Broaching a Cultural Logic of Modernity

Grand narratives" are now out and "local knowledge," in. All to the good; but if we've lost the Eden where the world's narrative rivers converge, can our cultural history--our literary history--do more than record labors and deaths within a diaspora? Here is a different proposal that lies between grand narrative and local chronicle: that cultural change takes place around a self-reflexive narrative that typically embodies an agenda, an immanent logic, a research program, or a set of problems and rules. Such a narrative, produced by a logic, gives reasons and fixes the criteria that any option for change must meet. Except in times of current crisis--times when war, plague, dearth, and death ride high--cultural change largely results from how situated humans choose amid contingency. The choices needn't, of course, be conscious, for it's in coping with a lifeworld, coordinating actions, and realizing interests that human agents produce them. Since world and interests rarely change wholesale, the logic ensures a sequence of motivated structural transformations. These are monitored. Contingency and human limits mean that if the motives produce the desired results, they rarely produce only those; and what they do produce infiltrates the lifeworld with which we then must continue to cope in accord with our logic.

Let me try to make a prima facie showing for this narrative proposal. I'll focus on the term "Modernity" as a practice-based label. No term so clearly assumes ongoing change: nothing can be modern without change. Yet as a term of art, "Modernity" has splintered into a caucus of mobile meanings. Most writers now, I think, treat Modernity as an entity, for "a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it"--this is "one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment." ¹ My first task, then, is to define "Modernity" in a different way and to show what one gains by doing so. Where current methods of discussing Modernity seem weak, I'll try to put forth an alternative that includes but redescribes the phenomena people call Modern. With the definition in place, the second task is to show how a generative logic proceeds from it. A plausible, immanent logic of "Modernity" ought to beget the cultural phenomena now denoted by the tag "Modernity" and its tendentious hangers-on, "Pre-" and "Post"-Modern.

For my prima facie showing, one exemplary vector of "Modernity" will have to suffice. I'll use the vector of information: my "logic of Modernity" will be shorthand for "logic_information of Modernity." Because I'm addressing change and motive, it's projectible information that interests me. That is, it's warrantable knowledge and know-how that promises to model or create a future order or control randomness. Projectible knowledge lets us predict, not just guess. ² Therefore I'll keep to arts and sciences with referential meaning, literature being the prime example among the arts. ³ After establishing the grounds for my argument in part 1, I'll calibrate the logic against certain facts in cultural history and illustrate how it helps us map them better. To this end part 2 offers three examples for literary historiography. Since I take the argument to be conceptually and historically complex, I state my own theses as clearly and definitely as I can. They're all defeasible; none of them asserts binding, irrefragable truth. Even if I wanted to assert firm truth, I couldn't. My prima facie showing rests on its being unknowable. That's why Modern people need probabilistic, design-strategy methods.

A logic of probabilities for a given individual comes from keying her behavior to her dispositions, her "character" or more broadly (after Bourdieu), "habitus." The behavior of Modernity, by any definition I know, designates something aggregate, of which individuals are only instances. Still, economics or population biology shows that one can model aggregate patterns of behavior as a field of historical probabilities, even when...