The (Very) Short 20th Century? Defining Modernity Down (part 1)

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I allude to the ‘long nineteenth century.’ I tend to be uninterested in epochal pronouncement; it usually seems to me to be a rather egomaniacal gesture (as when intellectual X declares period Y over and done with; see below on fashions in theoretical prefixes.) Nevertheless, a hypothetical conversation I have been having in my head has got me thinking about how we will reflect upon and classify the 20th century in contemporary and future discussions. If the long nineteenth century referred to the period between the French revolution and World War I — a period of reconfigured sovereignty and unbridled Empire — perhaps a similar reconfiguration of the socio-political will be said to characterize the 20th. Could we periodize the ‘short’ 20th century (I depart here from other formulations) as beginning at or towards the end of World War II (perhaps with the creation of the United Nations or at Bretton Woods) and ending in 1989, with the fall of the wall? (I deliberately resist September 11, 2001, as an epochal marker, believing that to invoke 9/11 these days participates in certain ideological framings [as for example, the very idea of the ‘GWOT’] that I reject — and besides, the significance of 9/11 in many ways I think was prefigured by the dissolving of the ‘bi-polar’ world of ‘the Cold War’ represented by certain momentous events in Berlin.)

The hypothetical conversation is between John Kelly & Martha Kaplan and Marilyn Ivy on the question of modernity. An odd juxtaposition? Consider: they are centrally concerned with the transnational politics and history of the Pacific; they are critical interpreters of the ‘national-cultural’; and they all take World War II and its aftermath as the foundational moment for the emergence of contemporary ‘glocal’ social orders. But while Ivy I think performs captivating hermeneutical theatrics with the concept of ‘modernity,’ Kelly & Kaplan assiduously criticize the ways in which the construct ‘modernity’ operates to cover over the specific character of the exercise of power on the world stage today (an exercise of power that assumes an especially American face).

I say ‘hypothetical’ but in fact this conversation has already partly taken place. In a fiery and brilliant essay, a rather contrarian tour de force contribution to “Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Athropologies” (ed. by Bruce M. Knauft), Kelly (& ostensibly Kaplan) practically mocks Ivy’s evocation of modernity in her Discourses of the Vanishing. The gist of Kelly’s piece is two-fold. First, ‘modernity’ is a lousy theoretical concept because it is vague (or, in his words, ‘sublime’), captivatingly, misleadingly undefinable. I quote Kelly quoting Ivy:

‘What I mean by modern [Ivy writes]–as if one could simply definie it–indicates not only urban energies, capitalist structures of life, and mechanical ad electrical forms of reproduction… the problem of the nationa-state and its correlation with a capitalist colonialism…a global geopolitical matrix from teh mid-nineteenth century on. It indicates as well the changes effect in identities and subjectivities, through the emergence of individualism and new modes of interiority; in relationships to temporality, through the emergence of ‘tradition’ as the background against which progressive history could be situated; and in institutionalized procedures, through what Foucault has called individualization and totalization: bureaucratic rationalisms, Taylorized modes of production, novel forms of image representation, mass media, scientific disciplines. In their historical specificity, the modes, procedures, and apparatuses constitute a discursive complex which I think of as modern (Ivy 1995:4-5).’

Pity the social scientist [Kelly comments] taking a definition such as this as a means to decide whether, say, India in 1857 or Hawaii in 1897 is or is not part of any modernity or alternative modernity. The sublime nature of the discursive complex here described is not merely my allegation. It is explicitly declared at the outset… Modernity, we are told, cannot actually be defined, or at least it cannot be simply defined… Ivy strikes me as extreme in the extensive honesty of her sublime evocation, and also in the explicitness of her exploitation of the capacity of the sublimely undefinable object to contain unresolved relationships and flat-out conradictions.

Second, Kelly suggests that modernity-talk tends to conceal the operations of power and force in the contemporary world by reinscribing the terms through which they are exercised, viz. those of the sovereign ‘nation-state,’ ostensibly ‘free’ (de-colonized) and ‘self-determined.’ I quote Kelly further:

‘Modernity’ and the ‘nation-state’ share a startling intellectual career. Both become ubiquitous after World War II, ‘modernity’ spreading widely in intellectual usage, ‘nation-state’ emerging virtually out of nowhere (the term ‘nation-state’ appeared in no major dictionaries of the English language before the 1950s; see Kelly and Kaplan 2001). And both terms, circulating in a vast transatlantic scholarly consortium, were solemnly recognized the cornerstones of centuries of practice in the West, never mind those pesky empires, providing a great continuity of European and American ‘historical specificty’ at the very moment when the Americans, allied with those still colonized, were actually dismantling the European empires. Critics of United States power are right to speak of neoimperialism in all of this, but as a translation, this has its costs. To paint the victors with the uniform and arms of the vanquished helps greatly in reconfiguring their virtues as grotesque. But neoimperialism cannot wholly clarify our view of the strategies, tactics, and weapons that really won the war and set the terms of global peace…

Those tactics included, among other things, the ‘Truman doctrine’ which became the brand of U.S. foreign policy following the establishment of the UN. Kelly goes on to note that Truman era ‘multilateral’ institutions of finance and order created and enforced the norms and forms of much of the contemporary world. What appears to disturb him is that abstracting these specific norms and forms (I borrow language from elsewhere) into a grandiose condition of ‘modernity’ does the ideological trick of concealizing the ways in which they work and the actual effects they have on the world and on peoples lives.

I’m convinced. (I have had many arguments with people recently about so-called American empire, and I love to refer them to this work.) But I can’t let go of ‘modernity.’ Why not?
It seems rather easy to point out that many key anthropological constructs are continually subject to open-ended debate, vagueness, undefinability. Need I mention the word ‘culture’? What about ‘structure’? The slipperiness of modernity (which I elsewhere have refered to as its ‘trickster-like’ quality) to my mind does not occlude its being useful in creating persuasive or captivating interpretations. For example, I guess I am just not ready to say that such luminaries as Giddens, Toulmin, Berman and others are simply bonkers or mystified.

160px-Harry-s-truman-58-766-09.jpgDoes Kelly’s argument here intimate a nominalism of modernity and the modern? I am actually interested to find out how Kaplan & Kelly would analyze the reflexive application of “modernity” in institutional settings such as those associated with development. (Fortunately, I hope to find out; Kelly & Kaplan have agreed to present their current work in Helsinki this spring.) ‘Modern’ isn’t ‘modernity,’ Kelly is careful to point out, but it is worthwhile noting that the Truman Doctrine was reflexively “modern.Take for example Truman’s inaugural address:

More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these people. The United States is pre-eminent among nations in the development of industrial and scientific techniques. The material resources which we can afford to use for assistance of other peoples are limited. But our imponderable resources in technical knowledge are constantly growing and are inexhaustible. I believe that we should make available to peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize their aspirations for a better life. And, in cooperation with other nations, we should foster capital investment in areas needing development. Our aim should be to help the free peoples of the world, through their own efforts, to produce more food, more clothing, more materials for housing, and more mechanical power to lighten their burdens. We invite other countries to pool their technological resources in this undertaking. Their contributions will be warmly welcomed. This should be a cooperative enterprise in which all nations work together through the United Nations and its specialized agencies whenever practicable. It must be a worldwide effort for the achievement of peace, plenty, and freedom. With the cooperation of business, private capital, agriculture, and labor in this country, this program can greatly increase the industrial activity in other nations and can raise substantially their standards of living. Such new economic developments must be devised and controlled to the benefit of the peoples of the areas in which they are established. Guarantees to the investor must be balanced by guarantees in the interest of the people whose resources and whose labor go into these developments. The old imperialism-exploitation for foreign profit-has no place in our plans. What we envisage is a program of development based on the concepts of democratic fair-dealing. All countries, including our own, will greatly benefit from a constructive program for the better use of the world’s human and natural resources. Experience shows that our commerce with other countries expands as they progress industrially and economically. Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge.

There is ambiguity in the usage of the term ‘modern’ here. It could mean ‘contemporary’ or something like ‘post-Newtonian.’ However, one of the diacritics that Giddens says characterizes modernity is precisely the reflexive investigation of social life, investigation which produces knowledge that is reapplied to the social field. In this sense, modernity elicits ‘modernity’ as its own object of attention, its own zone of representation and intervention: modernity is constituted just in the form of awareness that goes under the name ‘modernity.’ This of course includes the social sciences such as anthropology. My own suspicion is that modernity-talk in social sciences is a symptom of the condition it diagnoses–and it couldn’t be otherwise. Moreover, those knowledges are in fact applied in through self-consciously modernizing discourse. In this sense, would development ideas that use explicitly notions of modern, modernization, and modernity comprise a ‘discursive formation’ worthy of the name modernity? Would this be further modernist sublime? Or would it be defining modernity down: to the period post-1944/5? That period that Kelly & Kaplan identify as the take-off point for ‘modernity’-talk in human sciences?

Tomorrow: Apprehending loss in the register of the modern, or reading Ivy in New Guinea.

One thought on “The (Very) Short 20th Century? Defining Modernity Down (part 1)

  1. My own inclination here is to understand “modernity” primarily as a folk term–a way people have of talking about their experiences of the present or their aspirations and fears for the future. One thing we can look at then is the way both the sense and the references of the term vary from place to place as it is used in the context of local concerns and ideas. I’m interested to see what you have to say about “reading Ivy in PNG”–since that seems to me to be one of the places where it helps to understand “modernity” as a local concept, one that might (for example) involve religion (as in Joel Robbins’s work) contra the more common equation of the the modern and the secular. One of the problems of “modernity” (and “postmodernity”) is that they can tend to become a series of evolutionary stages as Nick Thomas poijnted out in and article called “Cold Fusion” in AA a few years back.

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