In What Sense Is Modernity a Problem? A Phenomenological, Post-Eurocentric Approach

David Kretz, Yale University

In 1842, Friedrich Engels complained: "As though the ‘modern’ could ever become ‘elevated to the rank of a concept’! As though such a vague, empty, imprecise expression which superficial minds everywhere put forward with a certain air of mystery, could ever become a philosophical category!" Against skeptics, from Engels to Jameson, I will argue that the concept of modernity can be made sense of. Instead of treating it as a historical period (the chronological approach), or as an ensemble of socio-cultural factors (the substantivist approach), I suggest to approach it phenomenologically, focusing on the structure of modernization *experiences* as a distinct form of historical experience. Modernization experiences, I argue, are (1) experiences of non-total historical rupture, (2) that out-strips existing frameworks' capacities for processing historical change, (3) and are understood to be humanly caused. This model has several key advantages. First, it accounts for the fact that modernization happens unevenly and in waves. Secondly, the resulting concept of modernity has the right extension (i.e., it accounts for why late 18th cent France, mid-19th cent Great Plains societies, and late Qing China all had entered modernity, but why neither Song China, nor post-Roman Europe count). Moreover, it achieves the right extension by disclosing something non-trivial about the included cases. This restores analytic value to a concept that seemed bogged down in polemics. Thirdly, factors (2) and (3), capturing both pro- and anti-modern intuitions, helping guide critical social theory towards disentangling the problems of modern societies—which are legion and shared with older societies (e.g., oppression, inequality, unsustainability)—from problems that are unique to, even constitutive of modernity: the lack of adequate frameworks for processing historical change. Equally, it points to a remedy: redeploying the agency constitutive of modernization experiences towards reworking those frameworks.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 187. Theorizing States and Modernity