What Does It Mean To Be Modern — Notes from the Event

The following is a rough write-up of my notes from the intro to our August 2008 event. We had a really interesting and wide-ranging discussion, which I haven’t attempted to summarise, so please feel free to add what you remember from the night in the comments.

We started by posing four related questions:

  1. Is modernity a period of time or a project?
  2. Can we opt not to be modern?
  3. Are the products of Modernism products of modernity?
  4. Can modernity end?

As a starting point I wanted to outline a model of modernity, if only to give
us something to knock down. I used The Consequences of Modernity by
Anthony Giddens, which offers a sociological view of modernity.

Modernity is often associated with the Enlightenment and in that sense it might be seen as a project. However, there are some quite distinct properties of the modern era from C17th onwards that condition western culture and now global culture, leading us back to the idea that modernity is a distinctive period of time.

Giddens outlines the discontinuities of modernity in terms of what he calls the “pace of change” and the “scope of change”, basically “how fast things change” and “how many things are subject to change, and to what extent”. Both of these are exaggerated, according to his model, in modernity.

For different thinkers there have been different fundamental underpinnings
and preconitions for modernity. For Marx it was capitalism. For Durkheim it was industrialisation, for Weber, rationalisation. For Hegel, the first to theorise deeply on modernity, it was the separation of the political sphere of the state from what he identifies as ‘civil society’: “In civil society each member is his own end, and everything is nothing to him.” (Philosophy of Right).

Giddens says that the dynamism of modernity stems from the separation of
space and time. He distinguishes pre-modern “place” with modern “empty space” and “empty time”. Places have specific significance because of what’s there, and similarly with times, but the times in a railway timetable, say, are purely abstract. The trail arrives at a certain station at 10:30am every day, regardless of whether anyone has any reason to go there on that particular day.

Giddens also looks at how modernity depends on “symbolic tokens” and “expert systems”. An example of a symbolic system is modern money, which is divoced from any direct exchangeability into some commodity (such as gold). An example of an expert system is the one that enables you to get from London to New York in half a day despite not knowing anything about navigation, aviation, safety, immigration and so on.

Symbolic tokens and expert systems, valid over vast amounts of space and
time, are dependent on trust. Giddens concludes that the current era is a kind of radicalised modern era rather than a postmodern one. Nietzsche is talking about many of the themes of alleged “postmodernism” in C19th, so how is now different? In fact modernity has just become self-aware.

The presentation ended on some questions. Giddens clearly places modernity in time. Is this valid? Can we opt not to be modern? Is modernism in the arts a response to modernity in wider culture? Have other times or places in the past been “modern” in a recognisable sense?