Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture

NEW CULTURAL THEORIES OF MODERNITY

NEW CULTURAL THEORIES OF MODERNITY Modernity is back with a vengeance. People are reflecting anew on the protean meanings of the modern, on its ambiguous legacies and current realities. While only a few years ago, everyone was fixated on postmodernism , we are now going back to that enigmatic phenomenon that precedes the “post.” The significance of modernity is clearly not yet exhausted. Yet this return is also a beginning, as scholars tackle well-worn ideas and calcified debates from new angles. As a result, our view of modernity is changing dramatically . The modern is not what it used to be. This rethinking of the modern is happening on various fronts. In this chapter I will look at a handful of recently published books that reveal suggestive affinities: Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, 2 Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large, Henning Bech’s When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity, and Janet Lyon’s Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern , as well as my own book The Gender of Modernity. All these books range across the competing definitions of modernity in different fields. They know about agreements and disagreements between those who see modernity as an uncompleted philosophical project, a global socioeconomic system, a distinctive array of aesthetic techniques, or a specific phenomenological reality. To give one example, Janet Lyon’s survey of the manifesto as a guide to the unresolved contradictions of modernity draws on debates about the public sphere, avantgarde art, modern forms of universalism, and the gendered meanings of political rhetoric since the French Revolution. While scholarship on modernism and modernity has often developed along separate and parallel tracks, scholars in such fields as sociology, anthropology, and literary criticism are now striving to create genuinely cross-disciplinary perspectives on the modern. There are three main causes for this new work. One is the dramatic upsurge of interest in the idea of culture across a broad spectrum of disciplines. Think, for example, of the new cultural history, the growth of cultural sociology, the influence of new historicism on the study of literature, and the rapid expansion of cultural studies itself as a new discipline or anti-discipline. Culture is not, of course, a new idea, but its meanings have shifted profoundly in recent times. The established view of culture, spelled out most clearly in the annals of anthropology , assumed a certain unity, internal coherence, and continuity. Culture was the relatively stable symbolic system through which individuals were socialized and integrated into their respective worlds. By contrast, contemporary scholars often view culture as a much more unstable affair. It is a loose-knit ensemble of interconnected yet divergent behaviors, perceptions, and ways of life, which are rich in ambiguity and contradiction rather than simply serving the interests of social reproduction. The specific value of the culture concept for interdisciplinary approaches to modernity lies in helping to bridge a persistent divide between the study of art and the study of society. To study culture is to study everything that signifies; the modern world is no longer an objective system peopled by more or less rational agents but is permeated through and through by diverse and competing practices of interpretation. The structures of social life cannot be separated from the layerings of symbolic meaning in which they are embedded. Arjun Appadurai writes of his analysis of contemporary social systems, “these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision . . . but deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of actors.”1 However, it is important to realize that “actors” for Appadurai are multinational corporations and nation-states as N E W C U LT U R A L T H E O R I E S O F M O D E R N I T Y 56 well as individual human beings. By linking cultural analysis to theories of modernity, scholars make it clear that they do not see culture as a redemptive sphere that floats free of the grubby realities of money and power. A second important reason for revising modernity is the rich efflorescence of writing on the history of women, people of color, gays and lesbians, and other disenfranchised groups. Popular forms of modernization theory have traditionally told a cheerful and uncomplicated story of history as progress, in which ever more groups would come to benefit from the fruits of Western development...