The Dictionary of Human Geography (128 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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modernity
A notoriously ambivalent and highly contested concept, the notion of ?mod ernity? has nonetheless acquired wide currency within hUMAN GEOGRAPhy, not the least prompted by the proliferation of ideas drawn from POSTMOdERNlSM in the 1980s and 1990s. Broadly speaking, the term has been used to designate a number of discrete, yet inter related, phenomena that, in most cases until recently, place EUROPE at the centre of the world stage (see eurocentrism): (NEW PARAGRAPH) First and foremost, modernity is used as a means to periodize European (and, by implication, ?world?) history by designat ing a distinct epoch. The boundaries surrounding this ?modern? epoch are un clear, starting as early as the dawn of the Italian Renaissance (fourteenth century), through the invention of the printing press (fifteenth century) to the iNdUS trial revolution (eighteenth and nine teenth centuries). As Bauman (1993, p. 3) put it: ? ??How old is modernity??? is a contentious question . . . There is no agreement on dating. There is no con sensus on what is to be dated.? Common to all epochal definitions, however, is the idea of a break with the past: with estab lished modes of representation, for example, with economic practices and regimes, with technologies, or with cultural and social relations. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Modernity is also used to designate a particular mental attitude that seeks rationally to understand the world we live in by finding order within and achiev ing domination over nature (cf. Withers, 1996). Here, ?modernity? becomes syn onymous with the notion of progress and gradually affects most areas of life, from the medicalization of bodies and environ ments to the rationalization of urban life through the discourse of planning (see also biopower). science and the pur suit of knowledge in the wake of the European ENLlGhTENMENT was central to this evidence based spirit of modern ity, which finds its perfect geographical expression in the notion ofCartesian, iso tropic space. Aspirationally, it is perhaps best captured by Kant?s famous 1784 maxim, sapere aude, or ?dare to know?. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A third dimension employs ?modernity? to designate a thoroughly secular project of liberation and emancipation that argu ably culminated in the related American and French Revolutions of the late eight eenth century, and which led to the emancipation of slaves and the establish ment of hUMAN RlGhTS across a range of differences. This ?political? modernity heralds a set of historical tasks that seeks the implementation of novel forms of political representation, of legal and social rights of individuals, and of justice in a host of different contexts (cf. Schama, 1989; Howell, 1993; Delaney, 2001: see also liberalism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) A final sense in which the concept of ?modernity? is used specifies a particular process of global incorporation that leads directly from the Age of Exploration to the European colonialisms of the nine teenth and twentieth centuries. In this context, 1492 marks the dawn of a new era: the beginning of globalization within and through a set of clearly struc tured, if historically developing, core PERlPhERy relationships (Taylor, 1999) and motivated, perhaps, by what Max Weber famously described as a ?protest ant work ethic?. The most basic element to this notion of modernity is the nation state and its territorially expanding cap acity to organize and make social proc esses anonymous (see also Harris, 1991). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Thus, it would seem best initially to concep tualise ?modernity? as a broad semantic field marked by tensions, contradictions and pos sible dlALECTlCAL energies, rather than stream lining them into an organic totality. The concept is thus implicitly linked to other concepts such as capitalism, ?nation state,? MOBiLiTy, literacy, dEMOCRAcy and urbaniza tion, to name but the most prominent. Any one of these, individually or in combination, are customarily invoked when attempting to define ?modernity,? so much so that often the link is established by rendering modernity as an implicit adjectival, and thus clarifying, part of any of the nouns just listed. In other words, while ?ways of thinking', ?economic practices' or ?modes of transportation' become paradig matically different by being prefaced and hence associated with ?modern', ?democracy' and other key concepts appear semantically to embody ?the modern' as such. Furthermore, throughout its history (however conceptual ized), ?modernity? has been contested (e.g. the Counter Reformation in the seventeenth century, the Romantic Movement in the late eighteenth century, the back to nature move ments of the late nineteenth century, the stu dent and worker uprisings associated with May 1968, or the current religious revival, especially in the USA). (NEW PARAGRAPH) What perhaps unites most definitions of ?modernity' is an emphasis on the notion of the ?new'. Modernity is synonymous with change and thus becomes a declared enemy of traditions. This is the root of many subse quent binary distinctions that characterize modernity: the ?new' is explicitly set apart from the ?old' and it is the distance between the two that acquires explanatory power. The importance of this threshold is encapsulated in the different figures employed to characterize modernity: Georg Simmel's ?stranger', Max Weber?s ?adventurer?, or the ?flAneuR and the ?gambler' invoked by Walter Benjamin all emphasize a border, be it between inside and outside, old and new, presence and absence or private and public (Shields, 1992; Strohmayer, 1997). It is in the nature of such borderlines to invoke an ?uncanny' sense of existence where the ?new' constantly has the power to threaten or disrupt, as exemplified in Fritz Lang's 1931 film M. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The notion of the ?new' (and the close, intertwined relationship between modernity, and filmic and urban space: see film) also points us towards another geographical con text surrounding modernity: its thoroughly urban, or better yet metropolitan character (Ogborn, 1998; Frisby, 2001; Pile, 2005). It is in urban settings that the ?new' materializes an exuberant side of modernity, where the ?new' is not synonymous with order but para doxically becomes associated with a set of practices subverting traditions (Berman 1983). The undermining of sexual mores, diversification of consumption practices, the rise in artistic freedoms and forms of expres sion culminating in the notion of an avant garde, the growth in new and decidedly urbane forms of ?destructive' capital assem bled in the hands of the bourgeoisie so effect ively analysed by Marx, or simply the development of different lifestyles all encom pass ?experiences of modernity? (Frisby, 2001, p. 2; see also Glennie and Thrift, 1992) that are not so easily, if at all, attained in non urban spaces. Small wonder, then, that it takes another quintessentially modern and urban figure, the detective (as exemplified by virtu ally any film noir), to reorder a world threat ening to become unreadable. The urban has become synonymous with the ?modern' in another sense as well: novelty principally also attaches to architecture, where ?order' trans lates into a functional approach to questions of housing and urban design (Dennis, 1994; Heynen, 1999). L.H. Sullivan's phrase that ?form (ever) follows function' (1896) and A. Loos' insistence that ?ornament is crime' (1908) together capture the architects' aspir ations materialised in modern buildings. Rather crucial for any understanding of modernity is the tension emerging at the heart of this and related ?ordering' impulses: the tension between any order given or imp arted upon architecture or urban design and the restless, destructive tendencies embodied by the ever changing nature of ?the new' (Donald, 1999: see modernism). As postmod ernists would later lament (and remaining within Loos' dictum), ?order' thus becomes its own ornament. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A solution to this impasse is offered by a further element common to many definitions of modernity: the projection of ?progress? on to constantly developing technologies. Effect ively reconciling the notion of ?the new? with the desire (or necessity) to impart order, the very idea of ?progress' imparts a sense of dir ection to ?modernity' and thus renders it potentially legible. Trusted or not, techno logical developments ranging from seafaring innovations, the invention of paper moneys, the steam engine, entertainment technologies such as panoramas or the cinema to the inter net of our present age all impacted upon everyday life in a way that has lent credence to the idea of an ephemeral and constantly changing; that is, a modern world that is defined by its technologically progressing nature (Asendorf, 1993). As this listing imp lies, these technologies have threaded different places into new conjunctions, and the intensi fication of multiple processes of time space compression under contemporary modes of globalization has reworked both senses of place and structures of space (Entrikin, 1991; Hetherington, 1997b; Oakes, 1997). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Modernity does not, of course, merely denote a set of particular constellations char acteristic of the material world. In addition to such historically contingent interpretations of modernity (or interpretations of the world through the lenses crafted by ?modernity?), a number of critiques of modernity have been formulated within philosophy and the social sciences, themselves a direct product of mod ernizing tendencies within society at large. Perhaps chief amongst these is the recognition that the quest for order inherent in many mod ern tendencies embodies an element of sys temic control that has been used historically to suppress progressive movements. Examples include the rationalization of urban space in Haussmann?s Paris, seen by contemporaries as the very ?capital of modernity? (Harvey, 2003b), the biopolitics and the central function of MARkETS under neo liberalism. Returning to the four main definitions of modernity pre sented above, we may thus infer a formative tension, not to say contradiction, between modernity as scientific progress and modern ity as an emancipatory project. Even so, to state matters in this way may well imply an all too overt reliance on modern ways of seeing. As Bruno Latour has insisted, most attempts to infuse a clear sense of ?order? have always been implicated in non ordered, hybrid and networked social practices (cf. Swyngedouw, 1999). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Another critique that has gained wide cur rency in the geographical literature is that modernity is inherently reductionist in its insistence on the primacy of the ?eye? over other sensual modes of connecting to the world (see also vision and visuality). Chiefly building on the work of Walter Benjamin and the writings of Guy Debord and the situ ationists, this strand of critique centres on the importance of optical metaphors and instruments in modern environments (Crary, 1990a). From Rene Descartes? early seven teenth century insistence on the importance of evidential modes of reasoning to telescopes, microscopes and cameras, through the optic ally structured spaces of modernity such as the arcades, boulevards and parks (Ogborn, 1998; Strohmayer, 2006), to ?ocular? writing in general with its focus on landscapes and the mappable nature of events (Guarrasi, 2001; Dubbini, 2002: see also cartographic rea son), modernity is characterized as a mode of engaging with the world that favours visual relations over and against other modes of con necting with and being in the world. As before, this critique has a double edge: it attaches to a ?modern? world that has become increasingly reliant on visual modes of communication, while also being critical of modes of under standing the modern world that in turn rely on visual technologies, rhetoric and categories. The ensuing dual practice of deploying the visual both as a structuring principle inform ing modern spaces and as a mode of under standing such spaces has perhaps best been characterized in the notion of the spectacle, as critically developed by Debord (1994). Central to this critique is the reliance common among critical social scientist and geographers alike on that which arguably requires critique itself: visual modes of existence. We ?shed light?, we ?illuminate?, we ?enlighten? all the while the world we live in has become satur ated with visual forms of commerce, informa tion and entertainment. In other words: the critique of modernity all too often relies on modern modes of communication and exch ange, rendering it vulnerable to the charge of being but another mode of consumption and distraction. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer?s earlier disenchantment with an Enlightenment, and their claims that modern ity had surrendered its better impulses to an ?entertainment industry? are akin to this critique. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In all of this it is important to remember that such dis enchantment, especially in the context of the twentieth century, was often brought about by real and often life threaten ing crisis experiences. Nazism in particular and its thoroughly rational implementation of the holocaust, but also the Stalinist experim ents, Hiroshima and the constant development of underdevelopment structurally endemic to modern capitalism have all contributed (see also war). So too have those politico legal responses to modern crises that have worked to produce an ?outside? to the modern, a heterogeneous and dispersed space of excep tion where particular groups of people are ex pelled from the privileges and protections of the modern even as they are made subject to its disciplines and punishments (Minca, 2007a). (NEW PARAGRAPH) For some commentators, this disenchant ment inspired the development of the concept of ?postmodernity?. Others have seen fit to speak of a second modernity (e.g. Beck, 1992) or of hypermodernity (e.g. Pred and Watts, 1992). More interesting still, given the complexities surrounding the term and its thoroughly euro centric origins, are recent developments that attempt to broaden the linguistic field surro unding ?modernity? (Gilroy, 1993; Appadurai, 1996; Gaonkar, 2001; Venn and Featherstone, 2006: see also Martins and Abreu, 1996; (NEW PARAGRAPH) Power and Sidaway, 2005; Walton Roberts and Pratt, 2005). The resulting post colonial notion of ?modernity? aims to reconcile the often devastating impact that modernity has on non Western cultures and societies with the progressive, emancipatory impulse also associ ated with modernity (see post colonialism). Acknowledging that modernity has impacted unevenly across space, the focus of these often surprisingly modern investigations is chiefly on the concrete negotiations that contextualize adoptive or rejective practices locally in a global setting. Gilroy?s (1993) studies of the complex formation of a ?Black Atlantic? exem plify this strand of scholarship. The main

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