Modernité en transit/Modernity in Transit ed. by Richard Dubé (review)

Part of the Cultural Transfers series published by the University of Ottawa Press, this volume is a collection of essays, half in English, half in French, addressing the subject of modernity within the context of globalization. The title seems to reflect the main premise of the authors, which is that modernity has not been superseded but is an ongoing project and condition, reinventing and refashioning itself as it interacts with current theoretical models of globalization. The different authors duly reference Habermas and are unanimous in their desire to reexamine modernity, seeking to reestablish it as “a paradigm in transit,” subject to permanent transformation in its reconfiguration of the current global situation. Without explicitly inviting us to “forget postmodernity” in the way Jean Baudrillard invited us to “forget Foucault,” they consistently interrogate, in the French sense of the word, Jean-François Lyotard’s seminal work The Postmodern Condition (1979) as a starting point for reasserting the persistent relevance of the term “modernity,” for raising the vexed question of periodization that has always haunted the modern and the postmodern, and for expressing the firm conviction that modernity is far from over.

From here it is only a short step to seeing postmodernity as just another grand narrative, a negative interlude before theories of modernity return to the center stage of history. In an ironical reversal it now becomes the hegemonic discourse to be opposed by the possibility of “multiple modernities,” based on ethnic, local, regional, and transnational identities, as well as the symbol of epistemological decline to be replaced by the transformative moves and mutations of a second modernity. The editors are nevertheless fully aware of the historical excess baggage of the term “modernity,” the havoc wreaked by some of its failed utopian ideals, and thus the necessity for its reevaluation, warts and all. The originality of their premise is, that despite appearances, modernity rather than postmodernity is the conceptual tool most suited to analyzing our current state and is to be located in close proximity to the theorization of globalization by thinkers such as Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck, and Arjun Appadurai.

This challenge to the seeming ubiquity of the postmodern condition and to the discursive exhaustion of its paradigm is nothing if not refreshing, but at times the reader may be forgiven for failing to grasp exactly where the distinction may lie, especially as the authors often avail themselves of the very vocabulary that has come to be associated with the postmodern. Such terms as “fluidity,” “multiplicity,” “diversity,” “pluralization,” and “hybridity,” are frequently (not always) used in order to valorize an all-singing, all-dancing modernity that, in a logic of replenishment and critical renewal of their flawed postmodern substance, aims to treat the more serious symptoms of the postmodern condition: atopia, immanence, loss of the referential, and Baudrillard’s simulacrum.

The contributors stem from sociological, anthropological, philosophical literary and political science backgrounds in Canada, Germany, and the States, and the volume has an eclectic, fragmented quality, evidenced by its five different parts, two of which contain merely two essays apiece. This effect, which is only to be expected in such an international interdisciplinary project as this, is further heightened by the alternation between French and English, as well as the different traditions of the scholarly essay obtaining in the respective academies represented. Indeed, one of the problems for the reader is the difficulty in finding a common thread and trajectory between the twelve essays, which treat subjects as diverse as eighteenth-century German and postcolonial anglophone literature, the meganarratives of “supermodern” architecture, contemporary Japanese antimodernity, the conception of responsible science, postnational cosmopolitanism, and the digital divide between developing countries and the West. Thought-provoking, original, and erudite, the contributions come across as manifestations of brilliant individual intensities rather than as being at the service of a fully integrated project, although common themes and ideas recur as leitmotifs throughout.

The risk is that the reader...