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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

modernity's monsters « Previous | |Next »
June 12, 2008

Russell Berman in the Introduction" to Telos Winter 2006 says:

The promises of modernity have always been problematic. The aspiration to draw a neat line between a rosy present and a benighted past, the paradigmatic modern historiography, never adequately gauged the force of tradition. The cultural legacy of the past can be heavy with inertia, but it can also draw on an organic vibrancy that can intrude abruptly into the up-to-date illusions of reason. What modern thought derides as old-fashioned just refuses to disappear—not because modernity has been too weak to expunge it (for it has surely tried hard to do so), but because modernity elicits its opposite, calls it forth, creates its own monsters,and then wonders why they won’t go away.

He goes on to spell out he monsters modernity creates:
The creatures at the limits of modernity are multifold: the gripping power of religion that, as if to shame the arrogance of secularism, has returned with a vengeance to the world-political center-stage of the twenty-first century; the material life of the body, which resists the late-enlightenment project to repress
subjective desire by repackaging it as performativity; and the various dreams of the past, nature, and community, which refuse to succumb to the managerial utopias of the new class of social engineers. When the project of modernity declines into bureaucracy—the last ditch effort to manage a world that will not be managed— its opponents appear, sometimes plausible, sometimes grotesque, an array of desires and fantasies that frustrate the well-laid plans of the good people in power.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:58 AM |