Modernité en transit - Modernity in Transit

11: What Do We Have in Common? Modernity and the Paradoxes of Postnational Integration

11 What Do We Have in Common? Modernity and the Paradoxes of Postnational Integration* Thorsten Bonacker Philipps-Universität, Marburg, Germany T wenty-five years ago Jean-François Lyotard (1984) published his famous report on the state of knowledge in developed societies, calling those societies “postmodern”. With this he described that “the state of our culture following the transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature, and the arts” (p. xxiii). This report was the opener for two discussions, one on a theory of the transformation of modern to postmodern societies and the other on the status of social theory. In this respect, The Postmodern Condition was a report on processes of social change as well as a postmodern way of doing social theory. In his book Lyotard makes two decisive arguments, both of which determined the discussion on postmodernity without being systematically referred to each other. The first argument concerns theories of modernity—the self-description of modern societies, to say it from a sociological point of view (see Modernity and the Paradoxes of Postnational Integration 317 * This article was first published in Studies in Social and Political Thought (vol. 12, March 2006, p. 73-97). 318 Thorsten Bonacker Luhmann, 1998). Lyotard objects to normative and functionalistic theories in that they do not reflect their own social conditions. Consequently, they are not able to appropriately grasp the actual social changes. In contrast to this, he demands a different theoretical design, a new and antiessentialist concept of a theory of modernity, a demand that he tried to fulfill in his following books (for example see Lyotard, 1992; 1988). The second argument is a sociological one that uses a temporal conception of modernity: according to Lyotard, postmodern societies are characterized by a transformation of central elements of modern societies: e.g., by a functional change of the state, the decay of modern legitimating patterns or the differentiation of autonomous knowledge domains. What is new in all of this is that the old poles of attraction represented by nation-states, parties, professions, institutions, and historical traditions are losing their attraction. And it does not look as though they will be replaced, at least not on their former scale. The Triateral Commission is not a popular pole of attraction. ‘Identifying’ with the great names, the heroes of contemporary history, is becoming more and more difficult (Lyotard 1984, p. 14). Summarizing Lyotard’s outline of the transformation of modern societies, one can say that we live in a post-heroic, political world without a strong identification with political units like the European Union or even the United Nations but also with organizations like churches or trade unions. So what Lyotard is describing here is nothing else than a process of individualization—like Beck (see for example Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001) has done since the 1980s—pointing out the consequences for the problem of social cohesion. While Lyotard’s (1984) first argument is directed against a certain interpretation of social science concepts and sociological representation of social life, Lyotard shows with his second argument that these concepts are 319 Modernity and the Paradoxes of Postnational Integration not plausible anymore under the actual social conditions . The Postmodern Condition so far also represents a trial of a “redescription” (Hesse, 1980) of modern society and its transformation. Three Aspects in the Discussion on (Post)Modernity The sociological discussion on Lyotard’s (1984) book and on other works concerning postmodernity concentrated on two points: either on the problem of appropriate social science concepts, of the so-to-speak scientific representation of society and their anti-essentialist reformulation (e.g., on works on cultural turn, on constructivism, on anti-essentialism , on post-feminism [see Fuchs, 2001]), or on the thesis of a fundamental social change of modern societies. In the latter case it was argued whether reflexivity or differentiation , late capitalism or multiple modernities are appropriate descriptions of social changes and transformations of modernity. The discussion about different cultural concepts of modernity, especially has shown that the key term “modernity” implies more than just a sociological, and therefore distanced, description of society; it suggests a performative way of setting normative standards and expectations. In essence, both are referring to one other point: using modernity as a social science concept means that an observer reproduces a specific self-description of a society as a modern one—without reflecting...