Multiple Experiences of Modernity: Toward a Humanist Critique of Modernity 9783737002295, 9783847102298, 9789860350449, 9783847002291

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Reflections on (In)Humanity

Volume 7

Edited by Sorin Antohi, Chun-Chieh Huang and Jörn Rüsen

Assistant Editors: Stefan Jordan (München), Marius Turda (Oxford) EditorialAssistants: AngelikaWulff(Witten) Editorial Board: Aziz Al-Azmeh (Budapest), Hubert Cancik (Berlin), Dipesh Chakrabarty (Chicago), Pumla Gobodo-Madizikela (Cape Town), Moshe Idel (Jerusalem), Oliver Kozlarek (Morelia), Grazia Marchianý (Montepulciano), Jutta Scherrer (Paris/Berlin), Hayden White (Santa Cruz), Zhang Longxi (Hong Kong)

Oliver Kozlarek (ed.)

Multiple Experiences of Modernity Toward a Humanist Critique of Modernity

V& R unipress National Taiwan University Press

Published in cooperation with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, National Taiwan University.

This book series is sponsored by the Orbis Tertius Association, Bucharest.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISBN 978-3-8471-0229-8 [Print, without Asia Pacific] ISBN 978-986-03-5044-9 [Print, Asia Pacific only] ISBN 978-3-8470-0229-1 [E-Book] Supported by Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnolog†a (CONACyT). Ó Copyright 2014 by V& R unipress GmbH, D-37079 Goettingen Ó Copyright 2014 by National Taiwan University Press, Taipei, Taiwan All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover image: “!Sensacional! … Con(cierto) collage de corazûn y la global collection”. Serigraf†a. 2002. Dimensiones: 90.0 x 70.0 cm. Page 2: Engraving by Johann Heinrich Meyer for the title page of Johann Gottfried Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität

Contents

Oliver Kozlarek Preface and Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Oliver Kozlarek Experiences of Modernity and the Modernity of Experience

. . . . . . .

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FranÅois Dubet Society and Social Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

45

Carlos šmaz Gispert Unfreezing the Subject. Subjectivity, Narrative and Socially-Contextualized Interactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Anna Popovitch From Ideology to Structures of Feeling. Raymond Williams on Culture and Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Saurabh Dube Unraveling Modernity : Subjects and Scandals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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I Conceptualizing Human Experiences

II The Multiplicity of Human Experiences with and within a Global Modernity Raewyn Connell Antipodes. Australian Sociology’s Struggles with Place, Memory and Neoliberalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

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Contents

Bidhan Roy Imagining a World of inequality : Representing Class Identities in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

III Latin American Experiences Luis Villoro A Negative Path towards Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Nicola Miller Incorrigibly Plural: Translating the Modern in Latin America, 1870 to 1930 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Lidia Girola Sociocultural Imaginaries of Modernity. Recent contributions and dimensions of analysis for the construction of a research agenda . . . . . 199 Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

Oliver Kozlarek

Preface and Acknowledgments

This book is a result of my participation in the project “Humanism in the Era of Globalization, an Intercultural Dialogue in Humanity, Culture and Values” that was brought to life and directed by Jörn Rüsen. During the project, I learned a great deal about not only humanism but also, and perhaps more importantly, the ways in which concepts in the social sciences and humanities are applied, how they rise to become brilliant stars that shed their light upon almost every academic and intellectual field, and then how they become obsolete, unwanted and, consequently, fall into oblivion. The second concept that illuminated my horizon as I intuitively began to conceptualize this book is that of modernity. Modernity is today a highly contested word. Some see in it a project, others a set of social imaginaries, still others even seem to suggest that the modern era has already passed, and that a postmodern age is taking over. Another argument is that modernity is a European invention, one that is highly Eurocentric. The problem is that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to reject any of these ideas. We cannot say that post-modernists are wrong, or that only Habermas – with his defense of modernity as a still “incomplete project” – is right. How can we explain such a broad and, at times, contradictory range of meanings that are assigned to just one word? And how can we continue to defend such a fuzzy word if we wish to make sense of our contemporary world without renouncing academic ambitions? In this book it is my contention that the broad range of possible interpretations of modernity is a consequence of the fact that different human collectivities have made different experiences with, and within, global modernity. As Jos¦ Joaqu†n Brunner claims: “[T]here is no such thing as a singular, prototypical experience with modernity, which would be situated outside and above the limits of geography, time, social class and local cultures”1. The humanist 1 Brunner, Jos¦ Joaqu†n (2002), ”Modernidad”, in: Carlos Altamirano (ed.), T¦rminos cr†ticos de la sociolog†a de la cultura, Buenos Aires/Barcelona/M¦xico: Paidûs, 173 – 180, p. 176.

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approach to modernity for which this book pleads is interested, first of all, in these experiences that human beings are making as they grapple with the consequences and the challenges of modernity. I must thank, first, Jörn Rüsen for encouraging this project. As a post-doctoral researcher on the project “Modernidad, cr†tica y humanismo”, Anna Popovitch has contributed very significantly to the book. Paul C. Kersey has been, once again, not only an important translator but also an indispensable and very skilful copy editor. I would also like to express my gratitude to Cristina Barrag‚n, who took on the challenging task of unifying the format of the different contributions to this book. Thanks are also due to the editors of the series Reflections on (In)Humanity, Sorin Antohi, Chun-Chieh Huang and Jörn Rüsen, for accepting this book. Last but not least, I would like to thank Mexico’s CONACyT for funding my project “Modernidad, cr†tica y humanismo” (CB 103958) and thus making this book possible. Berlin, November 2013

Oliver Kozlarek

Oliver Kozlarek

Experiences of Modernity and the Modernity of Experience1 The past has made us orphans, as it has the rest of the planet, and we must join together in inventing our common future. World history has become everyone’s task, and our own labyrinth is the labyrinth of all mankind. (Octavio Paz) In one way or another, in the course of creating a history these [Latin American] nations were producing a culture— that is, a set of values and principles […] which necessarily expressed a mode of being, the distinctive experience of certain men in particular circumstances who had no reason to feel therefore that their experiences were inferior to those of other men. (Leopoldo Zea)

This book is about modernity. It strives to understand modernity yet, at the same time, it also wishes to provide a framework for a normative reference inscribed in the tradition of modern humanism. It is within this normative reference to humanism that a critique of modernity can be articulated that is in itself modern. This means that our critique of modernity does not require any anti- or post-modern reference, and surely does not need a transcendental one. In my opinion, all the chapters of this book seem to share these presuppositions. They all understand themselves as expressions of a modern critique of modernity and, I would add, they all follow a humanist agenda. In the context of this book, I would define this common humanist agenda as follows: there are certain theoretical and methodological decisions present in all of the texts gathered here that express a clear interest in the experiences that real human beings have lived when confronted with the challenges and imperatives of the modern world. This may be a very minimal definition of “humanism”; however, on this occasion I do not want to present a full-blown justification of a new kind of humanism, but an aspect of a humanist orientation that could help

1 I would like to thank Anna Popovitch and Gustavo Leyva for reading and commenting this text.

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inform our understanding of modernity, as well as the various challenges that present themselves in and within the processes of modernization.2 In this way, this book defies many conventional theories that deal with modernity. Directed especially against the so-called “theories of modernization”, the argument here is that modernity is not a telos yet unattained by most contemporary societies, while only a few societies in the ‘global North’ enjoy its blessings. Here I understand modernity, first of all, as a set of challenges that all contemporary societies confront. But these challenges do not present themselves in the sober abstraction of this or that theory ; rather, they come to the fore only in and through human experiences. That said, we must emphasize that experience here is not seen as the key to a universal, anthropological condition that all human beings throughout history might share. It is, however, a key to the understanding of the condition of modern societies and relates directly to one of their major characteristics, which I would call “world-consciousness”. In the first section, my aim is to outline a concept of experience that is linked to certain aspects of what we may call the modern condition, but that I will name “world-consciousness” (1). In the second section, I intend to show that the tradition of Critical Theory is still interesting for a critique of modernity that is compatible with modern “world–consciousness” (2). After that, I briefly summarize the consequences for a contemporary theory of modernity that is in line with modern “world-consciousness” and is informed in the experiences that real human beings have lived in the processes and dynamics triggered when confronted with the challenges of modernity (3). Then I will outline a rough sketch of what a program of a critical theory of the experiences of modernity could look like (4). Finally, the contributions to this book will be summerized (5).

1

World-consciousness and experience: a modern quest

It has often been argued that a certain loss of experience, indeed even of the ability to have experiences, becomes apparent under the modern condition (Adorno, Benjamin). Yet, at the same time, it seems to be true that modernity is quite obsessed with experience (see Jay 2005). Certainly, there are different understandings of what experience actually means, and what Michael Oakshott has to say about this topic is probably true: “‘Experience’, of all the words in the 2 The word “modernization” is not used here in the sense given in the so-called theories of modernization or that Marshall Berman had in mind when he distinguished among the terms “modernity”, “modernism” and “modernization”. Rather, I use this word to try to emphasize the idea that modernity is not a definite state of affairs but, rather, one that provokes certain dynamics and processes.

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philosophic vocabulary, is the most difficult to manage, and it must be the ambition of any writer reckless enough to use the word to escape the ambiguities it contains” (cited in: Jay 2005:9). Although this book sees itself in the tradition of this ‘recklessness’, it does not aim to escape the ambiguities of ‘experiences’. On the contrary, ambiguous is not only the word, but also what it stands for. But it is precisely this ambiguity of experience, as well as the acknowledgement of it, that contributes to an oft-claimed characteristic of modernity : i. e., its contingency (Rorty) or ambivalence (Bauman). In what follows, I will argue that the ambiguity of modern experiences has to do with a new kind of world-consciousness that emerges in modernity. Two meanings of world-consciousness. The concept “world-consciousness” that I am referring to has basically two different meanings.3 The first speaks of “world” in a planetary sense. “Modernity as world-consciousness” then means, first, awareness of the planetary entanglement of human affairs. I think it is correct to say that some of the most important discourses in contemporary social theory, as well as in related discourses, do, in one way or another, chart this planetary, or global, condition of modernity. In an earlier book, I tried to show that this is true for postmodernism, the globalization debate, the debates about multiple modernities and post-colonialism (Kozlarek 2011). But “world” is a highly polysemic word, as it refers not only to the world in a planetary sense, but also to the world in a more “philosophical” or “existential” sense. According to this second meaning, “world” is the precondition for all possible experiences, organized in time and space. One important feature of “world” in a modern understanding is that it is human-made. Human beings do not only adapt more or less successfully to the given, “natural” world, or to an environment (Umwelt), but must construct the worlds in which they live. And although these “second worlds” are not radically independent from the “first” one, the “real one” or the world of the “things in themselves” (Kant), they do have a significant degree of flexibility and autonomy. The German sociologist Günter Dux observes that there is a certain “constructive autonomy” in the way we make our worlds (Dux 2005), which implies that our worlds are not simply inherited from one generation to the next. The discovery that the processes of the adaptation of the spiritual and socio-cultural forms of organization of existence would not be very fruitful if it were correct that […] 3 I take this concept here and in earlier writings from Alexander von Humboldt and, especially, from Ottmar Ette’s reconstruction of Humboldt’s ideas (see Kozlarek 2011). However, it is not my intention to maintain the original meaning that Humboldt may have invested in it. I am also aware that the concept “world” needs to be discussed in greater detail by recovering important philosophical traditions. But for the purpose of this argument it suffices to understand the word in the two meanings recovered here. An insightful study of this topic was published recently by the German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch (2012).

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all knowledge is somehow the heritage from the older generations […]. The younger, rather, always begin a new constructive process from the cultural zero point, animated by their anthropological condition (Ibid. 62).

Yet, despite all autonomy, the construction of our worlds is an existential necessity. Dux also has the words for this: “The organization of a world is determined […] by an absolutely pragmatic interest: precisely that of constructing a world relevant for action” (Dux 2005:76). Meaningful action and thought would thus be impossible without these self-constructed worlds. We can also say that these self-constructed human worlds organize and regulate the way in which we interact with “Nature” and with other human beings. Two clarifications are necessary here: 1. The presupposition that human beings are constructing their own worlds does not evoke a constructivist theory in the strong sense. Human beings are constructing their own worlds, but the agency responsible for this construction is not a Kantian subject. 2. Our worlds do not determine all possible action, as an ontological and functionalist reading would suggest. Herbert Marcuse’s critique of “worldhood” is quite illustrating in this respect, as to the abstract ontology implicit in Heidegger’s notion he opposes an idea of the “socio-historical world” which is seen not as an essence but as a permanent process (see Kellner 1984:51 – 52). Also, the notion of world that I am using here is not static, but intends to be dynamic. Another important step in the direction of a de-ontologized understanding of world has been advanced by Jürgen Habermas,4 to whom I will return below. Our worlds are a universal necessity, yet, at the same time they are highly contingent. This has to do with the fact they are made of culture. We could even say that culture is but a different word for our self-constructed worlds of meaning. According to Ralf Konersmann, “[Culture] requires attention, care, realization, but the result of this expense is uncertain. Culture has to be actualized always anew from within itself […]. Culture is not ‘given’, but is ‘made’ from one moment to another” (Konersmann 2001:12). This provides an additional insight into the nature of our worlds: they are not carved in stone; rather, they are continually shaped and reshaped (see Kozlarek/Rüsen/Wolff 2012) in and through processes of social action which they, simultaneously, enable. In what follows, Konersmann mentions a series of practices that concretize culture (interpretation, critique, translation), and “institutions” that organize and regulate these practices. The last point deserves to be highlighted: i. e., institutions give a certain stability to certain social practices and, thus, to our cultural worlds. Yet, they cannot be seen as absolutely independent forms of

4 I refer here basically to Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action.

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organization that would follow an exclusive kind of logic, independent of all other processes of the construction and reconstruction of the cultural worlds.5 Another important practice for the actualization of culture would be appropriation. Every newborn member of a given cultural community has to appropriate this culture over his lifetime (see Dux 2005). These processes of appropriation unleash a high potential of creativity that produces the representative culture of a certain generation. Yet, at the same time, it must be clear that the new generations do not build their cultural worlds from scratch, but always return to an already existing “material”. In this sense, it is true that our cultural worlds have a material “presence”, as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht argues (Gumbrecht 2004). Or, put differently : as members of a world we always perceive this world, and the culture it is made of, as a “material presence”. But since the processes of appropriation of the materially present culture modify the given world, it can be argued –against the idea commonly held by modernization theory– that tradition and change are not mutually exclusive. The discovery of culture. In the history of Western philosophy, the discovery of culture is very recent. Ernst Cassirer articulated his Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, his cultural philosophy, only at the beginning of the 20th century. Cassirer is interesting because his transformation of Kant’s critical philosophy is one of the most rigorous attempts to launch a philosophy of culture that wished to see itself as prima philosophiae.6 Cassirer also saw in his philosophy of culture a way to resolve the tension between subject and object that has burdened modern philosophy from its very beginnings in the thought of Ren¦ Descartes. Cassirer believed that symbolic forms reconcile the conflict between subject and object in a Bildwelt (world of pictures) that was, simultaneously, constitutive of the distinction between subject and object (see Cassirer 2001:1 – 49). Expressed in our terminology, we could say that Cassirer added to the two already philosophically discernible worlds –the subjective and objective ones– a third: the cultural. And although Cassirer himself did not use this terminology, Karl Popper would, a few decades later. In an attempt to clearly distinguish the three ontological dimensions he speaks of three worlds: “world 1”, “world 2” and “world 3”. For Popper, the latter was also the world of culture. He wrote: I mean the world of the products of the human mind, such as languages; tales and stories and religious myths; scientific conjectures or theories, and mathematical 5 Certainly, an important question is how worlds and institutions interact. However, this is not the place to explore this topic. 6 It is quite astonishing that despite the wide acceptance of the thesis that we are currently undergoing a “cultural turn” that affects all areas of the social sciences and humanities, Ernst Cassirer’s philosophical endeavor is rarely remembered.

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constructions; songs and symphonies; paintings and sculptures. But also airplanes and airports and other feats of engineering (Popper 1978:144).

I would go so far as to say that only what I have called here the philosophical “discovery of culture”, and what according to Popper could be termed the “discovery of world 3”, make modern world-consciousness complete. Modern philosophy has always revolved around the idea of a fragmentation of the world into two parts: subject and object. But the discovery of the cultural world not only proposes a possibility of reconciliation, but also allows us to depict, for the first time in human history, the place where the human being is only human.7 The discovery of culture makes the human world visible. This discovery of the human world is not the merit of Western philosophy as an expression of a higher form of Reason. It is, however, a consequence of the historical circumstances and contingencies upon which I will try to shed light in the sections below. The origins of world-consciousness. The question I am striving to answer in this section is why today we are aware of the existence of our worlds. In order to find an answer to this question it is necessary to contextualize ideas in their historical context. A pure history of ideas does not suffice for this purpose. Rather, what is imperative is to recognize ideas as a consequence of historical conditions. A while ago, Stephen Toulmin presented an illustrating depiction of the early modern era (Neuzeit) in Europe. His book, Cosmopolis. The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, gives an excellent account of how world-consciousness arises in that part of the world, what it implies and what consequences it has, although Toulmin does not use exactly this terminology. What he proposes to his readers is, however, “to outline a revised narrative [of modernity]” (Toulmin 1990:21). This means, first of all, the need to rethink the idea that modernity is the result of the appearance of Reason. In order to understand this we must step down from the podium of the philosopher and dirty our hands by digging into real history. But Toulmin also convinces us that a revisionist historical account is needed. For Toulmin it is clear that the glorification of the beginning of the modern era must be questioned seriously. The picture our teachers gave us of the 17th century was a sunny one. For the first time, Humanity seemed to have set aside all doubts and ambiguities about the capacity to achieve its goals here on Earth, and in historical time, rather than deferring human fulfillment to an Afterlife in Eternity – that had made the project of Modernity ‘rational’ 7 This is another idea found in Cassirer’s work. He thought that a philosophical anthropology can only derive from a philosophy of culture (Cassirer 1995:40).

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– and its optimism led to major advances not just in natural science but in moral, political, and social thought as well (Ibid.:ix).

Toulmin recalls that after WWII this common understanding was questioned time and again, and that it became necessary to ask anew just what it was that triggered modernity. The answer that he gives to this question is a sobering one: modernity began to manifest itself as a shattering crisis: In early 17th-century Europe, life was so far from being comfortable that, over much of the continent from 1615 to 1650 people had a fair chance of having their throats cut and their houses burned down by strangers who merely disliked their religion. Far from a time of prosperity and reasonableness, it looks like a scene from Lebanon in the 1980s. As many historians put it, from 1620 on the state of Europe was one of general crisis (17).

My argument is that “world-consciousness” is a consequence of this crisis. Two moments of disenchantment. Famous for its depiction of the early modern age in Europe is Shakespeare’s phrase: “Time is out of joint”. It has often been argued that this sentence reveals the loss of “ontological security” that people all over Europe experienced at that time. Anthony Giddens defines the concept of ontological security as follows: Ontological security is a form, but a very important form, of feeling of security in the wide sense in which I have used the term earlier. The phrase refers to the confidence that most human beings have in the continuity of their self-identity and in the constancy of the surrounding social and material environments of action […]. Ontological security has to do with “being” or, in the terms of phenomenology, “being-in-theworld” (Giddens 1991:92).

My thesis here is that it is precisely the early modern world-consciousness that provokes an elevated loss of “ontological security”. People began to lose “ontological security” because the worlds they were living in started to fall apart. Since modernity is usually opposed to tradition – at least in so-called “modernization theory” (see Bonacker/Reckwitz 2007:10) – we could say, perhaps using the same terminology but giving it a rather different meaning, that the early modern era introduced itself with the destruction of “traditional worlds”. To put it differently : it is not modernity versus tradition but, rather, that modernity came on stage as the experience of the destruction of existing (“traditional”) worlds. We could call this the first moment of modernity. Before modernity can become a positive “project”, it first constitutes a fundamentally negative experience. A more classical expression that describes this experience can be found in Max Weber’s notion of disenchantment. Certainly, Weber thought that disenchantment of the modern world is a result of occidental rationality firmlyrooted in modern science. But perhaps it would not be wrong to understand

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disenchantment of the modern world not so much as the awakening of Reason but, before that, as the erosion of traditional worlds brought about by a series of historical contingencies. What follows are different strategies designed to deal with this condition. In Europe it was the combination of the consolidation of the Nation-state and Imperialism that produced, literally, a ‘new world’ in which world-consciousness provided new enthusiasm. According to Toulmin, it could be said that this new enthusiasm is linked to the desire and, indeed, a certain success in dominating the world; both in a planetary sense, as well as in terms of the social world and nature. This enthusiasm culminates in the 18th century and finds in the Enlightenment its most powerful expression. In fact, the Enlightenment understood itself as the unleashing of Reason. However, this enthusiasm with Reason and Enlightenment did not last very long. As a matter of fact, it came to an end in the following century, when the idea of Reason turned into institutionalized social practices of “instrumental reason”. It was at that point that a new kind of disenchantment – now a disenchantment with the solutions to the first disenchantment – began to be articulated in European thought. In his Critique of Modernity, Alain Touraine reminds us that the Enlightenment was not about “progress”, but was a strand of thought that tended towards a “destruction of the sacred world”, all the while searching for a new form of “union between man and the universe” (Touraine 1991:30). This way of putting it shows clearly that the Enlightenment was not about constructing a “new world” once “traditional worlds” had been destroyed but, to the contrary, it provided a justification for the destruction of those “traditional” worlds, while at the same time establishing new rules for the way in which human beings were to relate to “Nature” and to other human beings. But we could also quote Weber again, because in his work we find clear evidence of this second kind of disenchantment. This time “disenchantment” characterizes Weber’s understanding of “occidental rationality”. Despite the Kantian enthusiasm for Reason that Weber shares, he clearly saw the destructive traits of “occidental rationality” (see Mackinnon 2001). After Weber, it was primarily the so-called Frankfurt School that took up this line of argumentation. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno developed a thorough critique of “instrumental reason”. This book expresses clearly the disappointment with what was thought to be a perfect solution to the crisis of the traditional worlds at the beginning of the modern age. In their critique of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno make a heroic effort to show that modernity did not find satisfactory modalities of relating to Nature, and that the way in which social relations operate also turned out to be a calamity. It is only recently that scholars have begun to pay attention

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once again to the fact that the Frankfurt School not only criticizes Reason – this would be utterly postmodern – but that its critique focused on our ways of relating to the natural and inter-human worlds that would compensate for the erosion of traditional worlds, thus guaranteeing more human worlds. I will return to this point later. Colonialism. Conventional theories of modernity, even critical ones, stop at this point. They do not consider non-occidental historical experiences that would help elucidate the destruction of “traditional worlds” in other areas of the planet. This leads to a regrettable Eurocentric understanding of modernity. If modernity is not the result of an evolutionary advantage that helped Europeans attain a superior degree of Rationality in comparison to other societies, cultures and civilizations; if, instead, it is a consequence of the destruction of “traditional worlds” that has concrete historical reasons, then the question must be: what historical circumstances have led to the destruction of traditional worlds in other regions of the globe. In seeking to answer this question, it is impossible not to turn to Colonialism, for colonial experiences cannot be neglected, especially from the perspective of a possible theory of modernity informed in the experiences that human beings have lived with the processes of modernization. It is my contention that these belong to the experiences of modernity at least for all those areas of the world that have been subjugated to colonial rule. It is in this sense that I consider the post-colonial critique of modernity to be one of the most important correctives in the debates on modernity (see Kozlarek 2011). However, I also think it is important to avoid conflating modernity with colonialism. Against a prominent post-colonial reading of modernity, presented by the group of scholars around Walter Mignolo, I would affirm that modernity is not coloniality. Without doubt, “Northern Theory” is Eurocentric and does eclipse the experiences with, and within, modernity made by others; hence the importance of recovering those experiences (see Santos 2009, Connell 2007; Connell in this book). I also grant that Eurocentric theories play an ideological role in the social and political construction of a world burdened by devastating inequalities, though this does not mean that once we realize this colonialism would be the only way in which to conceive of modernity. Although this is not the place to discuss Mignolo’s theory at length it should be noticed what the Brazilian sociologist Jos¦ Maur†cio Domingues wrote a few years ago. In an article that critically engages the “modernity/coloniality” project, he explains that what is needed in order to come to grips with our contemporary global modernity are theories capable of coping with an increasing degree of complexity (Domingues 2009). And it seems to be precisely this sense of complexity and, especially, historical sensibility, that is missing in many ways of dealing with modernity still today.

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However, I think – especially given the goal of achieving an understanding of modernity guided by experiences – that Colonialism is a factor for singular experiences that simultaneously refers to shared experiences made under modern conditions that are not reducible to Colonialism; namely, the erosion of what we are calling “traditional worlds”. In other words: although Colonialism is yet another set of historical circumstances that destroys traditional worlds, it is not explainable through the same causes or principles as, let’s say, the religious wars that provoked the destruction of the traditional worlds of northwestern Europe. Instead of looking for the one, unique historical principle that will explain the global presence of modernity, I would plead for an understanding informed by greater historical sensibility. The fact that modern experiences make themselves felt all over the planet, and the global scope of modernity – in itself a central characteristic of this phenomenon – are, rather, consequences of a very complex entanglement of diverse historical experiences on a global scale. World-consciousness and humanism. In the understanding of modernity that I am arguing for, “humanism” is another keyword. The aforementioned “discovery of Culture” is crucial in this context, as it coincides with the awareness that the worlds in which we live are actually human-made; i. e., imposed neither by God’s law nor by the laws of Nature. Human beings give themselves their own laws, as Kant has postulated. But awareness of this fact, recognizing that human beings are constructing their own worlds, actually requires a major shift in the logical presuppositions of thought and discourse. It is not enough to develop a language in which “Man” simply replaces “God”, although this anthropocentric model actually has informed important currents of humanism which find their most contested starting point in the philosophy of Descartes. Today we recognize the consequences of this model. In his aforementioned Critique, the French sociologist Alain Touraine reminds us that “Descartes liberates himself from the sensory world as well as from opinion […]” (Touraine 1992:48). We could also say that Descartes pretended to liberate his thought from experience and culture altogether ; however, his “emancipation”, his humanism can be seen as a first step in a process of transition in which the old order was crumbling away before the new one had properly emerged. Anthropocentric humanism is thus a humanism of transition. It recognizes the central role that human beings play in this new world, but has not yet achieved the condition that will allow it to explain how the different ingredients of this new world interact. Centuries after Descartes, Michel Foucault questioned this humanism, emphasizing clearly its transitional quality : [T]hat appearance [of “Man”] was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of

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something that had long been trapped within beliefs and philosophies; it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge (Foucault 2002:422).

Instead of seeing it as a wholesale rejection of humanism, Foucault’s judgment of the Cartesian current of humanism could also be read as a corrective. Important for the understanding of this corrective is to recall that Foucault’s thought has passed through the “linguistic turn” in which language is assigned the role of protagonist (see Fortanet 2008:28), and where “Man” as a sovereign subject no longer has a place. Following Frederic Jameson, we could call Foucault’s position “postmodern”, but Jameson also explains that to this kind of postmodernism there corresponds a radicalized humanism: “Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which ‘culture’ has become a veritable ‘second nature’” (Jameson 2003:IX). It is this “postmodern” dilatation of the cultural world that produces its own experiences. But, paradoxically, it is precisely at this point that the human world is all that remains. Instead of seeing “Man” as the replacement of God, who acts only according to his intentions, Foucault must have thought that the worlds constructed by human beings that ultimately produce subjectivities are more important than subjectivity itself. An alternative understanding can be found also in earlier expressions of the philosophy of culture. Cassirer’s work, or more contemporary sociological cultural theories like the one Günter Dux presented a few years ago, and that we mentioned above (see Dux 2005), are interesting in this context, precisely because they present attempts to explain the interplay of the three worlds from the perspective of the “human world”, while avoiding both the dilatation of the world of culture that blacks out Nature and the subject, and the deification of the subject. Another merit of Cassirer’s philosophy of culture and Dux’ “historical-genetic theory of culture” is that they advanced in the direction of a theory that reflects the need to develop a new “logic of the Humanities” (Cassirer 1960). Dux – who takes issue with an idealist understanding of human agency, but also with functionalist theory – claims that what is needed is a “procedural logic” (prozessuale Logik) that would help understand the processes of construction and reconstruction of our worlds. This procedural logic would also help us rethink humanism: The understanding of the spiritual form of life as a form of life that human beings have constructed is revolutionary for the self-understanding of the human being. It dissolves the ontological determinations of what we are, which are assigned to the understandings of humanism that are behind us (Dux 2010:199).

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This means that a new Humanism becomes necessary ; one according to which “the human being is what he has made of himself through the construction of his form of life” (Dux 2010:199). A humanism that corresponds to modern “world-consciousness” places the human being in charge of the construction of his cultural world, and allows him to define the position he wishes to claim in this world. But it does not deposit in the subject absolute sovereignty over the world. This limited sovereignty of the subject over the cultural and social world, and over Nature, calls for a theory that is capable of highlighting the places of interaction between the different worlds. It is my contention that such a theory must be centered on the notion of experience. In our context, experience would be the word used to name the modern ways of interacting with and reflecting upon our worlds. World-consciousness and the centrality of experience. It is not my intention here to develop a complete theory of experience, rather, I will limit myself to highlighting a few elements that might orient such a theory. A notion of experience that corresponds to modern world-consciousness as defined here can be found in John Dewey’s work. Dewey suggests that experience emerges at the interfaces between the human being, as a living organism, and her/his “environments” (“nature” and the social) (2005 [1934]). For the human being, experience is not a passive form of perceiving or even suffering the world. On the contrary, it is an active engagement with the world: “Experience in the degree as it is experience is heightened vitality. Instead of signifying being shut up in one’s own private feelings and sensations, it signifies active and alert commerce with the world; at its height it signifies complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events” (Ibid.:18). “Experience” – we might also say – is a sort of “communion” with the world that is both cognitive and creative. Or to put it yet another way : it is constitutive; as a practice it also constitutes subjectivities. The creative aspect lies in its form-giving faculty. Dewey writes: Form is arrived whenever a stable, even though moving, equilibrium is reached. Changes interlock and sustain one another. Wherever there is this coherence there is endurance. Order is not imposed from without, but is made out of the relations of harmonious interactions that energies bear to one another (Dewey 2005:13).

In more practical terms, the creative aspect of experience seems to be tied to the practice of narrating. Once again I cite Dewey : Philosophers, even empirical philosophers, have spoken for the most part of experience at large. Idiomatic speech, however, refers to experiences each of which is singular, having its own beginning and end. For life is no uniform uninterrupted march or flow. It is a thing of histories, each with its own plot, its own inception, and movement toward its close, each having its own particular rhythmic movement; each with its own unrepeated quality pervading it throughout (Dewey 2005 [1934]:37).

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Here the reference to narrative (“histories”, “plot”, “close”), and even to poetry (“rhythmic movement”), is quite obvious. “Experience” seems to constitute itself in stories and narratives. Narratives are both individual and collective. The reference to poetry contains the reference to poesis; i. e.: to creation. Walter Benjamin shared some of these ideas. “Narration” or, as he insists, the act of narrating, is for him intimately linked to having experiences. Hence, for Benjamin the loss of experiences that marks modernity is tantamount to the loss of the ability to tell stories. For this author, the loss of experience finds its mirror image in philosophy as a form of reasoning deprived of existential qualities. What is left is an understanding of experience in the sense of empirical science. But Benjamin found an alternative understanding in a concept of experience that draws on pre-Enlightenment sources and thinkers like J. G. Hamann, Goethe and the Romantics (see Osborne/Matthew 2012:5). Benjamin insisted that an alternative concept of experience had to be related to language. According to this idea, “all experience – including perception – is essentially linguistic, while all human language (including writing, typically associated with mere convention) is inherently expressive and creative” (Ibid.:6). One of the consequences of this understanding is the possibility to abandon the radical division between subject and object. Osborne and Matthew see here an almost “mystical relationship”, constituted through experience (see: Idem). However, one can also argue that Benjamin is not so much interested in forging a new mythology as in working on a theory of language, which attempts to focus on the mimetic capacities of language. Language is thus a medium that establishes mimetic “correspondences” to the world (see Benjamin 1992). Again, we could argue that this way of understanding language comes close to a ‘poetic’ interpretation (see Kozlarek 2011). The mimetic faculty is thus the link between the creative-active aspect of experience on the one hand, and the receptivepassive one, on the other. It is, in a strict sense, the modality that allows the self to relate8 to the world. Yet it is simultaneously constitutive of self-constructed human worlds. Our concept of experience that draws on Dewey and Benjamin, would be translated into German as Erfahrung, not as Erlebnis. “[…] Erlebnis is often taken to imply a primitive unity prior to any differentiation and objectification. Normally located in ‘everyday world’ (the Lebenswelt) of commonplace, untheorized practices, it can also suggest an intense and vital rupture in the fabric of quotidian routine” (Jay 2005:11). Our understanding of experience as Erfahrung, however, suggests a rather sophisticated process with a longer tem-

8 It is a revealing etymological fact that the verb “relate” means “to establish a relation to something or someone”, but also “to narrate”.

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porality, a process that constitutes our world-relations, and is an outspokenly social practice. In nuce: ‘experience’, according to our understanding, is a very broad concept; one that has a cognitive dimension without being reduced to the understanding of the empirical sciences. It also has a practical dimension since it refers to social practice: it is something that human beings do – i. e., a form of human action – and its most significant form of action is narrating. Last, but by no means least, experience is a process in which the world is not only registered as an external facticity, but in which a “form” or “order” is constituted that is the result of the interaction between human beings and the world. Experience thus generates spaces and times and is, therefore, a practice of “worlding”. Therefore, the concept of experience is not only related to cognition, but also thematises practical engagement with the world (nature and the social). Upon taking into consideration this existential importance of narrating and having experiences it becomes difficult to imagine that these faculties dry out completely. In other words, the idea of the “loss” of experiences – advanced by Benjamin (see Jay 2005:2) – fell short of providing an explanation of modern troubles with experience. Instead of presupposing the wholesale disappearance of experiences it would be more accurate to speak of a crisis of experiences. But then we have to ask again: what exactly do we mean when we speak of a crisis of experience? According to what I have said so far, this crisis would be linked to the erosion of the worlds that human beings give themselves, and that inform the ways in which we interact with other human beings and with nature. We have seen how these problems marked the beginning of the modern era. But are they still acute? The crisis of experience today. In the Preface to their book, Reflexive Modernization, the sociologists Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens und Scott Lash mention three topics that for them must define the agendas of any current program of critical social theory (see Beck/Giddens/Lash 1996). These refer clearly to the two problems I have been attempting to elucidate so far : 1. They spell out what today is firmly established in the semantics of the social sciences and the humanities as “sustainable development”. Now, while one may object that this terminology is converting itself more and more importantly into the buzzword of a new ideology, Beck, Giddens and Lash understand not only the ambiguity of this concept, but also the need to face the problems it identifies, since ecological questions cannot simply be reduced to a preoccupation with the “environment”. The “environment” sounds like an external context of human action. But ecological issues have come to the fore only because the “environment” is in fact no longer external to human social life but thoroughly penetrated and reordered by it. If human beings once knew what it is that “nature” was, they no longer do. What is

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“natural” is now thoroughly entangled with what is “social” such that nothing can be taken for granted about it anymore (Beck/Giddens/Lash 1994:vii).

In our terminology, we would say that what these three sociologists are referring to is the deterioration of our relations to Nature, but also that this problem coincides with the deterioration of the social world. 2. A second problem they identify is that of “globalization”. When they published their book in the early 1990s, the so-called “globalization debate” was just starting to take off. And it would be no exaggeration to say that this debate significantly challenged the way we understand modernity (see Kozlarek 2011). In our context, we have not spoken so much of globalization, but of “worldconsciousness in a planetary sense”. In a more accurate language, we can say that part of our contemporary modernity is the awareness of the global entanglement of human affairs, and the challenges that emerge from it. Also, for Beck, Giddens and Lash, the deterioration of our world-relations – i. e.: relations to our natural and social environments, as well as to members of the human community at large – seems to be of utmost importance for any kind of critical social thought. And, at least in the case of Giddens, we might suspect that he perceives the cause of this critical situation in the erosion of traditional worlds, which is why he decided to call this modern society “post-traditional” (see Giddens 1994). The consequences of this are world-relations that produce alienation instead of a satisfying, fulfilling life. However, in what follows I will briefly attempt to show that these were the concerns of the first generation of Critical Theory. Therefore, I still consider that this strand of social thought is an important starting point for any attempt to come to terms with our contemporary modernity.

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Critical Theory, world-consciousness and experience

Here, I understand Critical Theory in the tradition of what today is also known as the “Frankfurt School”. Today, the most important representatives of this current of thought are Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. It has come to be commonplace to distinguish different “generations” of Critical Theorists. According to this understanding, Habermas, as a disciple of Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and others, would be included in the second generation, while Honneth, a former student of Habermas would be part of a third one. In their respective attempts to “actualize” (aktualisieren) Critical Theory, the different generations shift attention to certain aspects of a comprehensive program of a Critical Theory of society, while losing track of others. In the sections that follow, I intend to develop the following argument: while the so-called first generation of

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Critical Theorists was still developing their ideas informed by modern “worldconsciousness” and striving to come to terms with it, the succeeding generations seem to have lost this objective. This shift can be observed clearly in the evolution of Habermas’ Critical Theory. Dialectic of Enlightenment. For Adorno and Horkheimer, it was common to argue that pathological world-relations are deeply carved into the cultural selfunderstanding of modern societies. The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) expresses this conviction in the clearest manner. The desperate endeavor of this book is to explain how Enlightenment can turn into a new “form of barbarism”. Although Horkheimer and Adorno shared the conviction that “freedom in society is inseparable from Enlightenment thinking” (Horkheimer/Adorno 2002:xvi) they also thought that this tradition paved the way towards the catastrophes that marked the 20th century. However, they did not wish to abandon the Enlightenment, and saw their critique of it as a kind of rescue mission. Their critique revolves around an enigmatic sentence: “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology” (Ibid.:xviii). It is impossible to understand this sentence without examining it in the context of the historical situation. For Horkheimer and Adorno the historical events of the 20th century did not constitute a relapse into the dark forces of irrationality. On the contrary, they suspected that they were already codified in the very project of Enlightenment. But more interesting for our context is that Horkheimer and Adorno actually focused their critique on the relations between human beings and the world, which they found inscribed in certain myths. Although they differentiated between the social world and “Nature”, this separation only makes sense in an analytical framework. If the objective is that of criticism, then it must be clear that these two dimensions of the world are intrinsically linked: “What human beings seek to know from nature is how to use it and dominate wholly both it and human beings” (Ibid.:2).9 And it cannot be forgotten that the ideas that condense in this unconventional philosophy are indebted to Marxism; the exploitation of Nature is considered possible only through “exploitation of the labor of others” (Idem).10 Yet, Dialectic of Enlightenment is not a covert attempt to promote dogmatic Marxism. It is, above all, Marxism’s cultural blindness that Critical Theory pretended to counter with a meticulous critique informed in the everyday experiences within the cultural worlds of modern societies. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, however, it is especially the cultural manifestations of pathological world-relations that interested Horkheimer and 9 How Adorno understood the way in which modern human beings interact with the world has been analyzed by Karsten Fischer (see Fischer 2005). 10 This is also clearly a Marxian idea (see Schmidt 1971 [1962]).

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Adorno. The most important institutionalization of this new culture is represented by modern science. Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno see here the most important motor of the “disenchantment” of the world (see Ibid.:2), though for them “disenchantment” means, first of all, “the extirpation of animism” (Idem). We may also say that the world loses its own meaning. All that does not fit into the explanatory scheme of modern science has to be either abolished or eradicated. Supposedly, this would make the world more “humane”. But in the dominant logic it means that the world must adjust to the idea that enlightened “Man” has of himself. Horkheimer and Adorno realize that it is precisely this idea that produces a new myth: the myth of the “anthropomorphism” of nature; i. e., “the projection of subjective properties onto nature” (Horkheimer/Adorno 2002:4). The phrase “being is man” thus becomes the centerpiece of the new myth of Enlightenment. At the same time, all those things that were seen as belonging to the realm of non-human “nature” are forced into the realm of the subject. This mechanism represents the elimination of the Other. However, Horkheimer and Adorno focused on another, yet related, problem: the construction of a hermetically-closed system that allows no outside. It is in this sense that we must understand the famous sentence “Enlightenment is totalitarian” (Idem). If the aim of Enlightenment was once to eliminate fear, it can only be said that it failed (see 9). All experiences of alienation are deeply-rooted in a culture that strove to abolish fear through domination of the world. Horkheimer and Adorno conclude: “Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized. The pure immanences of positivism, its ultimate product, is nothing more than a form of universal taboo. Nothing is allowed to remain outside, since the mere idea of the ‘outside’ is the real source of fear” (Ibid.:11). Many of the important decisions taken, especially by Adorno, find their explanation in this diagnosis; for instance, his high esteem of modern art. When Adorno points to the liberating potential of modern art, he does not justify himself by evoking, as it were, a kind of escape from the world (Weltflucht), closing his eyes to the problems that the modern world contains. On the contrary, he seems to cultivate the hope that modern art could disclose an alternative modality for relating to Nature and the social world; a modality that finds its practical principle not in the subjection of Nature and other human beings, but in a free kind of mimetic relationship. The one-dimensional world. Herbert Marcuse’s thoughts are also clearly marked by what I have described here as the second meaning of world-consciousness. The question around which his Critical Theory revolves is, as a matter of fact: which “historical project” (historischer Entwurf) allows us to rethink the “man-nature” and “man-man” relationships in such a way that they

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offer a contrast to the conditions given by providing a “greater chance of pacification” (Marcuse 1991:228)? Instead of giving a positive answer to this question, Marcuse begins with a severe critique of modern society. Much like the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Marcuse attempts to show that the lack of social freedom is rooted in certain cultural presuppositions. But in contrast to Horkheimer and Adorno, he interrogates more decidedly the philosophy of his time with the aim of showing that many of its currents coincide with the scientific-technological thought with which the logic of social domination was compatible. Also important for Marcuse was the overlapping of the two worlds: the social world, on the one side, and Nature, on the other. He believed that social forms of domination and the “rationality” of modern science and technology were intimately linked. Habermas has cited the following words from Marcuse: The scientific method which led to the ever-more-effective domination of nature thus came to provide the pure concepts as well as the instrumentalities for the ever-moreeffective domination of man by man through the domination of nature. Theoretical reason, remaining pure and neutral, entered into the service of practical reason. The merger proved beneficial to both. Today, domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology but as technology, and the latter provides the great legitimation of expanding political power, which absorbs all spheres of culture (Marcuse 1991:161; cited in: Habermas 1987:52).

Habermas’ critique of Marcuse focuses primarily on the theory of rationality that the latter developed following Weber (see Habermas 1987). Where Marcuse presupposed only one concept of rationality, Habermas distinguishes two different concepts to which, in addition, he relates two different types of social action: “In order to reformulate what Max Weber called ‘rationalization’, I should like to go beyond the subjective approach […] and propose another categorical framework. I shall take as my starting point the fundamental distinction between work and interaction” (Ibid.:91). Without doubt, this distinction represents a very important innovation in Critical Theory, but it also deflected attention from the two different worldrelations – the one with the social world and the one with nature – to only one: the social. Instead of rethinking the modalities in which we may relate to nature, Habermas concentrates his interest basically on social interaction through communication. We could also say that by doing so Habermas began to prepare the foundations for a theory that eventually blacked out the problem of the relation to nature, which was still paramount for Critical Theorists of the first generation. I will return to this point later. In his discussion of Marcuse’s theory, Habermas already began to retreat from certain presuppositions that were still very much alive in the former’s thought.

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While, according to Habermas, Marcuse was seeking an “alternative attitude to nature”, Habermas seems to emphasize the necessity of modern technology : Technological development thus follows a logic that corresponds to a structure of purposive-rational action regulated by its own results, which is in fact the structure of work. Realizing this, it is impossible to envisage how, as long as the organization of human nature does not change, and as long, therefore, as we have to achieve selfpreservation through social labor and with the aid of means that substitute for work, we could renounce technology, more particularly our technology, in favor of a qualitatively different one (Ibid.:87).

To put this in a nutshell: The differentiation between “labor” and “interaction”, as well as the corresponding types of rationality – instrumental and communicative – allow Habermas to cushion Marcuse’s critique in such a way that precisely a radical imagination of alternative world-relations is compensated through the resource of communicative rationality. The question thus becomes whether the hope that Habermas deposits in the regulative principle of communicative rationality is justified, whether it counteracts the consequences of the pathological world-relations that modern societies provoke. Or to put it another way : isn’t Marcuse right when he pushes for alternative ways of relating to the worlds? In part, Marcuse develops this alternative in his One-Dimensional Man, as Habermas recognizes: Instead of treating nature as the object of possible technical control we can encounter her as an opposing partner in a possible interaction. We can seek out a fraternal rather than an exploited nature. At the level of an as yet incomplete intersubjectivity we can impute subjectivity to animals and plants, even to minerals, and try to communicate with nature instead of merely processing her under the conditions of severed communication (Ibid.:88).

Certainly, one could argue that in comparison to Habermas’ sophisticated theory, Marcuse’s ideas sound romantically nave. But does this mean that they are no longer adequate for our time? Andrew Feenberg does not seem to think so (see Feenberg 2002). Upon examining the possibility of “actualizing” Marcuse’s Critical Theory precisely from the perspective of a philosophy of technology this author comes to the conclusion that Marcuse’s warnings are today more pressing than ever. I would share Feenberg’s judgment. Marcuse not only criticizes modern society, but pleads for a new kind of engaging with the world (Marcuse 2000:76). Thus, new modalities of engaging with the world are needed; however, these cannot be found in the “realism” of modern science and technology, but in the imagination of modern art. In the final chapter of One-dimensional Man, Marcuse attempts to explain what the relationship between “imagination” and

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“Reason” should be, according to his understanding –i. e., between “aesthetics” and “reality” – and concludes that “phantasy” and the “poetic imagination” do not contradict “scientific and empirical reason” (see Marcuse 1991:151). “Imagination” was not abolished in the modern world, but was subjugated by modern science and technology. “Imagination has not remained immune to the process of reification. We are possessed by our images, suffer our own images” (Ibid.:254). The question now becomes how to liberate these faculties in a process that aims toward achieving emancipation. Marcuse thought that this would be possible if imagination could be “rationalized”: “Rational is the imagination which can become the a priori of the reconstruction and redirection of the productive apparatus toward a pacified existence, a life without fear. And this can never be the imagination of those who are possessed by the images of domination and death” (Idem). Marcuse envisions the “liberation of imagination” (Idem) as being aesthetic in a dual sense: “with respect to sensuousness and with respect to art” (Marcuse 2000:76). Art is not an end in itself. On the contrary, it is a source from which forms of dealing with the world emanate. In Marcuse’s words: “Therefore, art has to find a language and images which [allow it to] establish new relations between human beings and things” (Idem). Now, according to Marcuse, it would be in and through this process that “experience” is liberated from the restrictive perception that modern science and technology compels (see Marcuse 1991:150). And it is in this sense that he understands art as a kind of “discovery” (Marcuse 2000:77). Finally, this new form of experience shall be used in the “Constitution of a new society”. What is meant here is: “[t]echnology as art, as the construction of beauty, not in the sense of beautiful objects or places, but as a form of the totality of life which encompasses society and nature” (Ibid.:80). Marcuse had no doubt that art has a profoundly emancipating character. In 1977 he wrote: “Art protests […] through transcendence. It is through this transcendence that it breaks with the dominating ideas, that it revolutionizes experience” (Marcuse 2004:195). Marcuse was not a philosopher who rendered himself to absolute negativity. On the contrary, he was quite literally envisioning a different world; a human world, to be sure, but one in which metabolism with nature and inter-human relations are oriented by forms of experience that find their model in the modern arts and not in the techno-scienfic rationality. Habermas and the linguistic turn. For Habermas it seems to be important to break free from any kind of “radical critique” like the one that his tutor Adorno had articulated. While Adorno and Horkheimer renounced their belief in the emancipating power of Reason, thus radicalizing, as it were, Weber’s critique of “instrumental reason”, Habermas confronts this position through a very am-

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bitious program that aims to rescue the normative contents that Enlightenment has deposited in the concept of Reason. As we saw above, this, Habermas thinks, is possible if different concepts of rationality are distinguished. Habermas’ attempt consists basically in establishing a relation between rationality and social action. His central argument is that in Marx’s theory, as well as in the ideas of the first generation of Critical Theorists, two different types of social action were usually conflated: ‘labor’ and ‘communication’ (Habermas 1987). While ‘labor’ follows an ‘instrumental’ rationality, Habermas insists that ‘communication’ reveals a different kind of rationality, one that he calls “communicative”, and that still contains a reserve of the emancipative promises that Enlightenment deposited in Reason. By introducing an action-theoretical shift, Habermas comes to the conclusion that the “idea” of Reason can only be fully understood when it is seen as a kind of hypostasis of certain forms of social action. In order to recover the normative content of Reason, Habermas later develops a normative theory of “communicative action”. While in earlier works he still seems to suggest that the different kinds of action and rationality corresponded to different kinds of world-relations – labor and instrumental rationality to the relation to the “objective world”, communication and its rationality to the way we relate to the social world – in his Theory of Communicative Action, he works with a more sophisticated ‘world-theory’, de-ontologizing, as it were, Karl Popper’s theory of the three worlds that we mentioned earlier. The alternative that Habermas proposes is a world-theory that has gone through a linguistic turn.11 For purposes of our argument it is not necessary to reconstruct this theory in detail. Suffice to note that, according to Habermas, human beings constitute their worlds (Lebenswelten) in and through intersubjective processes of communication. The idea is that ‘speech acts’ – a term he adopted from analytical philosophy – simultaneously activate different ‘validity claims’ that refer to different world dimensions: truth to the objective world, correctness to the social world, veracity to the subjective world, and clarity to the world of language. As its emphasis on validity claims makes clear, Habermas’ theory is a normative one. In this sense it contrasts with the ambition of the first generation of Critical Theorists, whose interest was never to articulate any kind of normative theory ; rather, they were concerned with understanding why human beings in modern societies experience an extremely high degree of alienation. The key to understanding alienation always pointed toward the ways in which human beings in modern societies interact with their worlds (social, 11 Although the term “linguistic turn” is widely used today in relation to structuralist and poststructuralist strands of thought, we must recall that it was originally used to name the changes introduced into philosophy by Wittgenstein, and what came to be known as “analytical philosophy”.

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psychological and natural). From Marx to the first generation of Critical Theory, alienation theory could be condensed into the idea that human beings in modern societies suffer from the way they relate to the world. But what Habermas seems to be much more interested in is the possibility of rescuing the normative content of Reason that he locates in communicative rationality. This regulative principle of communicative rationality may be important for the rescue mission of Enlightenment, but it lacks empathy with the experiences of alienation that human beings live in modern societies on an everyday basis. Habermas and beyond. Clearly, Habermas wished to introduce a paradigm shift into Critical Theory, and he did so very successfully. Drawing attention to the link between human communication and rationality allows for a normative understanding of modernity that helps identify the resources needed to resist the “colonialization of the lifeworld” through “systemic” imperatives. At the same time, it helps identify the causes of the problems that people face in modern societies. But in contrast to earlier Critical Theorists, Habermas’ theory loses sight of the “damages” that people really experience in their lives. Some of the major criticisms of Habermas’ theory actually do point in this direction. Axel Honneth’s critical reading of Habermas, for instance, proposes to inform Critical Theory decidedly with the experiences of “social pathologies” that people create in a “pre-theoretical” realm of social life (see Honneth 1994a), for he also thinks that such a theory could actually provide a better normative understanding. He insists that it is not communicative rationality as such that orients communicative action, but that the desire for recognition is the force that drives human beings to engage in communication with other human beings (see Honneth 1994b). With no need to delve further into Honneth’s theory, we can already see that for him Critical Theory has to return to its tradition of deriving a critical standpoint from the inner-worldly experiences that social actors are making. More recently, Hartmut Rosa proposed an “outline” of a Critical Theory that recovers Honneth’s ambition to return to a diagnosis of “social pathologies”. In doing so, however, he distances himself even further from the normative ambitions that motivated both Habermas and Honneth. Two points from his program are of interest for our line of thought: 1. Rosa thinks that Critical Theory needs to return to the tradition of articulating a theory of alienation, especially the alienating effects of social accelerations that particularly interest him (see Rosa 2005), and provide important evidence that alienation is still a problem of which Critical Theorists should be well aware. 2. More recently, Rosa has developed the idea that a Critical Theory oriented towards experiences of alienation must rethink human “world-relations” (Weltbeziehungen) (see Rosa 2012). The idea here is that human beings ex-

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perience alienation if they are not engaged in fulfilling world-relations. Instead of using the adjective “fulfilling”, Rosa considers that “resonance” is a better word to evaluate world-relations. A world-relation is thus “fulfilling” if it produces “resonance”; for instance: when one listens to music that one enjoys, or when one meets a person to whom one feels strongly drawn. It remains to be seen just where Rosa’s theory will head in the future, but for now we can sense in it two interests that align with at least two of the central ideas of this essay : 1. the need to go back to the experiences that real human beings are making in modern societies; and, 2. the need to rethink our worldrelations. I would add to this agenda, however, one additional point that I find crucial, and that I encountered especially upon re-reading Marcuse’s work; namely, that our worlds do indeed have an aesthetic dimension. This means, above all, that worldrelations are not only formal, but are saturated with contents and meanings imbued with colors, tastes and smells. The normative dimension to which aesthetics refers is beauty, but in our context we want to understand beauty in Marcuse’s sense: “not in the sense of beautiful objects or places, but as a form of the totality of life which encompasses society and nature” (Marcuse 2000:80). Beauty thus pertains as a normative principle to a kind of world-relation in which the experiences that are made imply sensibility and materiality. Hypothetically, we could now say that it is only in a society that has lost the faculty to orient its ways of acting and thinking towards a regulative principle of beauty that we can expect to find world-relations that are unable to respect or recognize alterity. Although this thought needs to be developed further, it is possible to relate it to our idea of understanding modernity as a certain kind of world-consciousness. The loss of a strongly-felt relation to beauty could be one of the consequences of the erosion of the traditional worlds with which modernity is still trying to come to grips. How can we incorporate all of this into a theory of modernity in which experiences are paramount?

3

Hints of an experiential theory of modernity

An important starting point for a reorientation of research on modernity towards an attempt to understand the different experiences with and within modernity can be found in Marshall Berman’s book, All that is Solid Melts into Air (1982). The book’s title cites a celebrated phrase from the Communist Manifesto, but more revealing for our purpose is the sub-title of this publication: The Experience of Modernity. Berman set out to study modernity in its singu-

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larity, but at the same time in its diversity. He wishes to integrate these two ambitions by turning one eye to the experiences with and within modernity : “There is a mode of vital experience – experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils – that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experiences ‘modernity’” (15). For Berman, it is clear that modernity represents a global challenge. “Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology : in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind” (Idem). However, this unification is not the one that the imperative of an abstract telos of modernity projects upon a future horizon as sociological theories of modernization would have us believe. Rather, it is a unity in which differences do not disappear. In Berman’s terms: “[…] it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity : it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish” (Idem). This means something that we have already announced a few times: there exists more than just one modernity. Or, to express this better : there are multiple experiences with and within our global modernity. Another point that is important for Berman is that modernity is not a “project” but, first of all, a set of experiences of loss, experiences of negativity that, however, have produced their own identities. “Although most […] people have probably experienced modernity as a radical threat to all their history and traditions, it has, in the course of five centuries, developed a rich history of its own” (16). This understanding changes the way in which we enquire about modernity. Instead of seeking the dark forces that are moving people to do things they do not wish to do – capitalism (Marx), instrumental reason (Horkheimer et al.), social acceleration (Rosa), and the like – we can now ask what the experiences are that real human beings are making in and within the processes triggered when confronted with the challenges of modernity, and how they account for them. Once again in Berman’s terms, we could say that we can now “explore and chart these traditions, to understand the ways in which they can nourish and enrich our own modernity, and the ways in which they may obscure and impoverish our sense of what modernity is and what it can be” (Idem). A more recent social theory that draws its inspiration from Berman’s take on modernity can be found in Peter Wagner’s work. Wagner makes a clear distinction between two “ways of understanding modernity”. The first is interested basically in an institutional analysis of modern societies (see Wagner 2008, Ch. 1). The second, however, is concerned with the experiences that human beings make while exposed to the imperatives and challenges of modern life. A sociology in which human experiences are taken seriously can be understood as a distinct source of information on modernization and modernity. It would have

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33

to develop a conceptual and methodological framework different from the conventional theories of modernity that focus mainly on an institutional analysis although, according to Wagner, “[w]e cannot entirely do without the institutional and critical approaches. But the potential to further develop the thinking about modernity and overcome its impasses lies today with the interpretative and experiential ones” (Wagner 2008:12). In his book, Wagner rearticulates intuitions that were explicit in his earlier writings. Some years ago, he had already shown his interest in the fact that the focus on experiences could help to bring the human being back into consideration. “Philosophy and social theory proceed predominantly by presupposition and show little interest in actual human beings who tend to be taken into account only as disturbances the more they enter the public scene” (Wagner 2001:61). In the same text, Wagner refers to Marshall Berman’s idea of integrating experiences into reflections on modernity : “In literature and the arts, in contrast, the experience of modernity is in the center and, as an experience, it concerns in the first place the singular human being” (Idem). Wagner also turns to the question of how to explore experiences. This seems to be an important question since: “experiences […] do not ‘speak’ on their own” (Wagner 2008:4). It is for this reason that he proposes combining a sociology of experiences with a hermeneutic methodology, for experiences need to be interpreted (cfr. Idem). In Wagner’s words: “While the interpretative approach provides the grounds for an understanding of the variety of possible forms of modernity, the experiential approach helps to understand why a particular interpretation may come about in any given setting” (Ibid.:12). Today, it appears that part of mainstream thinking on modernity contemplates it in the plural; i. e., more than one modernity exists, and there are varieties of modernities. The debate that revolves around ‘multiple modernities’ has been especially successful in promoting this idea; however, according to the experiential understanding of modernity that we are trying to highlight here, it would be more accurate to speak of multiple experiences of modernity. Potentially similar challenges are experienced differently and tackled in distinct ways. In this regard, Wagner writes: “The difference between varieties of modernity is a difference in the answers given to those questions” (Ibid.:3; italics in the original). Wagner reconnects his experiential understanding of modernity to the institutional one when he attempts to concretize the modern challenges which he calls probl¦matiques, and which he localizes in the following realms: the cognitive, the political, the ‘self ’, and the questions of how to deal with the past (see Wagner 2001). But while these challenges may be the same in all societies, the ways of dealing with them are not. Moreover, these differences manifest themselves in and through the different experiences, which are now placed in the

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center of the research on modernity. Another important ingredient consists of specific historical experiences: “The experience of significant historical moments constitutes the background against which specific answers to those questions are given” (Wagner 2008: 3; italics in the original). Finally, another author who introduces an experiential emphasis into research on modernity is the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who not only recognizes the importance of experiences, but also the fact that in our contemporary modern world not all experiences are the same. While those made in the “Global North” seem to be important, those made in the “Global South” tend to be neglected or, as Santos prefers to say : to be “wasted” (Santos 2009). What he means, and somehow translated into the language that I am trying to develop in this text, is the following: we long ago reached a moment at which the limits of Western modernity, the Western ‘world’, can no longer be ignored. Increasing violence in almost all parts of the world, the increasing destruction of our natural environments, and the increasing experiences of alienation are phenomena that cannot be overlooked and that clearly show the need for alternative ways of relating to our natural and social environments. But there is something else that I think is important. Santos’s idea of searching for other experiences shows that he places little confidence in theories like the one proposed by Habermas. In other words: it does not suffice to know how worlds are constructed in and through the process of communication; it is also important to have a more substantial idea about the worlds in which we are living or in which we wish to live. Santos, therefore, thinks it is important to open spaces that will allow for an exchange of the different experiences with and within modernity, and that the World Social Forum represents an important step in this direction (see Santos 2006).

4

Towards a modern world of all human beings

The theories mentioned in the previous section lack clear definitions of what experiences actually are. It was my intention in the first section of this essay to show that modernity seems to be quite obsessed with experience and that we can understand this obsession as a consequence of the fact that modernity represents, first of all, a condition of the sudden loss of “traditional worlds”; and that this, in turn, provokes a crisis of the ways in which people relate to the social environment and to nature. To focus on experiences means to focus on the interfaces between human agents and their respective worlds (social and natural). Experiences are produced in and through world-relations. The fact that in modernity experiences

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are being regarded as important only reflects how problematic world-relations have become. The first generation of Critical Theorists maintained a clear sense of this. They were trying to advance an all-encompassing critique of world-relations in modern societies. And some of them – we mentioned Adorno and Marcuse – even strove to think of alternative forms and modalities to relate to the world. While Habermas seems to turn his back on such questions, a new generation of Critical Theorists appeared to return to the conviction that modernity is, first of all, about troubled world-relations. We briefly referred to Hartmut Rosa in this context. But one of the problems with many Critical Theorists is that they ponder modernity as the consequence of one single, totalizing principle that operates as a sort of dark force behind the backs of social actors, imposing upon them alienating forms of relating to the world. Against this kind of “general theory” (Santos) I am proposing as an alternative a critical theory of modernity that sets out to interrogate all the different experiences that the modern erosion of the traditional world has provoked up to now. Another problem with Critical Theorists is that they do not consider the possibility of a plurality of experiences with and within global modernity, or that different historical constellations and cultural presuppositions can actually alter even the philosophical understanding of normative conceptions like “justice”, as we can see in Villoro’s text. Instead of a theory of modernity, this book calls for a dialogue with others who are sharing experiences of modernity. It is a humble exercise in getting such a dialogue off the ground. It does not see modernity as a solution, but as an ongoing negotiation as to how we are to make sense of our contemporary world, the one we share with all other human beings.

5

About this book12

The book has three sections. The first ponders conceptual and theoretical questions concerning a social theory of experiences. In his article, FranÅois Dubet presupposes that certain structural modifications of social life in latemodern societies force us to abandon long-held ideas. Society can no longer be understood as a functionally integrated unit, nor is it defined by universal values. As a consequence, social action cannot be conceived as guided by internalized roles or a habitus. Dubet thinks that this situation forces social scientists to chart the “labor” that social actors realize in order to maintain a certain 12 This section was co-authored jointly with Anna Popovitch.

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social order. Social research must therefore focus on the experiences that individuals, groups and social actors make in these processes of social action. He insists that experiences do not constitute identities but, rather, challenge already given identities, and reflect on processes of social action from the perspective of social actors in a world that has become highly unstable and uncertain. Carlos šmaz Gispert advances a similar argument. However, for šmaz the central concept is not that of experience itself, but that of subjectivity. Against the classical subject-theoretic currents of social thought, he emphasizes that thinking subjectivity is not really a limitation, since it does not force the social into the straightjacket of Reason. On the contrary, thinking the social through the looking-glass of the subject makes it possible to not only recover experiences and expectations that are constantly articulated in processes of social action, but also obliges us to recognize emotions and meaning as aspects involved in these processes. “Interpretation” is another cornerstone of šmaz’ conceptual architecture, as social actors are constantly interpreting the situations in which they are acting. Interpretations and experiences, finally, condense into narratives. Looking at social research in Mexico, šmaz encourages social scientists to take into consideration the narratives that social actors are articulating. In “From Ideology to Structures of Feeling: Raymond Williams on Culture and Society”, Anna Popovitch explores Williams’ contribution to the study of subjectivities. Starting from the assumption that Williams’ work contains rich methodological insights that are useful for the analysis of social experiences, Popovitch unpacks the notion of “structures of feeling” as central to this author’s cultural materialism. The essay opens with a discussion of Williams’s engagement with, and departure from, Marxist theories of ideology. The author then examines the historian’s account of the collective beliefs that underpinned the Romantic conception of art in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. She concludes the essay by pointing out how “sophisticated forms of literary and cultural analysis of the kind elaborated by Williams can contribute to our understanding of how historically contingent beliefs persist across time, remain latent within the new patterns of thinking into which they are absorbed, or are superseded by unprecedented forms of consciousness”. Saurabh Dube’s essay closes the conceptual section of the book. He shares many considerations with the authors mentioned above, though he is more interested in the consequences for a theory of modernity. Also of prime interest for Dube is the construction of subjectivities. Drawing primarily on South Asian experiences, he tries to see in them constructions of “subjects of modernity”. His “subjects of modernity” are those “subjected” to the challenges that the modern condition represents, though their reactions will vary. Dube not only understands modernity as a global condition, but also convincingly argues that social actors in post-colonial societies actively participate in shaping this global

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modern world. In doing so, he challenges not only conventional theories of modernity – above all, the so-called “theories of modernization” – but also certain currents of contemporary post-colonial theory. Instead of limiting himself to a critique of “Eurocentric” tendencies in mainstream social theory, Dube seems to be more interested in understanding the specificity of a modernity that grows out of post-colonial conditions. In the second and third parts of the book we attempt to shed light on the experiences, interpretations and processes of the shaping of modernities in different parts of the world. The second section begins with Raewyn Connell’s essay, “Antipodes: Australian Sociology’s Struggles with Place, Memory, and Neoliberalism”. This constitutes a valuable contribution to the post-colonial critique of knowledge production. Connell analyzes Australia’s place in the “global periphery” and surveys the history of Australian sociology since the country’s inception as a dependent, resource-exporting economy thought of as an “antipode” of metropolitan centers until its entry into the league of “modern” Western nations. The essay emphasizes the fact that Australian sociology originated as an “extroverted” discipline whose theoretical and methodological tools were borrowed from Europe and North America. Its subsequent development, including the school of critical empiricism consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s, and studies of neoliberalism published in the 1990s and 2000s, has been characterized by a tension between an allegiance to metropolitan modes of thought and an awareness of local problems arising from Australia’s experience as a settler colony. Connell argues that in order to overcome the theoretical blindness inherent in the peripheral social sciences it is important not only to recognize “the diversity and internal complexity” of post-colonial societies, but also to take into account the “relations among diverse knowledges and their producers” (42). In “Imagining a World of Inequality : Representing Class Identities in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission”, Bidhan Roy examines the contribution of South Asian diasporic fiction to the understanding of the effects of globalization on class identities. Approaching literature as a rich medium of expression that elucidates processes of identity construction, Roy turns to Hari Kunzru’s novel Transmission in an attempt to answer questions that have been at the center of the theoretical debate among I. Wallerstein, A. Appadurai, P. Gilroy, D. Harvey, and F. Jameson: How should class consciousness be theorized in the age of globalization? Are Marxist conceptions of class obsolete in the context of transnational labor markets and mass migration? The essay opens with a discussion of five contrasting critical perspectives – Wallerstein’s World System Theory, Harvey’s writings on uneven geographical development, Jameson’s account of postmodernism, Appadurai’s view of “disorganized capitalism”, and Gilroy’s work on diasporas – that frame the author’s reading of Transmission. Roy’s analysis of

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South Asian diasporic subjectivity as portrayed in the novel suggests that in the new global economy traditional class identities are reconfigured around multiple ideological axes that reflect the impact of consumerism, geographical dispersion, and ethnic diversity. Finally, the third part of the book concentrates on Latin American experiences in and within global modernity. The texts gathered here show that modernity is a global condition that is both singular but also highly contingent. There are, indeed, multiple experiences within modernity that provoke different consequences and results. Part Three begins with a seminal text by the Mexican philosopher Luis Villoro, which we are publishing here for the first time in English translation. In “A Negative Path towards Justice”, Villoro questions the applicability of Western theories of justice to developing nations. Pointing out that while most postWorld War II philosophical reflections on justice privilege the idea of a consensus among free, equal, and rational subjects living in well-ordered democracies, he stresses the fact that post-colonial societies are plagued by numerous chronic problems. These range from an unequal distribution of basic material goods and the marginalization of vulnerable social groups from collective decision-making to the disdain for indigenous cultures historically excluded from the rule of law. Consequently, Western theories of liberal democracy are hardly suitable for understanding the experience of delayed modernity in countries that lack the conditions for the implementation of the rational consensus model. Villoro argues in favor of taking a “negative” route towards justice that presupposes the absence of a just moral order and envisions the possibility of escaping from oppression. In order to counter unjust power, the disenfranchised subject must (1) recognize the experience of her/his exclusion; (2) affirm her/his difference and proclaim her/his equality with the aggressor ; and, (3) demand that “the other” acknowledge the legitimacy of her/his grievances. Nicola Miller’s essay provides an interesting insight into the intellectual constitution of modernity in Latin America at the beginning the 20th century. By drawing on the works of three leading intellectuals – Jos¦ Enrique Rodû (1871 – 1917), Alfonso Reyes (1889 – 1959), and Carlos Mari‚tegui (1894 – 1930) – she makes an important point: Latin America’s reactions to modernity do not limit themselves to reactionary rejection, on the one hand, and uncritical assimilation, on the other. On the contrary, it seems to be true that Latin American intellectuals experimented very creatively with modern ideas, articulating “projects of modernity” that are different from those that could, and still can, be found in Europe or the U.S. Miller’s article reveals that Latin American reflections on modernity did express the same disenchantment with rationalism found in the European critique of modernity. But at the same time this would not lead to renouncing the great promises of the Enlightenment. The Latin American

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“dialectics of Enlightenment” was not only articulated well before Horkheimer and Adorno published their famous book, but the stresses were also placed quite differently. The book closes with an essay by Lidia Girola, in which the author reconstructs the notion of social imaginaries of modernity that the Canadian Philosopher Charles Taylor has used, and according to which social imaginaries are not only produced theoretically, but are shaped by “legends, myths, stories, stereotypes, prejudices, and tradition”. Girola stresses that social imaginaries do not belong to academics or intellectuals, but are used by all social actors who constantly strive to give meaning to the worlds in which they are living and acting. In the second part of her article, Girola links the conceptual tool of social imaginaries to Latin American experiences with modernity. She refers to important cultural scientists from the region like Renato Ortiz and Jos¦ Joaqu†n Brunner, pointing out that they have developed very similar meta-theoretical ideas about how to study modernity, which we can also encounter in Western authors like Peter Wagner. Brunner, for instance, has made the point that modernity must be studied “as period; as institutional structure; as vital experience; and as discourse”. Drawing on these ideas, Girola proposes a new research agenda concerning modernity ; one that not only contemplates all these different dimensions, but that must be comparative in order to come to terms with the challenges of global modernity.

References Beck, Ulrich/Anthony Giddens/Scott Lash (eds.) (1994). Reflexive Modernization. Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benjamin, Walter (1991 [1939/1940]. “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire”, in: Walter Benjamin (1991). Abhandlungen, Gesammelte Schriften, Band I-2. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt/M., pp. 605 – 653. Benjamin, Walter (1992). Sprache und Geschichte. Philosophische Essays. Stuttgart: Reclam. Berman, Marshall (1982). All that is Solid Melts into Air. The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Bonacker, Thorsten/Andreas Reckwitz (eds.) (2007). Kulturen der Moderne. Soziologische Perspektiven der Gegenwart. Frankfurt/M./New York: Campus. Cassirer, Ernst (1960). The Logic of the Humanities. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. – (1995). Nachgelassene Texte und Manuskripte, Vol. 1. Zur Metaphysik der symbolischen Formen. Hamburg: Meiner. – (2001). Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen. Erster Teil: Die Sprache. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

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Connell, Raewyn (2007). Southern Theory. The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in the Social Sciences. Crow Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Cook, Deborah (2011). Adorno on Nature. Durham: Acumen. Dewey, John (2005). Art as Experience. New York: Penguin. Domingues, Jos¦ Maur†cio (2009). “Global Modernization, ‘Coloniality’ and a Critical Sociology for Contemporary Latin America”, in: Theory Culture Society, 26:112 – 133. Dux, Günter (2005). Historisch–genetische Theorie der Kultur. Weilerswist: Velbrück. – (2010). “Humanität im säkularen Verständnis der Moderne. Die Verantwortung der Politik für die humane Lebensform”, in: Jörn Rüsen (ed.) (2010). Perspektiven der Humanität. Menschen im Diskurs der Disziplinen. Bielefeld: Transcript, 191 – 220. Feenberg, Andrew (2002). Transforming Technology. A Critical Theory Revisited. Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press. Fischer, Karsten (2005). “In the Beginning was the Murder: The Destruction of Nature and Interhuman Violence in Adorno’s Critique of Culture”, in: Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 6(2), 27 – 38. Fortanet, Joaqu†n (2008). “Leer a Foucault. Una cr†tica de la experiencia”, Da†mon. Revista de Filosof†a, no. 43, 15 – 32. Foucault, Michel (2002). The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge. Giddens, Anthony (1991). The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. – (1994). “Living in a Post-Traditional Society”, in: Beck, Ulrich /Anthony Giddens/Scott Lash (eds.) (1994). Reflexive Modernization. Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity Press, 56 – 109. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (2004). Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1981). Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Habermas, Jürgen (1987). “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’”, in: Jürgen Habermas (1987). Toward a Rational Society. Cambridge/Oxford: Polity Press, 81 – 122. Honneth, Axel (1994a). “Pathologien des Sozialen. Tradition und Aktualität der Sozialphilosophie”, in: Axel Honneth (ed.). Pathologien des Sozialen. Die Aufgaben der Sozialphilosophie. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 9 – 69. – (1994b). “Die soziale Dynamik von Mißachtung. Zur Ortsbestimmung der kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie”, in: Leviathan, 22, 81 pp. Horkheimer, Max/Theodor W. Adorno (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press. Jameson, Fredric (2003). Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Jay, Martin (2005). Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kellner, Douglas (1984). Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Konersmann, Ralf (2001). “Das kulturkritische Paradox”, in: Ralf Konersmann (ed.) (2001). Kulturkritik. Reflexionen in der veränderten Welt. Leipzig: Reclam, 9 – 37.

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Kozlarek, Oliver/Jörn Rüsen/Ernst Wolff (2012). Shaping a Humane World. Civilizations – Axial Times – Modernities – Humanisms. Bielefeld: Transcript. Kozlarek, Oliver (2011). Moderne als Weltbewusstsein. Ideen für eine humanistische Sozialtheorie in der globalen Moderne. Bielefeld: Transcript. Mackinnon, Malcolm H. (2001). “Max Weber’s Disenchantment. Lineages of Kant and Channing”, in: Journal of Classical Sociology. Vol. 1(3), 329 – 351. Marcuse, Herbert (1991). One-Dimensional Man. Studies of the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. London/New York: Routledge. – (2000). “Kunst in der eindimensionalen Gesellschaft”, in: Herbert Marcuse (2000). Nachgelassene Schriften. Kunst und Befreiung. ed. Peter-Erwin Jansen, Lüneburg: Zu Klampen, pp. 71 – 85. – (2004). “Die Permanenz der Kunst. Wider eine bestimmte marxistische Ästhetik”, in: Herbert Marcuse, Schriften, Band 9, Konterrevolution und Revolte. Zeitmessungen. Die Permanenz der Kunst. Lüneburg: Zu Klampen, pp. 191 – 241. Osborne, Peter/Charles, Matthew (2012). “Walter Benjamin”, in: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.). URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ win2012/entries/benjamin/ last access: Nov. 14, 2013. Paz, Octavio (1985). “The Labyrinth of Solitude”, in: Octavio Paz (ed.). The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings. New York, NY: Grove Press, pp. 7 – 212. Popper, Karl (1978). Three Worlds. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan (http://www.thee–online.com/Documents/Popper–3Worlds.pdf) last access: Nov. 10, 2013. Rosa, Hartmut (2005). Beschleunigung. Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen der Moderne. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. – (2012). Weltbeziehungen im Zeitalter der Beschleunigung. Umrisse einer neuen Gesellschaftskritik. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (2006). The Rise of the Global Left. The World Social Forum and Beyond. London/New York: Zed Books. – (2009). Una epistemolog†a del sur. Mexico: Siglo XXI. Schmidt, Alfred (1971 [1962]). The Concept of Nature in Marx. London: NLB. Toulmin, Stephen (1990). Cosmopolis. The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. New York: Free Press. Touraine, Alain (1992). Cr†tica de la modernidad. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econûmica. Villoro, Luis (1998). Estado plural y pluralidad de culturas. Mexico City : UNAM/Paidûs. – (2001). “La bfflsqueda de la identidad en la cultura latinoamericana”, in: Devenires II, 4, pp. 132 – 146. Wagner, Peter (2001). Theorizing Modernity. Inescapability and Attainability in Social Theory. London/Thousand Oaks/New Dehli: Sage. Wagner, Peter (2008). Modernity as Experience and Interpretation. A New Sociology of Modernity. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press. Welsch, Wolfgang (2012). Homo mundanus. Jenseits einer anthropischen Denkform der Moderne. Weilerswist: Velbrück.

I Conceptualizing Human Experiences

FranÅois Dubet

Society and Social Experience1

All theories of social action hark back to a natural conception of societal life, beginning with the question of determining if we do indeed live in societies. These theories are all anthropological and constitute hidden moral codes that define both the nature of mankind and what is good for its members. While we may admit that the concept of action in terms of social experience counts among these theories of action, it remains important to define how this concept arises and to which vision of societal life it corresponds. I wish to address not so much the notion of social experience, which I have previously endeavored to define in a book, as the theoretical and sociological reasons that can lead to the use of this notion (Dubet, 1994). Collectively, these reasons can boil down to a simple and relatively banal argument: what we call society can no longer be conceived as an integrated functional unit controlled by a system of positions, norms and values; social action can no longer be understood as the accomplishment of an internalized role or of a habitus. At the same time, we cannot reduce social action to a model of rational action since it falls within the scope of several orders of rationality. Confronting and managing these logical notions is what I call the social experience.

1

Action, role and society

We must keep to an intuitive definition of classical sociology such as that which Parsons (1951) tried to synthesize by expanding on Durkheim’s thinking, and which asserts a principle of continuity for the actor and the system; more precisely, the notion that the actor and the system are merely two sides of the same “reality” (Nisbet, 1984). From this point of view, opposing holism to individualism does not constitute a serious approach, unless it is used to put forth methodological positions or approaches to the analysis of societal life. If we 1 Translation: Richard Genest.

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accept this principle of continuity, it is pointless to posit an opposition between society and the individual, and we must above all admit that any conception of “action” also represents a conception of the “nature” of society. Thus, analyzing action in terms of roles conforms to a more or less functionalist vision of society, in the same way that a conception based on rational choice corresponds to a vision of society defined by “market forces”, and economic, political and moral considerations… (Boudon, 1988). Those statements can also be inverted to show that any theory about society is also a theory about action. The identification of the actor with the system was never more pronounced than in what we refer to, for mere rhetorical convenience, as classical sociology, which conceives of action as the accomplishment of a role, of an internalized “program”. This notion of a program has too often been derided, in particular by Durkheim and Parsons, for us not to briefly recall its virtues. First, it has an exceptional explanatory power for a great number of behaviors. Second, it calls for an elaborate conception of the individual, since it is not a flawless model; it allows for some contradictions between the notions of the individual and of internalized control, contradictions highlighted among others by psychoanalysis, which partakes of this model. Third, this theory leaves room for the autonomy of the subjects, if not their freedom, which is seen as the internalization of a role based on universal and rational values. Finally, let us note that this conception of action and of the actor is not as conservative as is often said. We may take for example the theory of action as a “habitus”, which is derived from this family of theories, in the sense that it conceives of action as the accomplishment of a set of precociously internalized tendencies in a social system characterized by class inequalities and cultural domination (Bourdieu, 1980). That said, in this critical version as well, the social order is essentially the one that reigns in our heads. It is not so much for its internal weaknesses as for the conception of society to which it is linked that this theory of action as a role has progressively lost ground. Indeed, this conception of action as a role implies that societal life proceeds from this organized grouping that we call “society”. In other words, this means that any action originates from a social system, from a stable and functional order –whether it is perceived or not as a system of class domination– and that the processes of social integration, social control and identity determine which social behaviors constitute practical realizations of this system. The concepts of socialization and of the social role therefore become essential. The notion of socialization explains how action models, patterns, values and rules are internalized and how they mold an individual’s identity. Given that the actor is embedded in society, explaining an action consists in elucidating how that action has been socialized. The second essential concept is that of roles: depending on their social position and on the circumstances, the actors accomplish

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roles that more or less partake in how society functions and/or in the reproduction of the social order. An action is thus explained, through both socialization and social roles, by the way society functions; society is a system, a “ghost” looming over social behaviors, it is the “author” of societal life in the same way that a playwright creates the parts which actors then play on stage. The notion of action as a social role implies that society should be perceived as an institution, as a group organized around its shared central values, as a compatible system of cultural identities, social concerns and individual subjectivities. To simplify further, we could say that the economy, culture and social norms must form a coherent whole within what we call society. At any rate, this integration must seem desirable, but must also be perceived as the realization of our aspirations to modernity through the reconciliation of reason, subjectivity and social organization (Durkheim, 1995). Clearly, this conception of social action is not totally naive, particularly in light of the fact that no society is ever perfectly integrated, and that this view of sociology never ceases to describe crises, anomie, the breakdown of habitus and anything else that might prevent the actors from behaving in accordance with their role and how they were socialized –anything that gives them some level of autonomy within the system–. But, like one of history’s little tricks, this creative action contributes in spite of itself to a new integration of the system, just as deviance and social movements produce a new systemic equilibrium. That said, it is not the conception of action that is essential here, but rather the belief in the notion that society underlies this conception of action. This notion was developed in France and in the U.S. most notably, at a time when what sociologists call society was in fact a project for a nation-state. We can therefore say that the notion of society is an idealized theoretical representation of this nation-state, a representation that rests on several pillars: – A society is a “functional” system in which classes, statuses and roles, and the division of labor contribute to the way societal life functions as a whole. – A society is based on common values institutionalized by the family, by education, by religion and by the political system. – A society is modern inasmuch as it promotes the individual in the name of the universal values of the Age of Enlightenment and of Reason. In fact, as Gellner (1989) clearly demonstrated, this representation forms the ideology of the modern and largely dominant nation-states, identified with modernity, democracy plus science. It is the representation of imperial states and of those states that consider themselves in the vanguard of history. More precisely, the notion of society postulates the increasing integration of culture, political sovereignty and the economic autonomy of the nation. State and national institutions, a national economy in control of its borders and currency, a

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national culture into which migrants eventually assimilate –i. e. integrate themselves objectively and subjectively (Park, 1950)– these are the fundamental ingredients of the notion of society.

2

The decline of the notion of society

For the last 40 years, we can almost indisputably argue that social thinking has been dominated –at first because of the critical social movements of the 1960s, then the impacts of globalization– by a detachment from the notion of interlockingness based on the correspondence and reversibility of actor and system. We progressively moved away from this model of interlockingness thanks to the transformation of the long-dominant representation of societal life in both the Marxist and functionalist camps in sociology. Indeed, the metaphor of interlockingness supposes as a prerequisite an integrated conception of societal life in which the dominant culture or ideology, however we may choose to call it, diffracts into a relatively homogeneous social structure, in a set of more or less integrated roles and, with time, in personalities. Whether we put societal values or the economic structure at the center of the process does not change anything from this point of view, society being a highly-integrated system in which systemic integration and social integration are two complementary sides of the same structure (Lockwood, 1964). This “tranquil” representation fell apart with what we shall call (as others before us) “late modernity” rather than postmodernity, in the sense that the breakdown that can be observed today was in great part already written in the various narratives of modernity : the growing complexity, the continuous rationalization, the disillusionment of the world, the anomie, the extension of democratic individualism, the expansion of the market… In other words, we are witnessing the exhaustion of the definition of society as the integration of economy, culture and political sovereignty. This integration was necessary to establish a continuity between the subjectivity of actors and the objectivity of their positions and, consequently, with the interlockingness from which the individual emerges. In truth, this representation only became dominant because society had already taken the form of the modern social (as distinct from religious), democratic (composed of equals), and industrial (engaged in a complex division of labor) group. It is this grouping that formed society within a national state. The fact that we can no longer identify society with a national state and with Society (Dubet, 2009) brings us back to globalization, however we may choose to call it and whatever judgments we may pass on it: the continuous expansion of capitalism and the market when the latter no longer appears to be controlled by the national state and/or the national bourgeoisie, the simultaneous develop-

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ment of a cosmopolitan mass culture and increase in assertions of identity, the development of the principle of democratic equality, the weakening of national political sovereignty, the decline of institutional forms of socialization… In theory, the process may be defined as the progressive separation of what the very notion of society had striven to integrate: the market, the culture and the institutions. From then on, class position and social status, for example, could no longer be considered sufficient variables to explain actors’ behaviors and subjectivity ; their age, their gender, their personal life path and their cultural background form a set of factors that individuals have to take into account and through which, in a way, they acquire their identity. The clinamen of class which led individuals to their fate normally ceases to be as rigorous, and individual accidents and exceptional cases multiply. But this logic also suffers from the interference caused by the development of organizations, networks and markets in which individuals are required to act in a more or less rational manner when the market has stopped being rooted in community links, in institutions and in inherited identities, or when the market seems to be taking hold of goods and territories that used to lay outside its grasp. In other words, this introduces a fluctuation, or plasticity, in the principle of system-actor continuity on which the conception of the individual was founded. A great deal was made of the criticism of the representation of action in terms of roles and statuses coming from the various interactionist conceptions inspired by a theoretical filiation perceived until then as relatively marginal, that of Simmel, then of Mead. As Lemert perfectly demonstrated, the social order is produced by individual interactions more than by the accomplishment of programmed roles (Lemert, 1951). “Social reality” itself is seen as a continuous cognitive production, a group of ethnomethods developed by individuals (Garfinkel, 1967). As Goffman ironically said: “I am not concerned with the organization of communal life, but with the organization of individuals’ experience of communal life. I personally give priority to society and consider the individual’s engagements with it as secondary : this work therefore only deals with what is secondary” (Goffman [1974], 1991). Everyone now accepts the Parsonian problem concerning social order but criticizes the answer, until now dominant, by refusing to reduce the actor to her/his socialization program. Based on the same observation concerning distance and fluctuation between actor and system, the conceptions of action in terms of rational choice and methodological individualism all put forward an even more radical answer. Not only do they assert that actions and individuals are not the result of a socialization program, but they also consider individuals as a basic fact of the equation, with their rationality and their capacity to achieve their interests. In the end, the answer to the question of order and action that all of classical sociology had rejected is reintroduced through a shift in classical and neo-classical eco-

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nomic theory towards current sociology. This conception, based on limited rationality, has profoundly transformed all the representations of societal life, even, for example, managing to impose itself in organizational sociology. Organizations are no longer construed as rational configurations of roles and statuses, but as a “play area” for power games that eventually lead to the construction of the organization in a continuous flux of changes and interruptions, of compromise and local constructions (Crozier, Friedberg, 1977; Friedberg, 1993; March, Simon, 1991). Here we must highlight one major difference between this type of theory and the previous one, beyond the latent anthropologies that underlie them. While phenomenological and interactionist solutions take into account the separation between actor and system, theories of rational choice like Boudon’s and Coleman’s, among others, recreate this connection by conceiving the system as a result of action, like a compositional effect (Coleman, 1990; Boudon, 1984 and 2003). In this way, the interlockingness model has almost totally reversed itself. Whatever path is chosen, it seems obvious that contemporary sociological theory is not structured around a central conception of the individual, an interlockingness program based on a representation of society as a system of homogeneous action controlled by a set of values and roles. One may always wonder if this evolution in sociological thinking was brought about by cultural and social transformations or by the dynamics of the academic and theoretical fields, but in any case, we must take heed of the decline of a long prevailing explanation that simultaneously asserted the unity of the individual and that of society. Criticism of the notion of roles and of the accompanying “pathos” implies at first a form of refusal or skepticism towards it. We know that Weber has expressed the belief that the Nietzschean criticism of modernity leads to a “tragical” construction of history and action. Legitimacy and “pure” types of action are thus irreconcilable; faith, instrumental reason and tradition are in constant opposition and at war with one another in spite of the world’s rationalization and disenchantment (Weber, 1971). With the “tragedy of culture”, Simmel developed a related theme (Simmel, 1988). Indeed, Weberian posterity has paid homage to this fragmented view of action, which includes rationalist, culturalist, phenomenological and critical Marxist filiations… and doubtless others that I have forgotten. What matters here, though, is that all these more or less legitimate legacies partake in the breakdown of the notion of role and of its consubstantial representation of modern society. From then on, a slew of alternative theories have appeared, whether they be newly-minted theories or rediscovered traditions which had been cast aside for a time by the sociological mainstream. It would not be useful to give a detailed overview of these theories here, as this is the domain of sociology manuals. We

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are observing the return of a rational conception of action coupled with a sociological individualism that defines the social system as an “emerging effect”, in addition to various phenomenological and hermeneutic trends in which the social system dissolves into an unstable permanent creation. According to the most radical modalities of interactionism, societal life is nothing more than a series of local adjustments, and the notion of system becomes, strictly speaking, useless. The most radical criticism of the Parsonian notion of role was informed by ethnomethodology, which reduces the concept of society to a way of “giving accounts” (Garfinkel, 1967; Qu¦r¦, 1984). This fragmentation of classical sociology is important here because it is associated with the weakening of the classic image of society. It means that societal life has lost its unity, and that the social system is contorted between integration processes, mechanisms for competition in various markets, and cultural representations of the subject. This is what D. Bell (1979) means when he speaks of the “cultural contradictions” of capitalism: the economical, the cultural and the political are being separated. This is also what M. Walzer (1983) emphasizes, in a different way, by using the principle of the autonomy of the various spheres of justice to define justice itself. This theme has taken predominance nowadays, in a much less analytical language, through the dominant idea that there is an irreducible tension between cultures and identities, on the one hand, and globalization, which is sustained by a generalized “rationality”, on the other. Some think that we are experiencing a “clash of civilizations”, while others believe we have reached “the end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992; Huntington, 1993). The more serious thinkers, however, know well that we live in both of these worlds at once and that the different logics of societal life have grown increasingly autonomous and “disenchanted” in a process which Weber described as the rationalization of the world (Gauchet, 1985).

3

Why speak of social experience?

A totally random or fragmented conception of social systems – sometimes described as “post-modern” – cannot be sufficiently satisfying, and for a simple reason: societal life creates a certain unity of practices and regulates behaviors; the actors themselves do not disperse as much as the more tragic visions of contemporary individualism predicted, with their view of societal life as the meeting of tribal life with the market. If the principle of the unity of the social order lies neither in the functional sociological structure of roles, nor in the universal values that apply to all, we must look for it in the “labor” that individuals and other actors undertake to attain this order – what we may call their experience.

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Taking up the issue where Weber left it, the essential problem is not so much the presence of various logics of action, but rather their articulation and the establishment of a specific subjectivity within this construction. The “tragic” structure of action does not mean that the social experience must always be tragical, far from it. To understand the experiential process, we must follow the dual movement of the breakdown and reorganization of the logics that shape it. 1. Sociological tradition and empirical observations combine to differentiate the many logics of action intertwined in each person’s social experience. I see no reason to refuse to explain a great proportion of social behaviors as an effect of a socialization process aimed at ensuring the integration of the actors, of their identities and of their affiliations. A whole logic of action is defined by role models. It should be noted, however, that these behaviors, which were socialized “upstream”, are neither automatic nor unconscious. They are, rather, simply routine (Giddens, 1987). This traditional action, as Weber stated, is viewed subjectively by the actors in a social system that is considered “already there”. There is no reason not to speak of habitus in this context, provided that we consider this habitus as a logic of action and not as blind programming, and that it implies a certain distance from oneself. This distance, this reflexivity, obviously comes from the fact that the actors are also dominated by a strategic logic. They are not simply the sum of their affiliations and their roles, since every social situation can also be seen as a market in which the actors must mobilize resources and develop strategies. A priori, there is no reason not to admit that not all social situations can be analyzed in terms of games and strategies that both concern and mobilize economic and social resources. Such a “cynical” reading of Goffman is possible when he shows that the actor of an interaction is a strategist wishing to attain “narcissistic” objectives and following a logic that is rational in relation to means (Goffman, 1991; Ogien, 1987). Nevertheless, social actors can never be reduced to their affiliations or their interests. They are also defined by a cultural representation of themselves, by a culture and by an ethic. That is the role of culture, to propose an image of the subject, of creativity and of human nature. For a long time, this representation of the subject was religious and “otherworldly”. It was then identified with Reason and natural laws, and is today perceived as a right to “authenticity” (Taylor, 1989). It is not necessary to consider this representation as a set of values to the extent that, unlike the functionalist model, these values do not become norms. On the contrary, the representation of the subject partakes in a process of subjectification, inasmuch as it is defined by a tension in relation with other logics of action, in the same way that the ethic of conviction is opposed to the ethic of responsibility.

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While a theory of roles postulates the interlockingness and continuity of the various logics of action I have just discussed, the theme of experience presupposes instead their increasing separation in modern societies. We can illustrate this separation with a series of examples (Dubet, Martuccelli, 1998). In industrial societies, social movements have for a long time been perceived by way of a principle of continuity in which community advocacy, moral criticism of society, and the aggregation of individual interests into common interests all combined, to the point of merging into a single movement. Nowadays, it appears that social movements are characterized by the tensions, if not the contradictions, among these diverse logics, and that they only manifest themselves in a fragmented fashion. We can also think of schools, which we can no longer reasonably consider as institutions that transform values into norms and norms into personalities by means of continuous adjustments. Schools now appear to be more like the juxtaposition of a juvenile community with a market for diplomas and strategies on the one hand, and with a cultural identification forged in one’s personal relationship with knowledge on the other (Dubet, Martuccelli, 1996). Describing all these phenomena in terms of crisis is neither useful nor desirable, as if the unity of the social and lived worlds were the only possible norm. The diversity of the logics we can observe in all domains must instead be considered as the “normal” form of societal life in modern societies; that is, in societies where each domain of activity becomes autonomous. 2. The notion of social experience strives to define the objective mechanisms for the separation of the different logics of action – logics which do not “belong” to the actors – and the subjective labor of the actors who attempt to rebuild the unity of their experience when it is no longer a given. The true subject of experience is not an identity that is already present, but a labor that allows the actors to construct themselves, since they cannot be reduced to any of the logics of action. They have to learn to manage and combine these various logics in order to ensure the continuity and stability of their experience. This labor is not hard to observe with individual actors like high school or university students, or with couples whose members must combine and adapt their differing expectations and rationalities, as clearly demonstrated by F. de Singly (de Singly, 1996). This labor of experience is not restricted to individuals. Certain related terms evoke the modern forms of management, when Taylorist models are no longer in vogue: how to “motivate” individuals, how to engage them in activities that no longer seem “natural” to them. There is a similar problem with norms of justice and, more broadly, with those policies that are defined as combinations of contradictory alternatives, and not as simple choices guided by Reason or by the public interest. Evidently, the theme of experience brings us into a world of instability, into a world perceived as fragile and uncertain in which identity is

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less a legacy than a co-production. The social order cannot be reduced to its functionality, to the transcendence of values, or to the natural order of the markets; it is the product of the encounter between these various registers of actions that pertain to different “causalities”.

4

The trials of the individual

The transition from role to experience is correlative with the exposure of individuals created by a general movement towards “deinstitutionalization” (Dubet, 2002). Institutions are the machinery that adapts individuals to their roles. They build identities and motivations, they impose norms and values – experienced as transcendent – on the actors, and they sometimes generate a pathology of behaviors, either by alienation through excessive control, or, as a default, by anomie. With the weakening of institutions, individuals face new difficulties. As the meaning of their actions and their experience is not “given” to them by institutions, individuals must construct it themselves. Thus, to the extent that the family unit rests on the stability of the couple’s feelings toward each other and of the advantages that each one obtains from the relationship, individuals must construct the meaning of their union, and work at making it last when this is no longer forced upon them. The tension between feelings of love and social roles, from which the whole romantic genre has emerged, is no longer a factor, having been replaced by an obligation for individuals to draw on the resources of their experience. The same reasoning can be applied to religion, since the individual experience of faith now determines religious choices much more than tradition or the hold of the Church (Champion, Hervieux-L¦ger, 1990). Faith no longer emanates from the routine application of rites and commandments, but from the meaning given by the actors to their wish to believe. We could also cite the case of high school and university students, who are now obliged to find meaning in their studies by drawing from the various registers of the educational experience. Deinstitutionalization proceeds from the central principle of modernity : the obligation to be a free and independent individual, to produce one’s own experience (d’Iribarne, 1996). An integral part of the modernist project, this obligation with respect to freedom and authenticity is crucial to modern subjects, who wish to perceive themselves as the product of their deeds, their reasoning and their feelings. The transition from role to experience is then only one manifestation of this moral individualism. Classical sociology has abundantly criticized this form of individualism, arguing that the individual is an anomic illusion, and that individualism is swept away by the vacuum of its own desires,

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lost and easily manipulated by mass society’s cultural industries when it ceases to be determined by its internal values… More often than not, this type of criticism is at its root conservative, even when it partakes of a critical tradition. It is based on nostalgia for the “hyper-socialized” individual of classical sociology, carried by yearning for a time of great figures, noble sentiments and aristocratic attitudes, to which a hatred of the bourgeoisie and of our individualist consumer society grants a radical air (Adorno, Horkheimer, 1974; Bloom, 1987). The sociology of experience leads us towards more traditional and nuanced images derived from a critical analysis of domination. For many individuals and groups, the labor of experience is perceived as a form of self-realization, as a freedom, and one would need a strong level of self-confidence to see in it a mere ruse of domination. Moreover, most of us, including those who criticize contemporary individualism, do not seriously wish for a return to the order of the institutions, to a time when women’s submission guaranteed the stability of the family, when Churches enjoyed a monopoly on faith, when school discipline ruled and when the order imposed by the concept of class destiny made injustice “bearable”… On the other hand, we must avoid all naivety, since exposing oneself is not devoid of risks for those who are unable to construct their own experience, and therefore to construct themselves; this because of the various modes of social domination. Certain social conditions must be met, certain resources must be available for the actors to be the subjects of their own experience. When this is not the case, an actor’s experience and subjectivity can be destroyed in several ways. When faced with personal failure, such as academic failure, actors who feel subjected to the obligation to be free can easily be swept away by their unhappy conscience. These individuals feel responsible and guilty for their own failure, since the obligation to be independent prevents them from “truly” believing the available justifications and forms of consolation. They are left to choose between violence, which amounts to blaming the teachers for the individual’s failure, and withdrawal, i. e. the refusal to participate in a game that could only destroy them. At the same time, these individuals, who cannot rely on solid forms of social support, constantly feel that they are despised, that they are exposed to other people’s judgment without the protection of a role and of its associated safeguards. The more individuals are forced to be “themselves”, the more their need for recognition becomes obsessive and their face and identity seem threatened by the gaze of others. We can also mention the difficulty represented by the obligation to “motivate” oneself, the obligation to find within oneself the resources for one’s actions when they are no longer perceived as a “transcendent” obligation (Alter, 1993). In all those cases, social conflicts lose their “objectivity” and lodge themselves

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at the heart of each person’s experience. The individual experiences them as intra-psychical conflicts, as personality problems, when they are in fact a manifestation of social domination. ***

The sociology of social experience aims to go “upstream” – from the actor to the system. This notion is absolutely not equivalent to personal experience, to daily life, to the feelings that people sometimes strive to turn into sociological objects. Not only is the social experience defined by a structure, but every logic of action that composes it must also be conceived objectively. The logic of integration proceeds from certain modes of determination through socialization and internalized social control. Strategic logic is developed in a context that determines the rules and distribution of resources for the competition in which the actors are involved. Finally, the definition of the subject no more belongs to the actors than do the modes of domination and social relations to which individual and collective actors are submitted. These are the objective processes that must enable sociologists to understand certain social mechanisms based on the analysis of social experiences. All things considered, we must analyze the actors’ behaviors and feelings if we want to understand how the various elements that make up what we call society (more out of habit than as a result of a serious analysis) do relate to one another.

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– (1988). Effets pervers et ordre social [1977]. Paris: puf. – (2003), Raison, bonnes raisons. Paris: puf. Bourdieu, P. (1980). Le sens pratique. Paris: Minuit. Castells, M. (1983). The City and the Grassroots. Berkeley : University of California Press. Champion, F. Hervieu-L¦ger, D. eds. (1990). De l’¦motion en religion. Renouveaux et traditions. Paris: Le Centurion. Cicourel, A. (1979). Sociologie cognitive. Paris: puf. Coleman, J. S. (1990). Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Crozier, M. Friedberg, E. (1977). L’acteur et le systÀme. Paris: Le Seuil. Descombes, V. (1996). Les institutions de sens. Paris: Minuit. De Singly, F. (1996). Le soi, le couple et la famille. Paris: Nathan. D’Iribarne, P. (1996). Vous serez tous des ma„tres. Paris: Le Seuil. Dubar, C. (1991). La socialisation. Paris: A. Colin. Dubet, F. (1991). Les lyc¦ens. Paris: Le Seuil. – (1994). Sociologie de l’exp¦rience. Paris: Le Seuil. – (2002). Le d¦clin de l’institution. Paris: Le Seuil. – (2009). Le travail des soci¦t¦s. Paris: Le Seuil. Dubet, F. and Martuccelli, D. (1996). A l’¦cole. Sociologie de l’exp¦rience scolaire. Paris: Le Seuil; (1998). Dans quelle soci¦t¦ vivons-nous? Paris: Le Seuil. Dumont, L. (1983). Essais sur l’individualisme. Paris: Le Seuil. Durkheim, E. (1995). Le suicide [1897]. Paris: puf. Ehrenberg, A. (1995). L’individu incertain. Paris: Calmann-L¦vy. Elias, N. (1991). La soci¦t¦ des individus. Paris: Fayard [Die Gesellschaft der Individuen, 1939]. Friedberg, E. (1993). Le Pouvoir et la RÀgle. Paris: Le Seuil. Fukuyama, F. (1992). La fin de l’histoire et le dernier homme. Paris: Flammarion. [The End of History and the Last Man, 1992]. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Gauchet, M. (1985). Le d¦senchantement du monde. Paris: Gallimard. Gellner, E. (1989). Nation et nationalisme. Paris: Payot [Nations and Nationalism, 1983]. Giddens, A. (1987). La constitution de la soci¦t¦. Paris: puf [The Constitution of Society, 1984]. – (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. – (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goffman, E. (1991). Les cadres de l’exp¦rience. Paris: Minuit [Frame analysis, 1974]. Habermas, J. (1987). Th¦orie de l’agir communicationnel. Paris: Fayard, 2 volumes [Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 1981]. Hirschman, A. (1991). Deux siÀcles de rh¦torique r¦actionnaire. Paris: Fayard [The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, 1991]. Huntington, S. (1993). “The Clash of Civilizations?” in Foreign Affairs, Volume 72, Number 3. Inglehart, R. (1977). The Silent Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lapeyronnie, D. (1993). L’individu et les minorit¦s. Paris: puf. Lasch, C. (1980). Le complexe de Narcisse. Paris: Robert Laffont [The Culture of Narcissism, 1979]. Lefort, C. (1981). L’invention d¦mocratique. Paris: Fayard. Lemert, E. M. (1951). Social Pathology. New York: McGraw-Hill.

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Locwood, D. (1964). “Social Integration and System Integration”, in Zolleschan, Z. K. Hirsch, W., Explorations in Social Change. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 244 – 258. March, G, Simon, A. H. (1991). Les organisations. Paris: Dunod [Organizations, 1959]. Martuccelli, D. (1995). D¦calages. Paris: puf. Mead, G.-H. (1963). L’esprit, le soi et la soci¦t¦. Paris: puf [Mind, Self, and Society, 1934]. Nisbet, R. (1984). La tradition sociologique. Paris: puf [The Sociological Tradition, 1966]. Ogien, A. (1987). “La d¦composition du sujet” in Le parler frais d’Erving Goffman. Paris: Minuit. Park, R. E. (1950). Race and Culture. Glencoe: The Free Press. Parsons, T. (1951). The Social System. Glencoe: The Free Press. Qu¦r¦, L. (1984). “L’argument sociologique de Garfinkel”, in Arguments ethnom¦thodologiques, ProblÀmes d’¦pist¦mologie en sciences sociales 3. Paris: CEMS, EHESS. Renaut, A. (1989). L’Àre de l’individu. Paris: Gallimard. Sennett, R. (1979). Les tyrannies de l’intimit¦. Paris: Le Seuil [The Fall of Public Man, 1973]. Simmel, G. (1988). La trag¦die de la culture. Paris: Rivages. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Touraine, A. (1992). Critique de la modernit¦. Paris: Fayard. Walzer, M. (1983). Spheres of Justice. New York: Basic Books. Weber, M. (1971). Economie et soci¦t¦. Paris: Plon [Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1922].

Carlos šmaz Gispert

Unfreezing the Subject. Subjectivity, Narrative and Socially-Contextualized Interactions1

Some time ago, I came to the conclusion that the social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, have achieved considerable success in explaining (albeit in a simplified way) those types of behavior that obey some form of positive socialization (i. e. one that reproduces the dominant values and behaviors), but have been much less efficacious in explaining the conduct of people and social groups in settings in which no such clear socialization takes place, or where social subjects emerge to confront it, especially by postulating, activating and, eventually, conquering alternative conceptions and practices. As has been denounced since Antonio Gramsci’s work, resistance to domination and/or changes in the existing cultural or economic conditions – despite the positioning of Marxism as a theory of action – is often simplified and, occasionally, even comes to contradict its own postulates because the consciousness and actions of subjects seem to be generated by structural causes. This Marxist determinism also explains, very simply, positive socialization on the basis of economic determinants, either from first principles, or by simply assuming that the dominant ideology does, indeed, dominate. However, we know, at the very least, that socialization does not dominate everyone to the same degree, and does not explain the resistances and open rebellions that arise against it. Nonetheless, this form of Marxism proposed the historical inevitability of the socialist revolution that may have contributed to the conviction of the inexorable success of revolutionary or reformist actions. However, as Robert Nisbet (1979) has pointed out, for the purpose of analyzing historical processes this supposed directionality (of ineludible success) is simply an oneiric construction of the mind. It is obvious that despite the multiple forms of human resistance and alternatives that are generated constantly within any society, much more analytical 1 Formerly published in Spanish: Carlos Imaz Gispert, ”Descongelando al sujeto. Subjetividad, narrativa e interacciones sociales contextualizadas”, in: Acta Sociolûgica, 56, September – December, 2011, 37 – 57. Translation: Paul C. Kersey.

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effort has been spent on the broader features that limit or condition the social action of social actors than on the concrete actions taken and their motivations that, in reality, modify the initial framework. It is more or less clear that this has provided the basis for the scientific justification and legitimization of the social sciences as such. Since its early classic works, so-called academic sociology has set out to identify the efficient causes that explain social phenomena and their meaning (Durkheim, 1978) in an irreducible and unidirectional cause-effect relation, while Marxism speaks – though perhaps only in the final instance – of the economic determination of those phenomena. In other words, setting aside certain nuances, human behavior was conceived in a way very similar to the conditioned conduct of animals. The existence of conditioning factors of any particular subject’s social action is undeniable. Moreover, we must recognize the contribution of those analytical efforts to our knowledge of the social, especially since Marx’ and Durkheim’s critical analyses of political economy, in particular the latter’s study of suicide, which revealed that even the most individual and intimate action of a subject – such as taking one’s own life – is indeed influenced by social conditioning. This is true, and has been amply demonstrated. In fact, it is now a truism: since human beings are not born or raised in a vacuum, their existence is influenced by the social forces that act upon them. However, contrary to the position held by the mainstream analytical currents of the social, it is clearly necessary to recognize and make explicit the fact that individuals cannot be analyzed simply in terms of their adaptations to the environment, and much less in relation to some specific determining or efficient factor in that milieu. This touches not only upon an extreme form of reductionism, but also upon the wellknown disjuncture between structure and action. Fortunately, a growing tendency to move away from determinist perspectives is emerging. For example, Anthony Giddens (1984) has recognized that no single overarching and determining mechanism or cause that can be specified as such explains social change; that is, there are no unitarian formulas capable of uncovering the mysteries of the social action of human beings. In an even earlier text, in an effort to rescue the history from below, E.P. Thompson (1977 and 1981) posited that the existence of a social class is not only the product of material conditions, but is also molded by its own creators and their actions. Thompson confronted the false disjunctive of the objective vs. the subjective by firmly adopting a perspective which holds that both are part of an indivisible unity. Thompson, therefore, sustains that we must incorporate the role of conscious, active human beings with their culture, values, actions, and experience, into social analysis, for they all modify subjects and their social milieu. However, as this historian is also careful to point out, it is necessary to do so by rejecting an

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element shared by the Frankfurt School and Althusser’s structuralism of the ideological apparatuses; namely, a consistently strong emphasis on the ineluctable weight of ideological modes: i. e. that domination which destroys or disables social spaces where initiative or creativity might emerge and that leads, naturally, to pessimistic or authoritarian outcomes. According to Giddens (2007), this also occurs in orthodox functionalism, represented so admirably by Durkheim and Parsons, with its focus on structure that fails to take into account the ongoing process of structuration. For Giddens, structure thus conceived “has no socio-temporal localization, is characterized by the ‘absence of the subject’, and cannot be framed as a function of a subjectobject dialectic”. For this reason he proposes to bypass the analytical disjunctive between structure and action by incorporating the concept of structuration. For Giddens, for example, natural language (structure) “is a condition for generating speech acts (action) and consummating a dialogue (interaction), but is also the consequence of speech and the realization of dialogue (action and interaction)” (Ibid., 154). Here, every interaction implies (an attempt at) communication, but no less important is the fact that it also constitutes a moral relation and a relation of power. Comprehending structure – defined by Giddens as a system of generative rules and resources; that is, as a set of conditioning and enabling factors – is thus inseparable from understanding the action and interaction performed by concrete subjects at specific times and places, for the latter, in turn, condition the existence and shape the dynamic of the development of the structure. In other words, they are the living structure. For Giddens, it is in this duality of structure (as both conditioner and facilitator of action and interaction, and consequence of them) that we find “the most integral feature of the processes of social reproduction that can, in turn, be analyzed in principle as a dynamic process of structuration” (Idem). Thus conceived, structure(s) only exist “as the reproduced behavior of situated actors endowed with intentions and interests” (Ibid., 155). Thompson and Giddens distance themselves from the determinisms that obviate the mediations, historical particularities and lived experiences of individuals. I am convinced that a perspective contrary to all determinisms, be they structuralist or culturalist in nature, allows us to cross the threshold that Marx opened when he raised consciousness to the level of a condition that “ignites” what, with Engels, he called the motor of history (class struggle), recognizing the powerful transforming capacity of work, which in his Capital is defined as an exclusively human activity oriented towards an objective anticipated in thought. In this sense, the Marxist affirmation that human beings make their own history in conditions not of their choosing constitutes not only a call to

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consciousness-raising and political action, but also an epistemological definition indispensable for understanding our society. It is also certain that a growing body of social research and a number of academic communities are coming to share the idea that “the scientific” no longer refers to immutable truths (“scientific truth”) and, moreover, that what is called “scientific” is not only not in conflict with human subjectivity, but is actually a product of it. What is pejoratively called subjectivity – a term that encompasses, among other things, emotions and meanings that people generate in response to their milieu – thus becomes central to our understanding of social action and interaction. Incorporating the experiences, expectations and actions of social actors entails recognizing that social life, its production (as change) and/or reproduction (as continuity), are all results of interaction among active subjects who are capable of reflexively modifying their behavior. While acknowledging the socially-constructed nature of any “scientific fact”, we must also recognize that in contrast to those disciplines that focus on the phenomena of the natural world and that are thought to be schematically pursuing an understanding of a universe originally independent of their own existence, research in the social sciences deals with a world that is distinct; it involves an exercise of self-knowledge, a realization that has at least three important implications. First, it obliges us to recognize that students of the natural world analyze a universe not created by them;2 but, in Giddens’s words, one preordained and biologically programmed (in a subject-object relation). In contrast, those who examine the social world operate in one that is created and recreated by its members through the ongoing interaction of intentionality, skills, norms and power (in a subject-subject relation). Though it has been established clearly that in this production of the social world human beings do not write their history on a blank page, nor in conditions of their own choosing, it is equally demonstrable that they do indeed rewrite it in an ongoing fashion and even, on occasions, tear up the sheet to try new beginnings. Second, it is clear that scientific theories of nature are not elements of the natural world itself though, obviously, they modify it through technology.3 In contrast, theories and beliefs related to the social are very much features or characteristics of that social world. Therefore, the social sciences, like all other rational discourses (Gouldner, 1979b) present in society, form part of the interests, skills, norms and powers that its members 2 While, obviously, nature was not created by human activity, it is clearly modified by it. 3 What is evident for the social sciences is increasingly less so for the natural sciences. As Hannah Arendt suggests (1998), due to the enormous, and growing, human impact on the natural world it becomes ever more difficult for natural scientists to maintain the pretended distance, neutrality and scientificist objectivity with which they have usually characterized their relationship to the world.

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continuously put into play. Social scientists are also part of this social reality, which is simultaneously constructed by their theories. They are at one and the same time judges of, and active participants in, the interactions that produce and reproduce the society ; both a condition and a consequence of them. Hence, they cannot possibly remain neutral, for declarations of “neutrality” are, in and of themselves, valorizations that presuppose intention. “Value-free” social science is, therefore, a myth whose most interesting and amusing aspect, as Gouldner suggests, is that it allows us to imagine “modern, scientific” researchers as “minotaurs”,4 when in reality they are simply social scientists and researchers with concealed values that arise from either ignorance or interests (Gouldner, 1979a). All theory is an interpretation of the reality constructed by concrete – historically situated – social subjects, never of reality itself, and empirical data (including “cold numbers”) are not independent of the subjects who, based on theories of their own elaboration (or that of others), construct, select, cluster and interpret them. In all their interactions, and especially with respect to their theories (their knowledge, which is power), social scientists form part of unequal power relations and, consequently, promote – in a conscious or unconscious way – the (re)structuration of the existing relations of domination or autonomy of rational individuals and social subjects (Giddens, 2007). The social sciences confront an “object” of study paradoxically characterized by the fact that it is not an object, not a thing but, rather, an entity that is reflexive, active and changing. While the world in which human beings act is given, it is also recreated by rationalities that they elaborate and modify constantly and reflexively, frameworks of meaning that allow them to organize and interpret their experience and, with time, modify their expectations and actions. Positivism, both that which emerges from academic sociology and from Marxism, is a straitjacket that limits human beings’ self-understanding. Its methodological imperative, known as the “scientific method” (as if it were somehow “unique”), is borrowed from the natural sciences. Clad in “scientific neutrality”, it conceals values while the overwhelming quantitative strength that is the central element of its legitimacy confounds the representative with the meaningful, all the while assuming, erroneously, that statistical correlation is equivalent to causal correlation and, more serious still, that numbers have the ability to select and explain themselves, and that the action and interaction of malleable thinking beings can be understood in quantitative terms.

4 A mythical being with a human body and the head of an ox, trapped in a labyrinth from which it cannot escape.

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Revalorizing human subjectivity Salvaging the human meaning of social action becomes viable when we situate the experiences and beliefs, values, perspectives, options and decisions of social actors into a specific context, and take up the challenge of approaching lived human experiences much more closely ; by focusing on the “subjected subject”: individuals endowed with intelligence, will, emotions and capacity for action. In this venture, the analytical perspective called “qualitative” and the tools it has developed are most useful, for they allow us to come much closer to the immediate context and rationality that characterizes particular social subjects. In a very brief synthesis, we could say that research known as qualitative – best developed in the field of anthropology – is based on three basic, assumptions that define its conceptualization of the analysis of social actions: 1) people act in their settings in accordance with the meanings they assign to them; 2) meanings are the result of people’s social interaction; and, 3) meanings are assumed, managed or modified in accordance with people’s interpretative processes. What we are positing, in an even starker synthesis, is the attempt by both the researcher herself and the subjects of study to understand social life as lived experience. This is no easy task, for by definition the researcher inevitably selects and interprets the data she encounters. According to Julio Alvar (1984), researchers strive to discover the lived reality of the “other” that, directly or indirectly, forms part of what we are; or, in the words of Leticia Ruano (2004), to achieve a weothers (nos-otros in Spanish). Recognizing that we can neither supplant the “other” nor introduce ourselves into another living being – for that is impossible – we know that even with intellectual honesty and methodological rigor our work can, at best, aspire to faithfully reflect but one part of reality. This is in no sense a novel analytical imperative but, rather, one that, to our misfortune, is still not widely accepted by academia, and much less by the (political and commercial) market that consumes quantitative studies and instrumentalizes knowledge acquired in academia. In a pioneering work in early 20th century sociology, William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki (1978) undertook an intensive project to record the life histories of Polish immigrants from peasant backgrounds residing in Chicago. Their conclusion was that, …for the effects of sociological analysis the superiority of vital documents over any other type of material becomes evident when we move from the characterization of simple data to the determination of facts, because in order to discern the real causes of a social event among its innumerable antecedents there is no surer or more efficient way than by analyzing the past of individuals through the action that led to the event (Ibid., 295).

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In the early 1930s, Antonio Gramsci recognized the importance of this perspective when he stated that it is true that autobiography has great historical value, for it reveals life [as it actually is] not as it should be according to written laws or dominant moral principles… In truth, history, in general terms, is made on the basis of written law: when new facts later come to light that invert the relationship among various questions it becomes necessary to document how the mutation was prepared “molecularly” before it exploded (Gramsci, 1999:153).

Early in the second half of the 20th century in his efforts to shake sociology out of its Parsonian structuralism, C. Wright Mills (1977) called for a renewal of the sociological imagination, which he defined as the capacity that “allows us to capture history and biography and the relation between the two in a society” (Ibid., 25). Mills further postulated that “social science deals with problems of biography, of history, and of their intersections within social structures, and these three things, biography, history and society, are the coordinates of the proper study of mankind” (Ibid., 157). In the late 1970s, Daniel Bertaux suggested that …beyond their divisions, theoreticians and empiricists are united by the same essential point; namely, sociology’s vocation to become an exact science. To achieve this project it was necessary to drain from ordinary men their capacity for unpredictable initiative and, hence, all capacity for critical consciousness and freedom of action on the socio-structural plane. It was necessary, as well, to empty the social order of all deep contradictions, to conceive it as an organism, system, or structure. Thus, the onedimensional thinking of functionalism and structuralism invested all its libido in an insane search for coherence and scientificity (Bertaux, 1999:16).

Therefore, he proposes recognizing, “at last, a cognitive value in human experience (of which life histories are but one possible form of expression)” (Ibid., 17). In this vision, Franco Ferrarotti arrived at the conclusion that …if each individual represents the unique re-appropriation of the social and historical universals that surround her/him, we can know the social on the basis of the irreducible specificity of individual praxis. That which makes an act or individual history singular is proposed as a means of access – often the only one possible – to scientific knowledge of a social system (Ferrarotti, 1981:41).

For Ferrarotti, …life history, far from being proposed as a set of elements illustrative of that which is already known, a facultative complement [and] qualitative key of the “hard” results of research, acquired by means of standardized techniques of exact measure, opens a new phase of research in the social sciences (…) Each life history is revealed even in its least generalized aspects as a vertical synthesis of a social history. Each behavior or in-

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dividual act appears in its most unique form as a horizontal synthesis of a social structure… Our social system is found integrally in each one of our acts, dreams, deliriums, works, behaviors; and the history of this system is to be found, also integrally, in the history of our individual lives (Ibid., 10, 41).

Bertaux’ and Ferrarotti’s conclusions constitute another step forward in the expectations originally posited by qualitative studies since, according to the former, it is necessary to advance in the construction of “a dialectical, historical and concrete ethno-sociology, founded upon the richness of human experience” (Bertaux, 1999:18); while for the latter, “the central thesis is that it is possible to read a society through a biography” (Iniesta and Feixa, 2006:9).

Other antecedents and references Well known references to pioneering works in Mexico are found in the works of Ricardo Pozas, especially Juan P¦rez Jolote: autobiograf†a de un tzotzil, and in Oscar Lewis’ Los hijos de S‚nchez. Both cases (an indigenous man from San Juan Chamula, and a family living in a tenement in downtown Mexico City, respectively) represent attempts to allow the people to describe themselves and their surroundings. Without doubt, Miguel Leûn Portilla’s Visiûn de los vencidos, part of what he called an anthology of the principal indigenous relations of the Conquest, based on the testimonies of local actors, is another fundamental and stimulating reference. Though it is by no means my intention to undervalue the important collection and contributions of other works elaborated in the corridors of formal academia, especially in recent years in Mexico, it seems to me most important to recognize that the social sciences owe an undeniable and substantial debt to the many poets and literati that with grand profundity, sensitivity and esthetic ability have sustained people (literary characters) and their lived experiences as the central axis of their efforts to describe and understand the human condition. However, due to space limitations, I shall only mention explicitly certain Mexican creators who, from outside the cage of the academic imagination, have devoted themselves to rescuing the chronicle, the novel – even tales – as historical narrative, by placing their protagonists in the center and stripping away academia’s monopoly on “understanding”. To paraphrase Paco Ignacio Taibo Jr. the springboard for this initiative is the fact that so many scholars have taken the political edge off historical events by eliminating the lived reality of those who produced them, despite the fact that this has also most certainly limited our possibilities of fully understanding these events.

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I present only a few examples.5 Manuel Payno, best known for his text entitled Los bandidos de R†o Fr†o, also wrote El hombre de la situaciûn, which interweaves history and literature in an attempt to undertake the historical reconstruction of a personage in a specific epoch and cultural context. Also, with Vicente Riva Palacio, Payno drafted a grand text on the history of Mexico that is both plural and comprehensive: El libro rojo (de 1521 a 1867) not only contains broad historical knowledge, but is also an exemplary text in the genre of the historical tale of that country. Certainly, as Ignacio Trejo points out (1988), the most outstanding writers of the 19th century – Altamirano, Riva Palacio and Payno himself, among others – utilized their literary texts of a historical character to teach history. This vision can also be found in the works of contemporary Mexican authors; for example, Elena Poniatowski’s La noche de Tlatelolco, Fuerte es el silencio, Tin†sima and El tren pasa primero; Carlos Monsiva†s’ multiple chronicles of various social movements; Ýngeles Mastretta’s Arr‚ncame la vida; Hern‚n Lara Zavala’s Charras; Aguilar Cam†n’s Morir en el Golfo and La Guerra de Galio; Paco Ignacio Taibo Jr.’s Bolshevikis (for which he received Mexico’s National Award for History), La lejan†a del tesoro, Che, Pancho Villa and Temporada de zopilotes; and Carlos Montemayor’s works on the history of armed struggles in Mexico, Muerte en el para†so and Las armas del alba, which vindicate the contribution of literature to the understanding of the human condition, achieved with truly notable profundity and erudition, through the genre of the novel. Montemayor (2004) begins by recognizing that while the historian is perhaps impassioned by the discovery of historical facts, the writer is impassioned by the human experience that made those events possible. With great acuity he points out a positive interrelation between literature and history, arguing that the latter is a form of knowing reality and not evading it. According to this author, when 5 Other countries provide a variety of examples. I will mention just a few selected for the powerful influence they have had on me: Howard Fast, whose extensive literary production reconstructs, through his protagonists, historical moments of the struggles of different peoples and social strata, as in My Glorious Brothers, Spartacus, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, Freedom Road, The last Frontier, etc.; Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History, where he places himself as a character who is exploring his own subjectivity in the setting of concrete historical circumstances; Malcolm X’s stark testimony of his daily life, entitled Autobiography ; Manuel Scorza’s five volumes of La Guerra silenciosa that display his literary gifts by linking ancestral myths and history to illustrate the struggle of Andean peasants to recover their lands, and La danza inmûvil, which probes the moral dilemmas of two guerrilla fighters who eventually become separated between Paris and the Amazon jungle; Laura Restrepo’s Historia de una traiciûn, which narrates the peace process in Colombia between the government and M-19 that culminated in yet another massacre, and La isla de la pasiûn that narrates the history of a group of Mexican soldiers and their families who were ordered by the government of Porfirio D†az to guard the Isla Clipperton but, with the outbreak of the Revolution, were abandoned to their fate.

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the works of the historian and the novelist complement each other it is not out of a passion for history but for human reality, a passion for mankind. In Montemayor’s words, it is imperative to gain a deeper understanding of the human condition. This perspective entails, fundamentally, incorporating the vision of social subjects themselves, as expressed in the description and interpretation of their decisions and actions; that is, through their lives and the meanings they attribute to them, and through how they lived those experiences. Recognizing literature as another form of knowledge contributes not only to a different and, surely, better diffusion of the results of social research but, above all, makes it possible to develop and communicate an emphasis on the experiential dimension of human life.

Searching for alternative paths I must confess that my penchant for this kind of literature6 (with its strong historical component and vindication of the vital role of flesh and blood human beings with heart, consciousness and will), and my own experience as a social actor, were what first led me to search for what is known in the literature on social analysis as “meso theories”, something like the point of encounter of the micro and the macro, for they recognize the existence of “structural and cultural” social forces that affect us all, while at the same time remaining aware of the capacity for action that – with varying limitations – social actors have and develop; of the role that will and consciousness play in propelling social action; and of how the latter becomes, in turn, an accelerated process of re-structuration of those actors’ way of thinking (politicization). It was with this conviction in mind that I undertook the research for my doctoral thesis (šmaz, 1995), in which in a first phase I elaborated a broad (“structural” or “macro”) analysis of the Mexican State and its educational system in order to search, in a second moment, for knowledge of the interactions of the direct actors involved in the educational process inside the space of the school. For this task, I applied a series of surveys and conducted a period of ethnographic fieldwork that included direct observation, in-depth interviews and life histories, all of which revealed much more than I had originally set out to record. As a result of this process and, especially, of my direct interaction with the principal protagonists of my research (innovative teachers in a public primary school in Mexico City), I reached the conclusion that structures are not only not 6 An adjective often used in academia to dismiss the cognitive capacity of a text.

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“exterior to the individual” but, rather, exist beyond theoretical abstraction as constant and concrete interactions among individuals. Moreover, I found that most of the “subjects studied” had not developed alternative pedagogical practices based on examples present in their earlier socialization but that, to the contrary, it was when they began to reflect on their own experience that they rebelled against the authoritarianism they had suffered and decided that they did not want to be, or to act, in the same way as their elders. Thus, they refused to reproduce the features of the education they had received (from their parents and teachers) and began a search for pedagogical options. It also became clear that those teachers were acting on the basis of knowledge developed during their teaching practice as to how the interactions of the interests, norms and power differences involved in their own performance and that of other actors function. They had delineated general strategies and specific tactics (simulating, fooling, convincing, organizing) that they constantly and skillfully adapted so as to get around the authoritarian milieu, or turn it to their advantage, and survive by developing innovative, non-authoritarian pedagogical practices and, on certain occasions, even by broadening their margin of action. At the end I was convinced that while my quantitative immersion had helped delimit the universe of study and recognize the magnitudes of certain processes and their representativeness, it had not allowed me to find the keys to understanding them. Unraveling them, at least partially, became possible thanks to the acting subjects themselves, who by narrating their own lives, motivations, difficulties, interactions and reflections, presented from their experience precise keys for recognizing their processes of resistance, survival and change, as entities alive and replete with meaning! Shortly afterwards, deeply shaken by the massive, mostly indigenous, armed and structured uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (ezln for its initials in Spanish) I left for an encounter with subjects who were participating actively in that movement. I needed to understand (and, if possible, help others understand) how and why thousands of Mexicans had decided to alter their conditions of existence even though it might well cost them their lives. Of course, the conditions of marginalization, oppression, discrimination and misery were undeniable but, according to my experience, did not suffice, in and of themselves, to explain the uprising. In a perspective that recognizes people as bearers of knowledge, capable of reflecting and acting, predestination is not possible; not to accept oppression or to struggle against it. As Gramsci might ask: How was this uprising “molecularly” constructed? What motives were given? How did they do it? What difficulties did they recognize and how did they confront them? And, finally, what social interactions developed that led to the decision and made its realization possible?

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Attempting to respond to these queries seemed impossible until I obtained the shared conviction and collaboration of those who figured in the uprising. It was important to listen to the protagonists’ firsthand accounts of their experience not only in light of the cognitive reasons explained above that revalued both individual and collective acts such that they were no longer assigned the condition of “data” (Pujadas, 2000), but out of respect for their very humanity, their existence as historical subjects. That is, as Yolanda MuÇoz affirms, it was crucial to treat these actors not as “things” or “objects”, but as protagonists and narrators of their own history (MuÇoz, 2004). The materials that saw the light of day under the titles Rompiendo el silencio: Biograf†a de un insurgente del ezln (2003), and Tierna memoria: La voz de un niÇo tzeltal e insurgente (2006) were written from this perspective. In the former text, my contribution consisted in editing the narratives of the protagonists, proposing an initial direction, transcribing and ordering the material, suggesting corrections to facilitate understanding, and collaborating in the shaping of the literary structure. In the second work, my intervention was much greater, for on the basis of the testimony of the principal protagonist I fleshed out the personages described, constructed others and introduced images and textures from the locale that I gleaned during a visit to the community in which that history had played out. I am convinced that these texts allow us to approach more closely what Gramsci called “life in the act” so as to better understand “how the mutation” of that mainly indigenous armed rebellion led by the ezln “was prepared ‘molecularly’ before exploding”. The two life histories presented in those books elucidate a multiplicity of concrete human interactions that the protagonists lived and produced. In refusing to remain inert victims of their circumstances they strove to become forgers of a distinct destiny. It is in this way that it becomes possible for us to approach an understanding of what Giddens calls structuration, by recognizing and narrating the processes that transpired as a result of the interactions and actions of thinking, changing beings; processes that originated in conditions not always chosen by them, yet clearly modified by them through their diligence and action, processes that can only be revealed through narrative7 as vital experience. The perspective outlined herein8 – one well worthwhile in and of itself – also 7 I use the term narrative, rescued by Paul Ricoeur (Historia y narratividad) and Hayden White (El texto histûrico como artefacto literario) as a substantial part of the historical disciplines because (as in sociology) it is through narrative that “historical –or social– facts” are articulated, acquire meaning, and become intelligible to others. 8 In this line I have also published El tiempo imposible. Una historia de vida (2008), and Irredentos. Viaje en la memoria de un protagonista (2010). They are part of this same search, but focus on experiences in other Latin American countries.

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entails, as Carlos Montemayor has argued consistently, the urgent need to recognize hidden social realities and silenced, distorted social struggles that, in reality, never simply disappear from the accumulated experiences of the social subjects that lived and knew them. Due to the lamentable concealment of these historical realities it seems to some that social conflicts are generated spontaneously – an impression that both amazes and disquiets them, though not their protagonists, and even less those who from the seats of government decree their immediate suffocation. Finally, my hope is that these reflections are worthwhile as a lived and contemplated experience that forms part of the search for an analytical focus on the social that unfreezes the subject by incorporating its subjectivity and contextualized social interactions.

References Aguilar Cam†n, H¦ctor (1980). Morir en el Golfo. Mexico: Editorial Oc¦ano. – (1990). La Guerra de Galio. Mexico: Editorial Cal y Arena. Alexander, Jeffrey (1990). “La centralidad en los textos cl‚sicos”, in Giddens, A. et al., La teor†a social hoy. Mexico: Alianza Editorial. Alvar, Julio (1984). Etnolog†a (m¦todo y pr‚ctica). Zaragoza: Guara Editorial. Arendt, Hannah (1998). De la historia a la acciûn. Barcelona: Paidûs/Ib¦rica. Bertaux, Daniel (1999). “El enfoque biogr‚fico: su validez metodolûgica, sus potencialidades”. Proposiciones, vol. 29, Santiago de Chile: Ediciones SUR. Accessed at http:// www.siosur.cl/publicaciones/RevistaProposiciones/PROP-29/14BERTAU.doc Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo. “Mi pueblo durante la Revoluciûn: un ejercicio de memoria popular”, vol. 1, Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Antropolog†a e Historia/Direcciûn General de Culturas Populares/Museo Nacional de las Culturas Populares. Durkheim, Emile (1970). El suicidio, Buenos Aires: Ed. Schapire. – (1978). Las reglas del m¦todo sociolûgico. Buenos Aires: Editorial La Pl¦yade. Fast, Howard (1975). Sacco y Vanzetti. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Siglo XX. – (1982). Caminos de libertad. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Siglo XX. – (1984). Mis gloriosos hermanos. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Siglo XX. – (2000). Espartaco. Mexico: Ed. Gobierno del Distrito Federal. – (2003). La fflltima frontera. Mexico: Ed. Colectivo para leer en libertad. Feixa, Carles (2003). “La imaginaciûn autobiogr‚fica”. Revista Nûmadas, nfflm. 18, Bogot‚, Colombia: Instituto de Estudios Sociales Contempor‚neos, IESCO, Universidad Central. Ferrarotti, Franco (1981). Storia e storie di vita, Bari, Italy : Lateraza. – (2007). “Las historias de vida como m¦todo”. Convergencia, nfflm. 44, May-August, Toluca: Universidad Autûnoma del Estado de Mexico. Geertz, Clifford (1994). “G¦neros confusos: la refiguraciûn del pensamiento social”, in Conocimiento local. Ensayos sobre la interpretaciûn de las culturas. Barcelona: Ed. Paidûs.

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Giddens, Anthony (1984). The Constitution of Society. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. – (2007). Las nuevas reglas del m¦todo sociolûgico. Buenos Aires-Madrid: Amorrortu Editores. Gramsci, Antonio (1978). Antolog†a. Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores. – (1999). Cuadernos de la C‚rcel, Mexico: Era-UAP. Gouldner, Alvin (1979a). “El antiminotauro: el mito de una sociolog†a no valorativa”, in La sociolog†a actual. Madrid, Spain: Alianza Universidad. – (1979b). La dial¦ctica de la ideolog†a y la tecnolog†a. Madrid, Spain: Editorial Alianza. šmaz, Carlos (1995). “Inertia and Change in the Pedagogy and Politics of Teachers. A Case Study of Public Primary School Teachers in Mexico City”, Ph.D. Thesis, Stanford, CA: School of Education. – (2003). Rompiendo el silencio. Biograf†a de un insurgente del ezln. Mexico: Planeta. – (2006). Tierna memoria. La voz de un niÇo tzeltal e insurgente. Mexico: RandomHouse/ Mondadori. – (2008). El tiempo imposible. Una historia de vida. Argentina: Croquis/FCPyS-UNAM. – (2010). Irredentos. Viaje en la memoria de un protagonista. Argentina: Nuestra Am¦rica. Iniesta, Montserrat and Carles Feixa (2006). “Historias de vida y Ciencias Sociales. Entrevista a Franco Ferrarotti”. Periferia, nfflm. 5, December. Spain: Universidad Autûnoma de Barcelona. Lara Zavala, Hern‚n (2010). Charras. Mexico: Editorial Punto de lectura. Leûn Portilla, Miguel (1977). Visiûn de los vencidos. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autûnoma de Mexico. Lewis, Oscar (1971). Los hijos de S‚nchez. Mexico: Ed. Mortiz. Mailer, Norman (1998). Los ej¦rcitos de la noche: Historia como novela-la novela como historia. Barcelona: Anagrama. Mastretta, Ýngeles (1988). Arr‚ncame la vida. Mexico: Ediciones Oc¦ano. Meyer, Eugenia and Eva Salgado (2002). Un refugio en la memoria: la experiencia de los exilios latinoamericanos en Mexico. Mexico: Ed. Oc¦ano. Mills, C. Wright (1977). La imaginaciûn sociolûgica. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econûmica. Monsiv‚is, Carlos (1988). Entrada libre, crûnicas de una sociedad que se organiza. Mexico: Ediciones Era. Montemayor, Carlos (1997). Guerra en el para†so. Mexico: Seix Barral. – (2003). Las armas del alba. Mexico: Joaqu†n Mortiz. – (2004). “Prologue” to Foto insurrecta, by Rodrigo Moya. Mexico: Ediciones El Milagro. MuÇoz Gonz‚lez, Yolanda (2004). “Literatura testimonial y contrahistoria”. In Conrado Hern‚ndez (coord.). Historia y novela histûrica. Mexico: El Colegio de Michoac‚n. Nisbet, Robert (1979). Cambio social. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Payno, Manuel (1979). Los bandidos de R†o Fr†o. Mexico: Promexa. – (1992). El hombre de la situaciûn, Retratos histûricos. Mexico: Porrffla, Sepan Cu‚ntos, nfflm. 605. Payno, Manuel and Vicente Riva Palacio (2005). El libro rojo (de 1521 a 1867). (“Prologue” by Carlos Montemayor). Mexico: Delegaciûn Tlalpan del Gobierno del Distrito Federal.

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Pujadas, Joan J. (2000). “El m¦todo biogr‚fico y los g¦neros de la memoria”, Revista de Antropolog†a Social, nfflm. 9, Spain: Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Poniatowska, Elena (1972). La noche de Tlatelolco. Mexico: Ediciones Era. – (1980). Fuerte es el silencio. Mexico: Ediciones Era. – (1991). Tin†sima. Mexico: Ediciones Era. – (2005). El tren pasa primero. Mexico: Alfaguara. Pozas, Ricardo (1975). Juan P¦rez Jolote: autobiograf†a de un tzotzil. Mexico: FCE. Ricoeur, Paul (1999). Historia y narratividad. Barcelona, Spain: Ediciones Paidûs Ib¦rica. Ruano, Leticia (2004). “De la construcciûn de los otros por nosotros a la construcciûn del nos-otros”, at www.jalisco.gob.mx/sria/educacion/consulta/educar/12/121Letic.html. Scorza, Manuel (1997). Obras completas. Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores. Taibo Jr., Paco Ignacio (1986). Bolshevikis, historia narrativa de los or†genes del comunismo en Mexico. 1919 – 1925. Mexico: Joaqu†n Mortiz. – (1992). La lejan†a del tesoro. Mexico: Planeta/Joaqu†n Mortiz. – (1996). Ernesto Guevara, tambi¦n conocido como El Che. Mexico: Planeta/Joaqu†n Mortiz. – (2007). Pancho Villa. Una biograf†a narrativa. Mexico: Planeta. – (2009). Temporada de zopilotes. Una historia narrativa de la Decena Tr‚gica. Mexico: Planeta. Thomas, William and Florian Znaniecki (1978). The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918 – 20). New York: Dover. Thompson, E. P. (1977). La formaciûn histûrica de la clase obrera. Barcelona: Ed. Laia. – (1981). Miseria de la teor†a. Barcelona: Ed. Cr†tica. Trejo Fuentes, Ignacio (1988). Faros y sirenas. Mexico: Plaza y Valdez Editores. Weber, Max (1985). Econom†a y sociedad. Mexico: Ed. FCE. White, Hayden (2003). El texto histûrico como artefacto literario. Barcelona, Spain: Ediciones Paidûs Ib¦rica. X, Malcom and A. Haley (1992). Autobiograf†a de Malcom X, Mexico: Ediciones B.

Anna Popovitch

From Ideology to Structures of Feeling. Raymond Williams on Culture and Society

Introduction Is there a coherent theoretical language suitable for the analysis of collective beliefs formed in response to shared life experiences? If culture plays a central role in the construction of social subjectivities, what are the adequate conceptual tools for the examination of the links among mental pictures of the world, cultural practices, and sociopolitical arrangements? What is “culture” anyway? For centuries these questions have troubled social and cultural theorists interested in understanding the causal mechanisms underlying historical continuity and change. In particular, Marxist intellectuals have undertaken a sustained effort to explore the extent to which widespread habits of thought reinforce or disrupt existing institutional norms. It is well known that many classical Marxist writers broached the subject of collective consciousness with the help of class analysis centered on the premise that individuals are socialized into ideologies that, at best, reflect their position in the economic relations of production or, at worst, serve the interests of ruling political elites. Orthodox variants of ideological criticism elevated into a dogma the view schematically outlined by Marx that “superstructural” phenomena – forms of social consciousness and legal, political, and cultural institutions – are determined in the last instance by the economic “base”. In the late 1950s and 1960s, New Left theoreticians expanded the methodological horizons of classical Marxism in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of how cultural, political, and economic processes interact across time. Among the key representatives of the New Left whose intellectual legacy has been of immense importance is the Welsh public figure, cultural theorist and historian, literary critic and novelist Raymond Williams. Williams’ writings on British literary and cultural history, popular culture, and mass media were instrumental in the development of cultural studies in Britain and, subsequently, worldwide. Like many other representatives of the New Left whose intellectual production reflected their engagement with critical social issues of the day,

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Williams led an active political life beyond the confines of Cambridge University where he held the post of Professor of Modern Drama. In the 1960s, Williams cofounded New Left Review. In the early 1980s he became a founding member of the Socialist Society and a sponsoring editor of the New Socialist set up by the National Executive Committee of the British Labor Party. As a socialist intellectual committed to a renewal of leftist politics, Williams participated in numerous working groups, campaigns, and projects. His work, much of which was aimed at developing a “critique of industrial capitalism as a human order” from what could be described as a neo-Marxist perspective, sparked debate and “stimulated critical reflection on fundamentals of the socialist project” at home and abroad (Blackburn, 1988: 14 – 18). Williams’ disapproval of rigid orthodox Marxism – “the model of fixed and known Marxist positions, which in general had only to be applied, and the corresponding dismissal of all other kinds of thinking as non-Marxist, revisionist, neo-Hegelian, or bourgeois” – translated into a critical re-appropriation of Marxist categories of cultural analysis (Williams, 1977: 3). Williams’ cultural materialism – “a theory of the specificities of material cultural and literary production within historical materialism” – opened up a new methodological terrain in cultural criticism that still remains influential today (Ibid. 5). In what follows I revisit Williams’ approach to the analysis of collective subjectivities by unpacking the notion of “structures of feeling” that is central to cultural materialism. In order to better appreciate the significance of Williams’ recourse to this difficult term I first briefly discuss why the Welsh theorist abandoned the classical Marxist concept of ideology. Second, I analyze the meaning of “structures of feeling” by canvassing Williams’ multiple uses of this notion in his various writings. Third, I turn to the critic’s examination of collective beliefs and attitudes that underpinned the Romantic theory of art in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain. I conclude the essay by pointing out how sophisticated forms of literary and cultural analysis of the kind elaborated by Raymond Williams can contribute to our understanding of how historically contingent beliefs persist across time, remain latent within new patterns of thinking into which they are absorbed, or are superseded by unprecedented forms of consciousness.

1

“Structure of feeling” versus “ideology”

Although the term “ideology” predates the Marxist tradition, it acquired widespread use in left-wing circles and eventually trickled down to social theory following the publication of the Marxist classic The German Ideology (1845 – 7) (Williams, 1983: 154). In this influential text Marx and Engels use the notion of

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ideology : (1) in a neutral sense to refer to “mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics”, art and other cultural forms that appear as the “direct efflux” of men’s “material behavior” (Marx, Engels, 2004: 47); and (2) in a more restricted sense to refer to a set of dominant beliefs professed by ruling elites that are instrumental in reinforcing the existing social order. In Marx and Engels’ subsequent writings, the latter rendition of the term “ideology” as “ruling ideas” that assist the “ruling class” in maintaining the status quo acquired a pejorative connotation (Ibid. 64). For example, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886) and in his letter to Franz Mehring (1893), Engels introduces the notion of false consciousness. According to the author, a subject that is in the grip of ideology perceives reality in an upside-down fashion as in a camera obscura due to the fact that he or she is unable to fully grasp the “material life conditions” that give rise to the thought process (cited by Raymond Williams 1983: 155). In a broader sense, consistent with the two uses of the term in question outlined above, for Marx and Engels, and later for Lenin, the notion of ideology was useful for pointing out the class character of collective beliefs that were deemed to have political significance. As Raymond Williams observes in Keywords, in the Marxist tradition and, more amply, in the social sciences1 ideology has often been equated with “the set of ideas which arise from a given set of material interests or, more broadly, from a definite class or group”. The notion in question has also been widely used – although “at times confusingly” – as the semantic equivalent of illusion, false consciousness, or a veiled portrayal of reality (Ibid. 157). In the mid-twentieth century, following the popularization of L. Althusser’s work – vigorously disseminated in Europe and in the U.S. alongside the writings of A. Gramsci, G. Luk‚cs, L. Goldmann, J. P. Sartre, and the Frankfurt School theoreticians – ideological criticism acquired prominence in Anglo-American social theory, political philosophy, literary criticism, and cultural studies. In the 1 In Ideology. An Introduction (1991) Terry Eagleton summarizes six definitions of ideology commonly used in the social sciences and humanities: (1) the politically and epistemologically neutral view of ideology as a semantic equivalent of “culture”: “the whole complex of signifying practices and symbolic processes in a particular society”. (2) A slightly more restricted meaning of ideology, synonymous with the notion of worldview, as a set of ideas and beliefs “which symbolize the conditions and life experiences of a specific, socially significant group or class”. (3) Ideology as an “action-oriented discourse” in which “contemplative cognition is generally subordinated to the furtherance of ‘rational’ interests and desires” of a particular social group. (4) The notion of dominant ideologies that refers to systems of beliefs and attitudes that “unify a social formation in ways convenient for its rulers” by “securing the complicity of subordinated groups” to the dominant social order without being imposed from above. (5) Ideas and beliefs that “help to legitimate the interests of a ruling group or class by distortion and dissimulation”. (6) False or deceptive beliefs “arising not from the interests of a dominant class but from the material structure of society as a whole” (28 – 30).

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late 1960s, in an effort to break with the economic determinism and teleological historicism of orthodox Marxism, Althusser returned to the problematic notion of ideology. In his seminal essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1969), the French philosopher rejected the pejorative conceptualization of ideology as false consciousness in favor of the more neutral definition of ideology as a socially necessary set of ideas and behavioral patterns embedded in institutional practices. Within the Althusserian paradigm, ideologies came to be regarded not as distorted mental pictures of the world propagated by shrewd political elites but rather as inescapable representations of “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” reinforced by a broad network of legal, political, and cultural institutions (Althusser, 1971). Despite their controversial nature, Althusser’s writings prompted a distinct style of thinking about culture as a “relatively autonomous” instance of social life that (1) does not merely reflect changes in economic arrangements and political processes but actively shapes them;2 and (2) can be analyzed in terms of discretely structured patterns of meaning that have a “material” existence – an approach that requires a historically informed institutional critique of culture of the type developed, among others, by M. Foucault in the 1960s and 1970s on the heels of Althusserianism. A balanced assessment of Althusser’s theory of ideology goes beyond the scope of this essay. It is relevant, however, to point out the role that his writings played in shaping the incipient field of British cultural studies institutionalized at the University of Birmingham in 1964 by a group of prominent intellectuals that formed part of the British New Left. The Birmingham-based Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies was set up at a time when post-World War II conservatism was being challenged by the explosion of youth culture and the “ascent of the working classes into positions of cultural and social leadership” (Lewis, 2002: 125). Its founders and collaborators developed a pioneering line of cultural criticism that became a necessary point of reference for subsequently established cultural studies programs. Originally influenced by the Marxist tradition, the Center engaged with a number of disciplines and methodological approaches in order to recover “neglected materials” drawn from the workingclass environment and mass media disregarded by traditional literature departments (Hall, 1980: 17 – 21). In the 1960s and 1970s, Althusser’s writings had a formative influence on the Center’s work. According to Stuart Hall –the Center’s director from 1968 to 1979 2 Althusser’s emphasis on culture’s “relative autonomy” also prompted Marx-inspired scholars to rethink class as a complex category constituted at the economic, political, and cultural levels and to work out a distinction between class position, class interest, class representation, and collective identity formed at the level of interpersonal relations in cultural groups, professional associations, etcetera. For an overview of this problem see B. Hindess 1977.

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– the Althusserian analytical paradigm prompted the Center’s shift away from a “Humanities’ definition of culture as a selective tradition [comprised of] valuable texts and artifacts” to an anthropological and historical understanding of culture as “cultural practices” that produce meaning. This approach was coupled with a “structuralist” focus on the role that symbolic production plays in securing social consent to “dominant cultural orders”. The Center’s research was informed by the questions: “What were the processes by means of which a dominant cultural order came to be preferred? How and why did societies come to be culturally structured in dominance?” (Ibid. 27 – 32). As Hall recalls, the structuralist perspective, borrowed from Althusser, Levi-Strauss and Barthes, …marked a radical break with the dominant forms of theoretical humanism by bracketing the terms “consciousness” and “intention”… Culture was seen as a product of unconscious forms and categories through which historically definite forms of consciousness were produced. The term “culture” was brought closer to an “expanded” definition of ideology, without the connotations of “false consciousness” (Ibid. 31).

and: Althusser’s ISA [“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”] paper was influential because of its emphasis on the “function” performed by ideology in reproducing the conditions and relations of production. However, it tended to conceptualize ideologies as “functional supports” for a given system of dominant social arrangements, thus downplaying the notion of cultural contradiction and struggle (Ibid. 34).

Hall’s criticism of Althusser explains why during the 1960s and 1970s many social theorists and cultural critics dissatisfied by what they saw as the functionalist bend of Althusser’s account of ideology looked for alternative ways of theorizing the links between culture, state, and society. Indeed, a non-charitable3 reading of Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” essay suggests a mechanistic view of the articulation between collective beliefs and social arrangements. For example, the philosopher’s portrayal of ideological apparatuses – or cultural institutions that function as “sites of struggle” insofar as they are traversed by multiple ideological tendencies – as state apparatuses where oppositional viewpoints are ultimately swallowed up by the dominant ideology 3 Although it is true that Althusser’s essay has been extensively criticized for its functionalist overtones, partly due to its level of abstractness and lack of empirical analysis, it should also be pointed out that, taken as a whole, Althusser’s theory of ideology mapped out a productive field of research whose participants filled in many of Althusser’s theoretical gaps. In social theory, Althusser’s writings provoked interesting debates about the advantages and disadvantages of methodological individualism in the social sciences (see, for example, E.P. Thompson 1978 and P. Anderson 1980). In cultural theory, Althusser’s ideas were unpacked by S. Hall (for example, see Hall 1976); in political philosophy, by N. Poulantzas (Poulantzas 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976). In aesthetics, Althusser’s concepts were fruitfully appropriated by P. Macherey (1978), T. Eagleton (1978), F. Jameson (1981), and P. Bourdieu (1993).

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is too simplistic. As Terry Eagleton has pointed out, while, generally speaking, it is true that newspapers, labor unions, or schools do reinforce certain mainstream beliefs, it cannot be assumed that these institutions are homogeneous wholes or that every skill instilled by them is somehow meaningful in the political sense. In other words, although Althusser adopted a broader view of ideology as a complex of symbolic processes by means of which individuals make sense of the world, “his thinking about the topic is covertly constrained by an attention to the narrower sense of ideology as a dominant formation… Althusser tries to shift us, then, from a cognitive to an affective theory of ideology” grounded on the assumption that within ideological discourses “the affective typically outweighs the cognitive, or… that the “practical-social” takes predominance over theoretical knowledge” (Eagleton, 1991: 18 – 21). The Althusserian account of ideology left unanswered a number of critical questions such as: What are the mechanisms that interpellate human beings as ideological subjects and in what sense can these mechanisms be considered ideological? How can we illustrate by means of concrete historical and sociocultural analysis Althusser’s hypothesis that a particular type of collective beliefs described as ideological leads to certain institutional practices that, in turn, secure the reproduction of a given social order without engaging in a purely theoretical speculation that postulates the existence of a causal connection between ideas, group behavior, power relations, and socio-political arrangements? Similar to Hall, Williams recognized the usefulness of the ideological analysis developed by Althusser but was equally wary of its limitations. For example, in a 1981 essay the Welsh critic equated the notion of ideology with that of experience. According to Williams, experience constitutes “the most common form of ideology”, where “the deep structures of the society actually reproduce themselves as conscious life” (Williams, 1981: 63). Referencing the writings of Althusser-inspired literary critics P. Machery and T. Eagleton, Williams underscored the usefulness of ideological analysis in the field of literary studies. In literature, ideology can be internally questioned because fictional writing simultaneously appropriates and reveals the ideological mechanisms that structure social consciousness. More importantly, it is precisely in the realm of literary analysis, rather than in the domain of theoretical reflection, that critics can dissect collective beliefs, attitudes, and fantasies contained in fictional portrayals of concrete, historically situated, lived experiences (Ibid. 62 – 63). However, in his own writings, Williams replaced the notion of ideology with what he considered to be more elastic concepts better suited for the analysis of collective subjectivity and social change. In his “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” – a widely cited essay that questions the validity of the “basesuperstructure” metaphor in its classical Marxist formulation – the Welsh theorist retakes A. Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. Unlike the static term “ideology”

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that, according to Williams, either designates a system of beliefs imposed by a section of the ruling class or, in its weaker sense, refers to “superstructural” phenomena (i. e. forms of social consciousness) determined by the material “basis” in a bottom-up fashion, “hegemony” points to the dynamic nature of processes underlying the social construction of identities. “Hegemony” refers to meaning-making processes that “saturate the consciousness of a society” and constitute “the limit of common sense for most people under its sway” (Williams, 1973: 8). Although the naturalization of hegemonic meanings is central to the reproduction of dominant cultures, hegemonic processes have “highly complex” internal structures that “have continually to be renewed, recreated and defended; and by the same token they can be continually challenged and in certain respects modified” (Ibid. 8). In other words, what interests Williams is not how the status quo is reinforced through ideologies but rather the ways in which established belief systems and attitudes are disrupted and transformed across time. In order to explain how social arrangements change through contradiction and struggle Williams introduces the notions of dominant, residual, and emergent cultural forms. According to him, in any society there is a “central, effective and dominant system of meanings and values” comprised of “practices and expectations, assignments of energy, our ordinary understanding of the nature of man and of his world” (Williams, 1973: 9). The dominant culture is not a uniform static whole supported by “the dry husks of ideology” (Ibid. 9). Rather, it is a dynamic enclave organized as a “selective tradition” that privileges certain meanings and practices inherited from the past while neglecting and excluding others. Some of the meanings and practices “passed off as the significant past” (that form part of the selective tradition) are “reinterpreted, diluted, or put into forms which support or at least do not contradict other elements within the effective dominant culture” (Ibid. 9). These are “alternative senses of the world” that either linger on the margins of the hegemonic culture, are absorbed by it, or are transformed into building blocks of an “oppositional” subculture (Ibid. 10). An oppositional subculture does not consist of deviant individual lifestyle choices; rather, it encompasses small-group solutions to social crises that can be potentially linked to revolutionary political practice. Generally speaking, alternative senses of the world are experienced as “residual” and “emergent” patterns of meanings and values. The former include symbolic elements that cannot be fully expressed in the terms of the dominant culture but “are nevertheless lived… on the basis of the residue… of some previous social formation” (Ibid. 10). The latter are comprised of new significances that have not consolidated into stable practices and, therefore, tend to be fragile and run the risk of being incorporated into the dominant culture (Ibid. 11). One of the central tasks of cultural materialism, then, is to “find a non-metaphysical and a

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non-subjectivist explanation” of the articulation between dominant, residual, emergent, and oppositional cultures (Ibid. 12). According to Williams, emergent cultural practices – that is to say, new attitudes, beliefs, and customs that underlie social change – manifest themselves in the form of latent structures of feeling. A structure of feeling is comprised of …affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought; practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity… a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating… [These forms of social experience] are often more recognizable at a later stage, when they have been (as often happens) formalized, classified, and in many cases built into institutions and formations… (Williams, 1977: 132 – 133).

On the one hand, a structure of feeling is different from a world-view; whereas the latter concept designates a more or less coherent “summary of doctrines” typically embedded in institutions, the former notion refers to “actively lived and felt” meanings and values that do not necessarily overlap with “formal or systematic beliefs” (Williams, 2005: 25). Changes in structures of feeling are “changes of presence [that] do not have to await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and action” (Williams, 1977: 132). On the other hand, structures of feeling differ from ideologies insofar as they are not reducible to group beliefs that characterize class relations. It is true, claims Williams, that “at times the emergence of a new structure of feeling is best related to the rise of a class…” (Williams, 1977: 134). In this sense, the term in question points to “the organizing principle by which a particular view of the world, and from that the coherence of the social group which maintains it, really operates in consciousness” (Williams, 2005: 23). However, at other times an incipient structure of feeling registers contradiction, fraction, or mutation within a class… when a formation appears to break away from its class norms, though it retains its substantial affiliation, and the tension is at once lived and articulated in radically new semantic figures (Williams, 1977: 134 – 135).

The shifts in values and experiences that mark the detachment of a class fraction from its parent class culture signal the formation of what the French sociologist Lucien Goldmann has called “possible consciousness”, which, in William’s summary, is that view of the world raised to its highest and most coherent level, limited only by the fact that to go further would mean that the group would have to surpass itself, to change into or be replaced by a new social group (Williams, 2005: 25).

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Finally, a structure of feeling can reveal an entirely new way of perceiving reality that is broader than the worldview of a particular class: One generation may train its successor, with reasonable success, in the social character or the general cultural patterns, but the new generation will have its own structure of feeling, which will not appear to have come from anywhere (Williams, 1965: 64 – 65).

The notion of structures of feeling acquires particular importance in Williams’ analysis of cultural formations and artistic movements. The term in question becomes the key analytical category of his cultural materialism – a method aimed at bridging the gap between sociology of culture, literary studies, and intellectual history. In Williams’ opinion, art and literature contain a special kind of affective social content, “which cannot without loss be reduced to beliefsystems, institutions, or explicit general relationships” (Williams, 1977: 132 – 133). In art and literature we witness …the dramatization of a process, the making of a fiction, in which the constituting elements, of real social life and beliefs, [are] simultaneously actualized and in an important way differently experienced, the difference residing in the imaginative act, the imaginative method, the specific and genuinely unprecedented imaginative organization… [These creative acts are] visible in the structure of feeling and demonstrable, above all, in fundamental choices of form… where changes of viewpoint, changes of known and knowable relationships, changes of possible and actual resolutions, could be directly demonstrated, as forms of literary organization… … what seems to me especially important in these changing structures of feeling is that they often precede those more recognizable changes of formal idea and belief which make up the ordinary history of consciousness… [In this sense, art can] succeed in articulating not just the imposed or constitutive social or intellectual system, but at once this and an experience of it, its lived consequence, in ways very close to many other kinds of active response… (Williams, 2005: 24 – 27).

2

The romantic artist

In order to better understand in what way emergent structures of feeling are crystallized in art I will now turn to Williams’ analysis of Romanticism in Culture and Society, 1780 – 1950. This elegant exercise in intellectual history explores the social and cultural impact of industrialization in late eighteenth-century Britain. Williams traces how changes in the use of the words “industry”, “democracy”, “class”, “art”, and “culture” registered in the writings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British intellectuals signal a new way of thinking about social, political, and economic institutions in modern industrial society. The second chapter of the book entitled “The Romantic Artist” addresses the popularization of a disinterested attitude toward art that lies at the heart of

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theories and practices of modern aesthetics. Similarly to P. Bourdieu’s study of the process of autonomization of art and literature in nineteenth-century France, Culture and Society analyzes how demographic, technological, and educational changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution in England set the stage for the dissemination of the collective belief in the “superior reality” of art. The emergence of large-scale industrial production, the growth of urban population, the development of printing presses and new media technologies as well as the proliferation of institutions of artistic consecration in the second half of the eighteenth century created the conditions for the phasing out of the feudal system of direct patronage of the arts and the development of a market-oriented field of cultural production. The advance of the middle classes to prosperity and their increasing access to education enabled the appearance of an anonymous mass of cultural consumers and made it possible for an increasing number of cultural producers to live off their labor. As fully-fledged professionals, writers and artists were no longer accountable to individual patrons. Instead of relying on a small circle of readers for approval and criticism, they came to depend on an impersonal market and gradually developed a hostile attitude towards the “philistine” public. As certain forms of intellectual labor became commodified with the spread of commercial publishing, within the lettered sphere “culture” came to be regarded as the antithesis of the market. The restricted sense of “culture”, predicated on the distinction between the mob and the cultivated few, gained currency and the production of art was increasingly perceived as a special kind of activity unstained by the corrupting influence of mass demand. The emphasis on artistic creation as “the seat of imaginative truth” and the celebration of the artist as an autonomous genius were part and parcel of the “theory of the superior reality of art” popularized in eighteenth-century England (Williams, 1960: 35 – 39). It is at this point that Williams’ argument becomes particularly interesting as he notes that the valorization of disinterestedness as the guiding principle of artistic activity by the representatives of English Romanticism could be interpreted as the artists’ direct response to the commodification of cultural production: “at a time when the artist is being described as just one more producer of a commodity for the market, he is describing himself as a specially endowed person, the guiding light of the common life” (Ibid. 39). In other words, it could be argued that the core system of beliefs underpinning the “superior theory of art” came into existence as part of a compensatory ideology of a new social group – that of professional artists – at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. But, according to Williams, this mechanistic explanation does not do justice to the complexities of the philosophical landscape of Romanticism. In order to fully understand the nature of British Romanticism one has to situate it as part of a broader European intellectual movement whose roots go

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back to classical antiquity. The emphasis on art as a superior reality is present in a number of Greek texts, including Plato’s Ion and Aristotle’s Poetics. It is wellknown that in Aristotle’s writings, poetry acquires the status of a privileged medium of expression through which generalizations about human life and human relations are grasped. Williams reminds us that much of classical theory portrays the artist as a person endowed with special skills that enable him to “read the open secret of the universe” (Williams, 1960: 43). In this sense, European Romanticism inherits the legacy, or the residual culture, of classical antiquity. At the same time, new ideas about art appear as part of an emergent subculture in industrial Britain. For example, key representatives of British Romanticism redefined the notion of “imitation”, central to art theory since classical antiquity, in derogative terms. In classicist texts “imitation” was understood, to quote William Blake’s phrase, as a “representation of what Eternally Exists, Really and Unchangeably” (Ibid. 42). The view that artists imitated, or grasped, elements of essential reality rather than adhering to someone else’s rules was reinforced in the writings of the Renaissance. However, in the eighteenth century, the term in question acquired a different connotation. In most of Romantic theory, “imitation” was taken to mean a lack of originality resulting from conformity to a given set of rules. For example, in one of the early documents of English Romanticism entitled Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) the English poet Edward Young defines imitation as “a sort of manufacture, wrought up by those mechanics, art and labor, out of pre-existing materials not their own”. In contrast, an original work, according to Young, “may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made” (cited by Williams, 1960: 40). Several other important semantic changes took place in the eighteenth century. The word “art”, which in previous historical periods had meant “skill”, came to signify “imaginative truth” and its use was restricted exclusively to the “creative” arts. A new term, “aesthetics”, was coined to describe a special kind of judgment about literature, music, painting, sculpture, and theatre. The word “genius”, distinguished from “talent”, came to mean the artist’s “exalted ability” to produce unique works of art. Finally, the term “culture”, which had been used to refer to the process of human training, gradually acquired a number of different connotations. Toward the beginning of the nineteenth century, “culture” became synonymous with “the general body of the arts” (Ibid. xiii-xiv). According to Williams, the critical attitude toward industrial civilization underlying the modern view of art and culture developed by European Romanticism permeates the writings of nineteenth-century philosophers and essayists. For example, in his reflections on Samuel Coleridge, John Stuart Mill outlines the principles of humane utilitarianism by drawing the reader’s attention to the negative aspects of British society. Mill criticizes

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…the [individual’s] loss of… self-relying independence; the slavery of so large a portion of mankind to artificial wants; the dull unexciting monotony of their lives… the absence of any marked individuality in their characters; the contrast between the narrow mechanical understanding produced by a life spent in executing by fixed rules a fixed task, and the varied powers of the man of the woods, whose subsistence and safety depends at each instant upon his capacity of extemporarily adapting means to ends… (cited by Williams, 1960: 55).

Mill’s indictment of social ills is echoed by the Scottish philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle, who condemns the contrast between the uncritical and dynamic thinking characteristic of the “Mechanical Age” and laments the reification of social consciousness exemplified by the principle of “Cash Payments as the sole nexus between man and man” (cited by Williams, 1960: 78, 83). D.H. Lawrence’s skeptical attitude toward industrial civilization closely resembles the views of Mill and Carlyle. According to the British novelist and essayist, the new age brings in its wake “a competition of mere acquisitions”, “the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty… the utter death of the human intuitive faculty”, the destruction of the “natural flow of common sympathy between men and men, and men and women”, and the frustration of the “instinct of community which would make us unite in pride and dignity in the bigger gesture of the citizen, not the cottager” (cited by Williams, 1960: 219, 226, 230). In summary, the emergent structure of feeling manifested across disciplines in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England contains a critique of social relations within a new, post-feudal, political economy model, rather than a narrow condemnation of technological progress and industrial production as such. The writers’ nostalgia for communitarian values and their disapproval of excessive individualism, conformism, routinized behavior, and the numbing of the aesthetic sensibility constitute, in Williams’ words, a “cultural objection to modern industrial civilization” of which the spread of democracy and the rise of the middle class formed part (Ibid. 58). In this sense, Romanticism’s defense of the superior theory of Art and its emphasis on Culture as a “critical idea” distinct from “practical social judgment” entails the attempt to offer contemplative activity as an alternative to the “impetus of a new kind of society” (Ibid. 93). To drive Williams’ point home, the high-brow conception of art and culture implicit in Romanticism does not amount to an ideology in the sense of “ideas and beliefs which symbolize the conditions and life experiences of a … socially significant group” (Eagleton, 1991: 29) for two reasons. First, because it is hardly possible to attribute this conception to a single social group describable in class terms, unless one argues – in a non-orthodox fashion – that members of the creative intelligentsia constitute a class by virtue of their dedication to intellectual labor and the presence of beliefs and values unique to this group. This

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is not Williams’ position. If some of the core aspects of the theory of art underscored by Romanticism can be traced back to ancient Greece – for example, the view of artists as visionaries with a privileged access to aspects of reality and the ability to communicate them to others – then it is more appropriate to conceptualize the resemblances across distinct historical epochs in terms of residual beliefs rather than ideological affinities. The relevant question, then, is: Which new cultural elements are added to the residual practices carried over into eighteenth-century England and what are these emergent cultural forms symptomatic of ? Second, the very notion of class ideologies lends itself more easily to the analysis of political rather than aesthetic beliefs and values, although it is well known that certain brands of Marxist cultural criticism such as the one developed by G. Luk‚cs condemned modernist literature as an alienating form of writing that echoed petty-bourgeois mentality. It is clear that Williams is interested in formulating a more nuanced argument about the relationship between art and society. The broader notion of ideology as a “complex of signifying practices” shaped by “material” processes (Eagleton, 1991: 28) is better-suited to the analysis of the Romantic theory of art. Indeed, if ideology is taken, in an Althusserian fashion, to allude to the ways in which individuals apprehend in symbolic terms – often inadvertently – what goes on around them, then it is not unreasonable to describe Romanticism as ideological. However, this description has little analytical value because it states an obvious fact; namely, that ideas are formulated in response to events that occur outside of our heads. Williams’ concept of structure of feeling and the accompanying notions of residual, oppositional, and emergent cultural forms, on the other hand, lend themselves to a more dynamic analysis of the cultural dimension of social change.

3

Concluding remarks

Depending on whether one approves or disapproves of Marxist accounts of ideology, Williams’ conceptual framework offers an attractive supplement or alternative to these views. Whereas the latter theories for the most part seek to uncover the ideological mechanisms by means of which dominant social arrangements are reproduced and reinforced, Williams’ cultural materialism emphasizes the interplay among discrete forms of experience, cultural conventions, and social change. Within Williams’ theoretical paradigm, developed with the help of hermeneutical techniques borrowed from literary analysis and applied to extra-textual bodies of meaning, the notion of structure of feeling acquires central importance. This notion commands cultural historians and

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social theorists to pay close attention to “affective elements of consciousness” that precede coherent beliefs formalized as part of philosophical, artistic, or political doctrines. By registering the crystallization of novel structures of feeling, one gains awareness of new ways of perceiving reality that can either wither away or consolidate as part of an emergent cultural form. In turn, emergent cultural forms, made up of beliefs held by minorities, can remain on the margins of the dominant cultural order or gain traction, become widespread, and eventually be transmitted across time as part of a residual culture. It is particularly interesting to compare Williams’ approach with class analysis. The task of exploring – in nuanced and theoretically sophisticated ways – the correlation between the class origins of a particular social group and its members’ beliefs, values, and attitudes is as relevant as ever in the context of increasing global inequalities. At the same time, there remains a vast terrain of social experiences that lies outside the reach of class analysis. On the one hand, it is well known that cultural movements, single-issue cross-class alliances such as feminist or environmental rights groups, professional associations, faith-based and diasporic communities and other types of tightly- or loosely-knit groups foster collective identities that require an intersectional analysis sensitive to race, class, and gender dynamics. On the other hand, it is often the case that, for example, cultural formations have amorphous identities in the sense that they lack manifestos or explicitly articulated ideologies but coalesce around a set of shared values. These cultural groups often develop distinct styles of thinking and acting that in the long run might have important social consequences. This was the case of the Bloomsbury Faction (Williams, 2005: 148 – 157) comprised of a small number of outstanding British writers, artists, and thinkers such as Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and John M. Keynes, to name a few. Although the Bloomsbury intellectuals, bonded by ties of affection, did not think of themselves as members of a cultural group in a formal sense, they shared a number of affinities and pursued an alternative lifestyle antithetical to aristocratic conventions. They placed an emphasis on aesthetic enjoyment, sexual freedom and candor, and cultivated critical awareness of contemporaneous social problems. Generally speaking, Bloomsbury intellectuals peddled a “philosophy of the sovereignty of the civilized individual” that exposed the conservative nature of the cultural and educational institutions propped up by the upper classes (Williams, 2005: 165). The group’s cultural style, shaped by the members’ commitment to Enlightenment values, not only had a profound influence on early twentieth-century literature, aesthetics, and economic theory but also constituted a point of reference for a broader social criticism of the Victorian morality. Similarly, in Latin America, intellectual groups have been of paramount importance. For example, as I have argued elsewhere, in Argentina, the cultural

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journal Los Libros (1969 – 1976), run by a group of prominent New Left intellectuals such as Beatriz Sarlo, Ricardo Piglia, and Carlos Altamirano, among others, contributed in significant ways to the modernization of cultural criticism. For instance, the group’s focus on social uses of literature and its treatment of literary criticism as a powerful taxonomic and normative apparatus yielded provocative insights that traditional, and in many respects outdated, text-centered criticism practiced by public school teachers and university literature departments was unable to deliver. With the help of theoretical insights afforded by Althusserian Marxism, the group undertook a pioneering institutional analysis of cultural production that, on the one hand, challenged theoretical approaches favored by liberal intellectuals and, on the other, countered the orthodox Left’s militant discourse on art. The Los Libros collective also developed a rich, although at times problematic, conceptual framework for the analysis of Peronism at a time when Argentine society, gripped by social unrest on the eve of General Videla’s military coup, was split down the middle between those who saw Perûn as a staunch anti-imperialist moved by the plight of the working masses and those who regarded him as an unattractive authoritarian figure. The group’s members rejected the equation of Peronism with fascism advanced by the communist Left while at the same time adopting a critical distance with respect to interpretations offered by liberal circles appalled by Perûn’s political style and the nationalist Left captivated by what it saw as Perûn’s socialist agenda. The intellectuals’ intervention into theoretical debates about the ideological nature of Peronism had political consequences. For example, their negative assessment of Peronism as a populist phenomenon conducive to the restoration of welfare capitalism translated into a disavowal of political strategies pursued by the trade union resistance movement that was loyal to Perûn. As militant activists, the group’s members sought to capture the imagination of workers in an effort to strengthen the anti-Peronist block of union activists interested in developing a socialist alternative to Peronism. In other words, in the case of the Los Libros, a set of common preoccupations cemented the connection, on the one hand, between the group’s aesthetic and social criticism and, on the other, between its intellectual work and political activism. The structure of feeling that underpinned the Los Libros project – the participants’ commitment to social change, intellectual voracity and the ability to think, write, and debate outside of universities policed by military dictatorships, as well as their critical distance vis-a-vis Argentina’s communist Left and liberal intelligentsia – allowed the group to develop a new cultural style informed by socialist ideals, to position itself with respect to other factions of the New Left, and ultimately to become a visible political actor (Popovitch, 2009). Finally, although the writings by Williams discussed in this essay focus on British cultural history, his concepts remain useful for the analysis of con-

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temporary issues in cultural studies. The concluding remarks of Culture and Society offer a glimpse into how a historically informed understanding of the residual nature of collective beliefs can form the basis for a critical appraisal of present-day attitudes toward, for example, the mass culture phenomenon. At the end of his chapter on the Romantic artist, Williams observes that the negative consequences of the Romantic philosophy of art as a superior reality were that “it tended… to isolate art, to specialize the imaginative faculty to this one kind of activity, and thus to weaken [art’s] dynamic function” (Williams, 1960: 47). Although subsequent art theories and movements, including the avant-garde, attempted – with various degrees of success – to reintegrate art into everyday life by mounting an attack on institutions of artistic consecration, the high-brow view of culture reminiscent of the Romantic approach to art remained influential throughout the twentieth century. For example, Williams observes that in societies with rapid technological progress where “many more levels of culture [are brought] within the general context of literacy”, it is not uncommon to hear wholesale condemnations of mass culture (Ibid. 328). The opinion that majority culture is low in taste presupposes a negative view of mass communication as such. According to this view, the quality of mass-produced books, magazines, newspapers, television programs and other types of cultural artifacts is necessarily inferior to that of cultural goods circulating in the field of restricted production. This is because the former objects, aimed at literate but intellectually unsophisticated audiences, reproduce the logic of commodification characteristic of large-scale cultural production, whereas the latter objects, crafted for connoisseurs, have a higher degree of aesthetic merit. In Williams’ opinion, the a priori indictment of mass communication described above reveals the critic’s inclination to offer a “selective argument” borrowed from the stock of residual judgments about Art (with a capital “A”). The claim that mass culture is “impersonal”, the tendency “to confuse the [mass communication] techniques themselves with the uses to which, in a given society, they have been put”, or the “temptation to concentrate on [cultural] habits which coincide with those of the observer” form part and parcel of residual highbrow aesthetics reminiscent of the Romantic theory of art4 (Ibid. 322 – 327). In light of these considerations, Williams suggests, it might very well be the case that the very notion of “mass communication”, used as a building block of “the natural ideology of those who sought to control the new system [of large-scale cultural production]” should be eliminated from our critical vocabulary 4 Culture and Society was published in 1963, nineteen years after Adorno and Horkheimer’s indictment of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment. It is interesting to note that although Williams does not explicitly mention the Frankfurt School in the book’s concluding remarks, his cautionary observations can be read as an implicit criticism of Adorno’s aesthetic theory.

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(Ibid. 332). It is, therefore, by bringing to consciousness and placing into historical context deep structures of meaning entrenched in the collective imagination that the social theorist can formulate a more adequate method of analysis of ever-changing sociocultural realities.

References Althusser, Louis (1971). Lenin and Philosophy. Trans. B. Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press. Anderson, Perry (1980). Arguments Within English Marxism. London: New Left Books and Verso Editions. Blackburn, Robin. “Raymond Williams and the Politics of a New Left”. New Left Review 1:168 (March-April 1988), pp. 12 – 22. Bourdieu, Pierre (1993). The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press. Eagleton, Terry (1991). Ideology. An Introduction. London; New York: Verso Books. – (1978). Criticism and Ideology. London: Verso Edition. Hall, Stuart (1980). “Cultural Studies and the Center : Some Problematics and Problems”. Culture, Media, Language, Eds. S. Hall et al., London: Hutchinson, pp. 15 – 47. Hall, Stuart et al. (1976). “Subcultures, Culture and Class: a Theoretical Overview”. Resistance Through Rituals. Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. Eds. S. Hall and T. Jefferson, London: Harper Collins Academic, pp. 9 – 74. Hindess, Barry (1977). “The Concept of Class in Marxist Theory and Marxist Politics”. Papers on Class, Hegemony and Party. Ed. J. Bloomfield, London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 95 – 107. Jameson, Fredric (1981). The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lewis, Jeff (2002). Cultural Studies. The Basics. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Macherey, Pierre (1978). A Theory of Literary Production. Trans. G. Wall, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick (2004). The German Ideology. Ed. C. J. Arthur, New York: International Publishers. Popovitch, Anna (2009). In the Shadow of Althusser : Culture and Politics in Late TwentiethCentury Argentina. Columbia University dissertation manuscript. Poulantzas, Nicos (1973). Political Power and Social Classes. Trans. T. O’Hagan, London: New Left Books and Sheed and Ward. – (1975). Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. Trans. D. Fernbach, London: NLB. – (1974). Fascism and Dictatorship: the Third International and the Problem of Fascism. London: New Left Books. Thompson, Edward Palmer (1978). The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. London; New York: Monthly Review Press. Williams, Raymond (2005). Culture and Materialism. Selected Essays. London; New York: Verso.

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– (1983). Keywords. A vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press. – “Marxism, Structuralism and Literary Analysis”. New Left Review 1:129 (SeptemberOctober 1981), pp. 51 – 66. – (1977). Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. – “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory”. New Left Review 1:82 (November-December 1973), pp. 3 – 16. – (1965). The Long Revolution. Ringwood, Australia; Middlesex, England: Penguin Books. – (1960). Culture and Society, 1780 – 1950. New York: Anchor Books.

Saurabh Dube

Unraveling Modernity: Subjects and Scandals

This chapter explores the terms, tangles, and textures of modernity by bringing together a range of critical concerns.1 First, it discusses how my wider work has articulated issues of modernity. Next, it explores the entanglements between modernity, modernism, and modernization. Here, my notion of “subjects of modernity” helps to unravel the concept-entity of modernity as entailing principally contradictory, contingent, and contested processes of authority and alterity. Third, building on these considerations, I engage (critically yet affirmatively) with two influential understandings of European (or North Atlantic) modernity. Fourth and finally, the chapter considers what is at stake today in careful engagements with modernity, not only by seizing upon two sets of scandals that characterize contemporary worlds but also by outlining what I have called a “history without warranty”.

Overture In everyday and academic understandings, being modern and enacting modernity are repeatedly cast as the transcending of tradition, as a break with what existed before. Indeed, even those academic, literary, and political writings that argue for the co-existence of the traditional and the modern do so by treating the two as discrete domains, which are then seen as being variously conjoined with each other. This view rests on powerful, contending, visceral images of tradition and modernity. To take a few examples, in architectural forms, adobe huts versus high-rise buildings; in performance arts, folkloric rhythms versus electronic extravaganzas; in cultural spaces, East versus West; and, in general, unchanging

1 Needless to say, the chapter draws upon a host of my previous writings. While a few of these shall be cited at appropriate points, I have especially drawn here upon Saurabh Dube, “Makeovers of Modernity : An Introduction”, in Dube (ed.) (2011) and Dube (2010a).

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customs versus transforming technologies. Such images and ideas have dense worldly, or ontological, attributes. Actually, there is even more to the picture. For, in commonplace and scholarly conceptions, modernity is equally pervasively projected as the condition of being modern that originated in the “West” and was then carried over to the “rest” as their process of becoming modern. If modernity’s lore of origins insists upon a radical break with all that is pre-modern, such a rupture originates in an imaginary yet palpable West. Only after this primal break is modernity framed as unfolding through time and space, spreading across worlds that are transformed in its (European) image and (Western) wake. Arguably, the end to this script arrives – if only in some (albeit, influential) writings – with the onset of the postmodern and post-modernity. Needless to say, the simplicity of these storylines is seductive. Yet, the simplicities, stories and seductions also intimately inform the ways in which social subjects across the globe live today. All of this leads to the question: What are the conditions, limitations, and possibilities of modernity – and the modern – in contemporary contexts? Combining history and anthropology, my wider work on modernity and empire, community and nation, the state and the subaltern, addresses such questions. In particular, I analyze prior, inherited understandings of modernity that are based on pre-figured, modular projections of the traditional and the modern, the non-West and the West. Indeed, I approach formations of modernity as always particular yet already global, all the while drawing on a range of experiences from South Asia and beyond.2

Unsettling modernity Scholars might readily concede today that the modern and modernity are notoriously imprecise categories that have been defined in many ways and bitterly debated for a long time now. Yet, modernity and the modern – as well as the postmodern and post-modernity – continue to be regarded in intellectual arenas chiefly as concepts, whose validity and/or invalidity derives from particular political positions or intellectual persuasions. In contrast, my projects are premised on the recognition that modernity is at once a concept and an entity, bearing profoundly worldly dimensions. I also argue that if all concepts-entities with palpable social careers necessarily have many avatars, varying across time and context, this is especially true of modernity and the modern. This is to say that my understandings of modernity are underpinned by twin, 2 The projects that I am referring to are especially embodied and expressed in Saurabh Dube (2004a; 2010c; 2005). See also, Saurabh Dube (1998; 2007 and 2004b).

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contrasting imperatives. On the one hand, I register the acute limitations of scholars’ efforts to readily define, delineate, and delimit modernity and to present their findings as the last words on the subject. On the other, I do not take a solipsistic view of modernity as an empty “place-holder” that can be then strategically filled in with meaning and purpose by academics and social actors according to their own needs. Put simply, I approach modernity as a contradictory and contested concept and entity ; one that, though celebrated by many and written off by others, continues to have a forceful impact on popular selfreckonings and distinct political agendas. My goal, then, is to critically call a series of bluffs while engaging with these ruses carefully and prudently. This endeavor is sustained by the recognition that there is no monolithic condition of being modern; to begin with, not even in Europe/the West. Indeed, although the discourse of modernity has often been presented as internally coherent and inherently unified, the processes of modernity have always entailed varied and contradictory histories. Registering this fact helps us perform two simultaneous tasks: to take seriously the imperious, central claims of discourses of modernity ; and to emphasize the mix-ups and margins that shore up modern worlds. It is in these ways that I have sought to hold up a mirror, as it were, to the mask of modernity as a potent, pervasive saga of progress, while keeping in view the truth that provisos of progress exist among social subjects as tissues of belief, structures of sentiment, and textures of experience. As such, my ongoing effort is to explore the checkered routes that have characterized the making of modernity and articulations of the modern in South Asia, their past and their present. To start off, as we shall see, aspirations toward becoming modern and the claims of being modern have been crucial to everyday worlds on the subcontinent for quite some time now. On the one hand, such resilience is linked to widespread projections of societal and political modernization. On the other, the desire to become/be modern, understood as identity and concept, has fused with various other indices of everyday self-reckoning, some of which are readily palpable while others are more imperceptible. It follows that processes of modernity are themselves sustained by their interconnectedness with a myriad of other tropes of self-making. My wider work has sought to trace the processes and networks through which modern institutions and selves, the one insinuated in the other, have been enabled and expressed on the subcontinent, while always entailing the meanings and practices of subjects of modernity. Here one finds apperceptions and actions both individual and collective which emerge entwined within everyday arenas of, for example, ritual and religion, gender and power, myth and history, law and legalities, conversion and belief, and aesthetics and art. They further reveal the protean expressions of the modern – a resilient force implicated in quotidian

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conceptualizations of colony and culture, ideology and identity, time and space, and state and nation. In brief, my larger bid has been to explore the everyday articulations of modernity in South Asia and beyond as densely woven into the intimate lives of the popular and the political on the subcontinent. All of this hinges on at least three critical tasks, which are conducted on different registers in my different writings. First, there is the urgency to think through the dichotomy of the traditional and the modern alongside its critical implications. At the same time, to undertake this endeavor is not to simply reject the opposition as an analytical error ; rather, we must understand the reasons for the provenance, persuasion, and persistence of the antinomy. Second, taking this step sets the stage for exploring modernity as involving processes of the past and the present, shaped not only by the modern Western subject but by diverse subjects of modernity including, especially, the terms of the self-making of different classes and communities in India. Third and finally, my work seeks to carefully unravel the distinct textures and many hues of modernity and its experiences on the subcontinent, raising critical questions concerning the plural manifestations and key contentions of the modern in South Asia. It was suggested earlier that formations of modernity have always been global yet already particular. Unsurprisingly, I do not mark off considerations of India from Europe, of the colony from the metropolis, and of the non-West from the West. Similarly, my work desists from simply separating the present from the past, power from culture, affect from reason, and politics from religion. Rather, the effort is to bring together these distinct domains as parts of mutual fields of exploration and explication. It is in such (several) senses, then, that my own writings have drawn upon yet reached beyond – at once explicitly and implicitly – distinct departures in recent discussions of modernity. I have in mind studies that have explored issues of “colonial”, “multiple”, “alternative”, and “early” modernity/modernities.3 I also keep in view works focusing on different articulations of modernity as historically grounded and/or culturally expressed.4 The point is that my work engages 3 Writings on “colonial”, “multiple”, “early”, and “alternative” modernity/modernities include, for example, Antoinette Burton (ed.) (1999); Dube and Banerjee-Dube (eds.) (2005); Daedalus (1998 and 2000); and Dilip P. Gaonkar (ed.) (2001). 4 See, for instance, Laura Bear (2007); Amanda J. Weidman (2006); Sibylle Fischer (2004); James Ferguson (1999); Charles Piot (1999); Lisa Rofel (1998); Harry Harootunian (2000); Donald Donham (1999); John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (1997); Paul Gilroy (1995); Dube (ed.) (2010c and 2004a); Sanjay Seth (2007); and Timothy Mitchell (ed.) (2000). See also, Anand Pandian (2009); Anupama Rao (2009); Ajantha Subramanian (2009); V¦ronique B¦n¦ (2008); Simon During (2004); Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels (eds.) (2003); Alex Owen (2004); Michael Saler (2006:692 – 716); Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000); Ritu Birla (2009); Dipesh Chakrabarty (2002); Arjun Appadurai (1996); and Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Majumdar (eds.) (2003).

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and extends such concerns in its own manner. To begin with, I approach the multiple articulations of modernity by registering contingency, contradiction, contention, and contestation as inhabiting the checkered core of modern worlds. Moreover, the terms, textures, and transformations of modernity – and the modern – are each articulated as marked by power as well as by difference, authority, alterity, the dominant, and the subaltern. Finally, I register the specific articulations of modernity yet all the while attending to their key implications, reifying neither the one nor the other, but critically considering their everyday expressions and quotidian configurations – as enacted on the ground. Needless to say, such dispositions toward modernity shall be clarified in the pages ahead.

Untangling modernity Not so long ago, two historical anthropologists wrote that, “Perhaps the greatest virtue of the recent Western scholarly preoccupation with ‘postmodernity’ is what it has revealed about ‘modernity’ itself”.5 Yet even as they authored this assessment, Jean and John Comaroff were possibly getting ahead of themselves. For, in the two decades that have followed their diagnosis, there have been even wider, rather different, critical considerations of modernity. It is not only that a variety of scholarship has been influenced by, and yet exceeded, the impact of the linguistic turn and postmodern preoccupations in the social sciences. It should also be noted that questions of modernity have been approached as part of the careful querying of the categories that are presupposed by distinct but typical ways of acting and understanding in contemporary worlds. Together, as Akeel Bilgrami has argued, “the extensive debate in many related disciplines over the last few decades”, which has put a question mark on inherited ideas and ideologies, forms part of “our intellectual efforts at self-understanding – in particular, our efforts to come to a more or less precise grip on the sense in which we belong to a period, properly describable as our ‘modernity’”.6 All this has meant that questions of modernity have increasingly escaped the limits of (purely) discursive derivation, scholarly formalism, and a priori abstraction.7 Underscored instead has been the fact that if modernity entails ideas, ideals, and ideologies, it equally involves the articulation of distinct historical 5 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Introduction”, in Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (eds.) (1993:xi). 6 Akeel Bilgrami, “Occidentalism, The Very Idea: An Essay on the Enlightenment and Enchantment”, http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2008/09/occidentalism-t.html, accessed 19 November 2013. 7 For a wider discussion of the ideas discussed in this paragraph, see Saurabh Dube (2010b:136 – 37).

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processes over the last few centuries. Indeed, there has been keen recognition of the divergent expressions of modernity and contending intimations of the modern – shaped by particular pasts, defined by projects of power, and molded by provisos of progress –. As a result, formations of modernity have themselves been revealed as contradictory and contingent processes of culture and control, as checkered and contested histories of meaning and mastery – in their constitution, sedimentation, and elaboration –. On the one hand, it is within such contingency and contradiction that modernity’s constitutive hierarchies and formative oppositions are framed and elaborated. On the other, these processes are not subject-less procedures; they emerge instead as expressed by subjects of modernity – and not only modern subjects – that are non-Western and Western. I shall soon return to these questions. For the moment, it is worth pondering the ambiguities that surround the concept-entity of modernity. In no small measure, the haziness derives from the manner in which modernity is often elided with modernization (and at other times folded into modernism). As is generally known, the notion of modernization, as expressed by its different theorists/theories, refers to modular projections of material, organizational, and technological – as well as economic, political, and cultural – transformation(s), principally envisioned in the looking-glass of western development. Here, different, often hierarchically ordered, societies are seen as succeeding in evolving (or failing to evolve) from their traditional (or pre-modern) states to modernized (or capitalist) arenas through linear stages of succession.8 Now, the simplistic, step-by-step, schemas and the reductively totalizing templates of modernization theories have always been far too tendentious.9 And so, too, have they been decisively questioned and firmly rejected by critical scholarship for some time now. Yet, motifs of modernization have carried wide resonance and have easily elided with mappings of modernity, such that each shores up the other. Why should this be the case? To begin with, as was noted earlier, dominant discourses of western modernity have portrayed the phenomena as marked by a break with the past, a rupture with tradition, a surpassing of the medieval. Of course, there have been dense histories and contradictory claims at stake here, including contending strains of the Enlightenment, counter-Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment traditions – issues that I have discovered elsewhere –.10 At 8 Here, especially influential statements included, W. W. Rostow (1960) and David E. Apter (1965). 9 I acknowledge that reassessments of modernization have emphasized the place of “tradition” in elaborations of “development”, for example. But such understandings continue to be based on the enduring oppositions –and teleological templates– of discourses of modernity. 10 Saurabh Dube, “Anthropology, History, Historical Anthropology” in Saurabh Dube (ed.) (2007: particularly pp. 6 – 7).

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the same time, it is also the case that by the second half of the nineteenth century – through projections and ruses of teleological historical progress, stages of civilization, and social evolutionist schema – an exclusive West gradually became the looking-glass for the imagining of universal history. As worldly knowledge, oriented not merely toward ordering but simultaneously remaking the world, these neat proposals and their formative presumptions entered the lives of historical subjects. Formidably disseminated as modes of apprehending social worlds, they have appeared instituted as tissues of affect and textures of experience within everyday arenas. In this scenario, the blueprints of modernization actually distilled the designs of modernity, the aggressive assumption of the latter holding in place the schematic prognosis of the former. Taken together, modernity’s discourses and modernization theories, inextricably entwined, the one with the other, have articulated an imaginary but palpable, distended and aggrandizing West/Europe as history, modernity, and destiny – for each society, culture, and people. Yet, there is more to the picture. Beyond routine representations, in artistic, intellectual, and aesthetic arenas, each understood broadly, modernity has often appeared in intimate association with its cognate (or conceptual cousin), modernism. Now, modernism is also an enormously contentious term that necessarily follows from the contested and contradictory character of the tendencies it describes. Here we find cultural movements, styles, and representations, going back to the mid-nineteenth century and extending into our own times, which have been diversely expressed in different parts of the world. Following Theodor Adorno, modernism has been a principally “qualitative” rather than a merely “chronological” category (Adorno, 2005:218): but it is also the case that the internal endeavors within modernisms to surpass the past, articulate the present, and envision the future have been intrinsically heterogeneous ones. They have engaged and interrogated, accessed and exceeded Enlightenment thought and Romantic tradition, abstract reason and religious truth, surface coherence and tonal depth, Western representations and precolonial narratives, the certainties of science and the presence of God, and governmental authority and popular politics.11 On the one hand, from Charles Baudelaire’s avowal of the “transitory” and the “fleeting” to modernist rejections of realism and replication in favor of discontinuity and disruption, and from Ezra Pound’s invitation to art to “make new” the many manifestations of modernisms since the mid-twentieth century 11 A parallel here is the manner in which opposed tendencies of modern knowledge –defined as those of rationalism and historicism, of the analytical and the hermeneutical, and of the progressivist and the romantic– can frequently combine in intellectual practice, leading to contradictions and contentions and ambivalences and excesses. Dube, “Anthropology, History, Historical Anthropology” (2007:10 – 15); see also, Dube (2010a).

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(and before), a key characteristic of these cultural tendencies has been to emphasize the difference of the contemporary present from past epochs. On the other, as Peter Childs has argued, modernism has always involved “paradoxical if not opposed trends towards revolutionary and reactionary positions, fear of the new and delight at the disappearance of the old, nihilism and fanatical enthusiasm, creativity and despair” (Childs, 2000:17). Now, to hold together the discourses of modernity and the articulations of modernism is not only to trace the distinct yet interwoven ways in which each one offers a cessation and overcoming of the past. It is also to register that the constitutive contradictions and contentions of modernism(s) can hold a mirror up to connected characteristics and contingencies of that acutely universal of all authoritative universals – modernity. To approach the entanglements among modernity, modernism, and modernization without simply folded the one into another while acknowledging their mutual linkages might have critical consequences. It suggests understandings of modernity not only as a forceful idea and ideology but as also entailing heterogeneous histories and plural processes.12 These imaginings and procedures extend back to the last five centuries and interlock in critical ways, such that both models of modernization and movements of modernism appear as crucial components yet small parts in the broader articulation of modernity. There are at least two facets to the phenomena, each insinuated in the other. On the one hand, as part of a familiar picture, processes of reason and science, industry and technology, commerce and consumption, nation-state and citizensubject, public spheres and private spaces, and secularized religion(s) and disenchanted knowledge(s) are constitutive of modernity. It warrants emphasis that vigilance is required regarding the endless unfolding of these developments as heroic histories. Indeed, teleological tales about the march of modernization/ modernity must be unraveled as rather more checkered narratives, even as models of modernization are registered as part of the protocols of modernity. On the other hand, the core of modernity crucially includes frequently overlooked processes of empires and colonies, race and genocide, resurgent faiths and reified traditions, disciplinary regimes and subaltern subjects, and seductions of the state and enchantments of the modern. Lessons learned from the split, Janusfaced nature of modernism assume salience here. This is to say that even as modernity has been ceaselessly portrayed as embodying a singular, seamless trajectory, its principal procedures have been contradictory, contingent, and contested – protocols that are incessantly articulated yet also critically out of joint with themselves.13 12 See, for example, Dube (2004a; 2010a; 2010c). 13 Dube (2004a: particularly p. 11).

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It is precisely these procedures that emerge expressed by subjects of modernity. Here, my reference is to historical actors who have been active participants in processes of modernity : social actors who have been both subject to these processes but also subjects shaping these processes. Over the past few centuries, the subjects of modernity have included, to take just a few instances, peasants, artisans, and workers in South Asia that have diversely articulated processes of colony and post-colony ; indigenous communities in the Americas under colonial and national rule; peoples of African descent not only on that continent but in different Diasporas across the world; and, indeed, subaltern, marginal, and elite women and men in non-Western and Western theatres. Unsurprisingly, these subjects have registered within their measures and meanings the formative contradictions, contentions, and contingencies of modernity.14 All of this is to emphasize, as well, the importance of affect and subjectivity – long privileged within modernism(s) – in explorations of modernity. Yet, it is to do so while refusing to approach affect(s) as the repressed other of the modern as well as eschewing an understanding of subject(s) as sovereign selves.15 Needless to say, such measures are salient for unraveling the procedures of modernity. First, it is well known that conceptions of modernity generally proceed by envisioning the phenomenon in the image of the European and Euro-American (frequently, implicitly, male) modern subject.16 In contrast, I am indicating the inadequacy of conflating the modern subject with the subject of modernity. Is it perhaps the case then that my articulation of subjects of modernity productively widens the range of address of modernity and its participants? Moreover, mine is not a chronological claim that everyone living in the modern age counts as a modern subject, for subjects of modernity have revealed, time and again, that there are different ways of being modern, now accessing and now exceeding the stipulations of the modern Western subject. Yet, all too often, in fashioning themselves, subjects of modernity have barely bothered about the Western modern subject while articulating the enduring terms of modernity. What are the implications of such recognition for weaving in distinct textures and transformations of affects and subjectivities – including inherently plural experiences, articulations, and elaborations of time, space, and their enmeshments – in considerations of modernity? Finally, it bears emphasis that there are other modern subjects in addition to Western ones, embodying formidable heterogeneity. Does this not suggest the need to rethink exclusive images of the modern 14 Saurabh Dube, “Modernity and its Enchantments: An Introduction” in Saurabh Dube (ed.) (2010c:1 – 43). 15 On issues of affect, I have found illuminating William Mazarella, “Affect; What is it Good for?” in Dube (ed.) (2010c:291 – 309). 16 I am developing here ideas that were initiated in Dube (2004a).

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subject in discussions of modernity, in both non-Western arenas and Western ones?17 At any rate, I hope it is clear that the dispositions to modernity that I am outlining do not claim to comprehensively define this category, entity, and process. Rather, my aim is to open up spaces for critically discussing procedures of modernity and their many persuasions. It is in this spirit, then, that I now turn to a critical yet affirmative engagement with two influential portrayals of modernity.

Articulating modernity For a very long time now, the world has abounded in both aggressive ideas that privilege an imaginary Europe/West as the centerpiece of modernity, history, and democracy, and several facile strains of anti-Enlightenment rhetoric that often mirror the representations of a bloated and singular modernity.18 It is important to question these two aspects simultaneously and carefully. The urgent dimensions of this task derive from how such cabalistic conceptions characterize multiple terrains, from the first world through to the fourth world. These conceptions and terrains require understanding, not dismissal. I believe I have already indicated my disposition toward impatient critiques of modernity. It is only appropriate, therefore, that I turn to seminal writings that authoritatively endorse modernity. My critical engagements are premised on two further recognitions. The first involves the need to go beyond key limits of postcolonial discourses today. Without putting too fine a point on the matter, several exercises in the field display an alarming tendency to refer insularly, primarily to work within their own allegedly cutting-edge, yet much too neatlydemarcated, domains. Thus, inevitably, such writings only take limited potshots against their “Eurocentric” academic adversaries without seeking to enter the protocols of the latter’s arguments. The second concerns the critical salience within scholarly practice of carefully considering the assumptions and entities that shore up our worlds, in this case those that revolve around modernity. Here we find dispositions and protocols that combine the rethinking and acknowledgement of categories and worlds of the past with the questioning and affirmation of concepts and entities in the present, issues to which I shall return. 17 These various modern subjects in the West and the non-West are also subjects of modernity. But, once more, not all subjects of modernity are modern subjects, of course. 18 For my earlier formulation of these questions, see, for example, Dube (1998); and for my more recent understanding see, for instance, Dube (2004a and 2010c). The latter works in particular explore modern dualisms not as mere analytical phantasms but rather as bearing profound worldly attributes.

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Let us begin, then, with some of the concerns and questions bearing on modernity and related discussions raised by the work of the remarkable, tireless philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Now, it hardly warrants emphasis that Habermas has played a key role in extending the democratic horizons of the “unfinished” Enlightenment project, especially through his elaborations of reason as “communicative action” and a self-critical modernity.19 Conversely, in reproducing the ineluctable conjunction of modernity with Europe, Habermas’ writings have played a thoroughly ethnocentric tune – or, if one must, reproduced an entirely Eurocentric refrain – within “classical” thought and “critical” theory.20 I propose to reflect upon these twin dimensions, conjoint dispositions, in the thought of Habermas. Avoiding yet another exegesis of Habermas’ writings, I would like to seize upon a somewhat unusual, personal statement concerning the work of the philosopher by a fellow thinker. Significantly, this critical avowal comes not from an intricately wrought philosophical discussion but from the rough and ready words that form part of an interview given by the social and political theorist, Zygmunt Bauman. Here is what Bauman says regarding the “power of argument” in the world according to Habermas: I think what attracted me to Habermas, really, was his ideal of a society shaped after the pattern of a sociology seminar ; that is, there are only participants and the one thing which matters is the power of argument… So, I liked this as a utopian focus imaginarius, somewhat like the idea of the ideal experiment, which is of course never achieved, but unless you have it, you can’t experiment at all. Now, I liked this horizon, this prospect, as the organizing, directing factor in our efforts – where we should aim at (Bauman, 1992: 217).

19 For example, Jürgen Habermas (1987). 20 Ibid., As is well known, criticisms of the Eurocentric nature of modern knowledge abound in academia today. A few of the studies that explicitly helped me consider the ethnocentric attributes of much classical and critical theory include Catherine Lutz (1988); Johannes Fabian (1983); Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the artifice of history : Who speaks for ‘Indian’ pasts?” Representations 37, Winter 1992, pp. 1 – 26; Walter Mignolo (1995); and Enrique Dussel, “Eurocentrism and modernity”, Boundary 2, 20, 1993, pp. 65 – 76. At the same time, I have understood the emphases of such writings in rather particular ways. For example, from Dussel’s writings I have taken the need to critically question the Eurocentric foundations of the philosophical discourse on modernity, and to draw from his work (as well as from that of Walter Mignolo) the salience of keeping in view not only the modernity of the Enlightenment (and its critical connections with British and French colonialisms) but also the modernity of the Renaissance (and its intimate interweaving with the empires spawned by Spain and Portugal). Yet, I also seek to think through Dussel’s and Mignolo’s attribution of a priori alterity and innate purity to subaltern and non-Western worlds. Similar distinctions mark my submissions regarding the significance of combining the will to carefully question with the impulse to critically affirm concepts and entities in intellectual endeavors.

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The short statement carries immense import. The salience and shortfalls of the “power of argument” in Habermas’ thought elucidate the limits and potentialities of thinking about modernity. But this is possible only when such learning and unlearning is predicated on our own efforts to bind the determination to carefully question with the desire to critically affirm in the labor of intellectual understanding. Once more, the issue involves affirming and questioning analytical (and everyday) categories and heterogeneous (yet overlapping) worlds. Two points are pertinent. On the one hand, Habermas’ emphasis on the power of argument appears connected with the possibilities and containments underlying his positing of reason as “communicative action”. These protocols at once displace a merely subject-centered rationality and underscore the “counter-discourse” of modernity.21 Together, they raise questions about the nature of an inter-subjective rationality as well about the extent of our obligation to the other in deliberation, but they also indicate the manner in which such proposals appear circumscribed by “scholastic reason”.22 On the other hand, it is worth considering whether Habermas’ projections of society along the “patterns of a sociology seminar” are linked, in distinct ways, with his “idealized history” that presents the past in terms of modular temporal schemes involving attenuated stages of succession.23 As a corollary to this, there is the issue of facing up to the fact of what is to be done when argument fails (even in a situation such as a sociology seminar or academic discussion); the moment when, despite its power 21 Habermas (1987 and 1984). See also, Habermas (1992); and Thomas McCarthy, “Introduction”, in Habermas (1987:vii-xvii). 22 On the notion of “scholastic reason” see Pierre Bourdieu (2000). 23 Here is Craig Calhoun commenting on Habermas’ idealized history concerning the nation. He begins by quoting from the philosopher’s text, The Inclusion of the Other : “The nationstate owes its historical successes to the fact that it substituted relations of solidarity between the citizens for the disintegrating corporative ties of early modern society. But this republican achievement is endangered when, conversely, the integrative force of the nation of citizen is traced back to the pre-political fact of a quasi-natural people, that is, to something independent of and prior to the political opinion –and will-formation– of the citizens themselves”. Having quoted from the text, Calhoun, the critical Habermasian, continues, “But pause here and notice the temporal order implied in this passage. First there were local communities, guilds, religious bodies, and other ‘corporative bonds.’ Then there was republican citizenship with its emphasis on the civic identity of each citizen. Then this was undermined by ethnonationalism. What this misses is the extent to which each of these ways of organizing social life existed simultaneously with the others, sometimes in struggle and sometimes symbiotically. New “corporative ties” have been created, for example, notably in the labor movement and in religious communities. Conversely, there was no ‘pure republican’ moment when ideas of nationality did not inform the image of the republic and the constitution of its boundaries”. Craig Calhoun, “The class-consciousness of frequent travelers: Toward a critique of actually existing cosmopolitanism”, in Dube (ed.) (2010c:319 – 20), emphasis in the original.

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and persuasion, an argument faces its utter refusal in a resolutely reluctant interlocutor or an apparently incommensurable other. Confronting these questions, I would like to undertake two broad acts of reading and writing in order to question and affirm Habermas’ formulations. First, it is vital to probe Habermas’ ethnocentric framing of rationality, which itself rests upon his representations of modernity as an entirely internally selfgenerated, European phenomenon – a representation that occludes any linkages with empire or non-Western worlds –. But it is also crucial to take up this endeavor while simultaneously thinking through the philosopher’s proposal of the counter-discourse of modernity. This involves reflecting upon the manner in which Habermas explores the primary crossroads of this counter-discourse to point toward a “path open but not taken: the construal of reason in terms of a non-coercive inter-subjectivity of mutual understanding and reciprocal recognition”.24 Here we find formulations that see reason as ineluctably situated; that is, “as concretized in history, society, body, and language”; that view its potential as requiring realization in the “communicative practice of ordinary, everyday life”; and that argue against totalized critiques of reason, emphasizing its capacity to be critical.25 At the same time, before being carried away by Habermas’ own “power of argument”, it is worth considering the problematic nature of these propositions. On the one hand, they reduce political power relations to relations of communication that “surreptitiously throw the political back onto the terrain of ethics”. On the other hand, they suppress visceral registers of being and difference to a telos of language that provides the model for practical, rational discourse, which always tends toward consensus.26 Now, the reading I am proposing uncovers the neatly packaged nature of Habermas’ thought and reveals – at the very least in terms of my own critical registers – its limitations and potentialities. All of this entails departing from the often exclusive – and at times a prior i– depoliticizing cast of the philosopher’s promulgations on communication and consensus, the inter-subjective and the non-coercive, and language and reason. At the same time, it also means learning to look beyond the strains and sensibilities of an anti-foundational thought that posits the other of reason. Such lessons draw upon, yet do not readily succumb to, Habermas’ wide-ranging critique of such traditions. Lastly, propelled by such protocols, the reading at stake involves affirming the important horizons that Habermas’ thought points to in considering the situated and critical nature of rationality. This is especially 24 McCarthy, “Introduction”, p. xvi. 25 Ibid., pp. xvi-xvii. 26 See here Jürgen Habermas (1971; 1984). The critical quotations derive, respectively, from Bourdieu (2000:66) and Stephen K. White (2000:36, 138). See also Pierre Bourdieu (1991).

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the case since his projections of the “power of argument” now appear brushed against their own conceits. Taken together, these proposals toward a criticalaffirmative reading of Habermas have a wider purpose. They point toward the possibility of his notions of counter-discourse of modernity being brought into productive tensions with different, alternative imaginings of modernity/modernities, politics and democracy. Second, it is salient to question Habermas’ a priori elision of modernity with Europe – each appearing as historical fact, theoretical metaphor and analytical abstraction – especially by tracking not only the way the West is rehearsed as modernity but the manner in which modernity is staged “as the West”.27 At the same time, far from simply pigeonholing Habermas’ writing as Eurocentric, such efforts entail entering the protocols of his thought where it is not simply an excision of the non-West but a patterned, attenuated and idealized history of Europe itself that shores up a critical theory of modernity. I have already provided an example in a note concerning the philosopher’s schematic, stagist statements concerning the emergence and predicaments of the (Western) nation, an issue that can only be elucidaded by means of a critical theoretical and historical discussions of Habermas’ influential account of the public sphere. Here, an important line of criticism has focused on how the Habermasian conception of the liberal public sphere entails an idealized history of liberal bourgeois public spheres. Thus, the philosopher’s account refuses to admit to the plural traditions of reasoned exchanged that marked eighteenth-century Western Europe. It ignores how the bourgeois public appropriated and marginalized inclusive notions of public participation and discussion by strategically closing off the range of possible discussants in the arena.28 The point is that it is not enough to merely lament and criticize the absence of the non-West and empire in classical theory. Such rebuttals circumscribe critical readings of European thought. The more important task is to pose questions concerning the larger subordination of history to theory. I am referring to queries considering how aggrandizing and authoritative pronouncements of theory/philosophy cannibalize and expropriate dense and heterogeneous entanglements of the past/history, not only by treating the latter as merely illustrative case material but by schematically recasting them through resolutely modular grids. Far from blaming Habermas for a one-off oddity in thought and theory, I am suggesting that a critical appreciation of his work brings such pervasive issues onto the horizon of a recuperative reading, registering unequal exchanges between the here-and-now and history. Such exchanges incessantly, 27 Timothy Mitchell, “The stage of modernity”, in Mitchell (ed.) (2000:15), emphasis in the original. 28 See Craig Calhoun (ed.) (1992). Consider also Bourdieu (2000:65 – 67).

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assuredly, indolently substitute the “ought” for the “is” in projections of the past and the present, and carry broad implications for academic apprehensions and scholarly commonsense.29 Let me concretize these proposals by staying just a little longer with another influential discussion of modernity, which articulates distinct apprehensions of the category-entity. I refer to a significant essay by the intellectual historian Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, a contribution that is at its best when discussing the complex pasts of the term “modern”, but that also takes up questions of modernity.30 Indeed, imaginatively intervening in a semantically- and analyticallyloaded field, this German intellectual historian sensitively tracks the “conceptual history” of the word “modern” in Western Europe. Specifically, he unravels intricate articulations of the notion of the “modern” with other terms and traditions, such as those of the “ancient”, the “classical”, and the “romantic” in European intellectual constellations over the past few centuries. Implicitly, at least, these materials reveal that the break with the past implied by the idea of modernity is exceeded, even undercut, by the contentious expressions of its intimate etymological and conceptual cousin, the “modern”. Yet it would not do to stop here. For, while registering the strengths of Gumbrecht’s work, it is equally important to probe the moment of his understanding when the concept “modern” yields to the category “modernity”. Now it becomes clear fairly quickly that Gumbrecht’s account of the concept of “modernity” remains entirely “internal” to Europe. This need not necessarily be a problem in itself – after all, we are considering the work of a historian of Western Europe – but for the fact that the purely internal nature of the argument also betokens its ineluctably exclusive cast. Thus, Gumbrecht’s history of the category of modernity not only overlooks the multiple hierarchies of this metaphor-entity, which have been variously played out on conceptual as well as historical registers, but also actively participates in the staging of modernity as the West by implicitly endorsing and explicitly expressing the hierarchies, oppositions and hierarchical oppositions of an exclusive modernity. Unsurprisingly, now an imaginary and distended yet palpable and pervasive Europe/West

29 Concerning such questions, elsewhere I have discussed the active interchange between the “ought” and the “is”, the “ideal” and the “real”, especially in relation to propositions of the secularization of the world. The point is that instead of considering either as a mere strawfigure, it is the interlacing of these propositional forms that underlie social worlds and their everyday apprehensions and academic understandings. Dube, “Introduction: Enchantments of modernity”. 30 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “A history of the concept ‘modern’”, in Gumbrecht (1992). It is perhaps significant that Habermas himself cites Gumbrecht in his opening considerations of modernity’s consciousness of time in his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 8.

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is reified and hypostatized into history, modernity, and destiny – for each society, any culture, and every people.31 Am I exaggerating? Here is Gumbrecht’s modest concession to the nonWestern world. He writes: “From our [European/Euro-American/Western] perspective at least, modernization in the underdeveloped countries is… taking place somewhere between decolonization and our own present” (Gumbrecht, 1992:108). This statement speaks for itself, announcing its immense complicities. But my case does not rest on it (and since we are bringing up this issue let me repeat that it is not guilt or innocence that I am after in any case). As I have suggested, it would be much too simple to endorse Gumbrecht’s genealogy of the term “modern” while upbraiding his “stagist” presumptions concerning modernity. The more challenging task – one that I have been trying to indicate through my reading/writing – is to track the formidable interweaving of these contending tendencies that not only shore up the text but that actually define the fact that it was written at all. Such entanglements reveal how a hermeneutic impulse within varieties of “historicism” that challenges schematic projections of the word “modern” intersects with a developmental “historicism” that now presents “modernity” through stagist stipulations. On the one hand, reflecting on the intertwining of the two historicisms can serve to open up the debate on the nature of historicism; i. e., to explore in focused ways the hermeneutic impulses, developmental imperatives, analytical implications, and their incessant enmeshments at the core of historicism.32 On the other, our own protocols of approaching the essay must eschew the desire to tear asunder its seemingly seamlessly stitched-together material. Rather, we need to trace the text’s unevenly sutured, irregularly tattered, texture. This approach would make it possible to unravel how the stitches binding together the text almost split at the seams and yet how the

31 Clearly, this pervasive, “metageographical” projection has appeared elaborated in several ways, from the evidently aggressive to the seemingly benign, embedded of course in “modernization” theory, yet has also long been lodged within the interstices of Western social and political thought. The projection also finds contradictory articulations within discrete expressions of “tradition” that question “modernity” by reversing the moral import of its constitutive hierarchies and oppositions. To rigorously reconsider modernity is to think through such oppositions, hierarchies, and elisions. See, for example, Anthony Giddens (1990); and Habermas (1987). 32 For a wide-ranging discussion of the intertwining of hermeneutics, philosophy, and historicism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sees Donald R. Kelley (1998). An acute critique of what I am calling developmental historicism with its beginnings in the nineteenth century is contained in Chakrabarty (2000). The point is that these powerful arguments regarding the nature of historicism have talked past one another : a study such as that of Gumbrecht, since it braids together distinct historicist impulses, can make possible a dialogue on the different, contending yet overlapping articulations of historicism.

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weaves of the work somehow hold together in the middle—not unlike the contentious entwining of heterogeneous temporalities in fabrics of modernity. To take up these tasks is also to attend to the contradictory and contingent interlacing of social worlds and academic apprehensions, especially under designs of modernity. Recall that Gumbrecht’s hermeneutical unfolding of the term “modern” rests on an untangling of the “details”. Such details not only resist being gathered unto ready schemes of social sciences, but also constitute social facts bearing immense import in everyday arenas. Conversely, the stagist presumptions shaping Gumbrecht’s understanding of modernity are attributes, at one and the same time, attributes of scholarly wisdom, of aspects of quotidian commonsense, and of their endless interplay.

Coda What is at stake in critically approaching and carefully articulating the terms of modernity in the present? The immense import of modernity today, it seems to me, turns on two sets of scandals in the contemporary world.33 These scandals are constitutive of modernity, its formative limits and fissured possibilities. First, there is the scandal of the West. What is the scandal of the West? Pervasive projections of an imaginary but tangible Europe, of a reified yet palpable West as the primary habitus of the modern, the enshrined space of modernity, democracy, reason and history. Second, there is the scandal of the nation. What is the scandal of the nation? Persistent propositions regarding state and nation as carriers of progress and development, which are substantial or ephemeral, realized or failed. The scandals anxiously elide and shamefully deny the broken promises of freedom and the undemocratic foundations of democracy under regimes of modernity – in the colony, the post-colony, and the modern West. Now, registering the outrages of the West and the nation does not imply their impatient, reckless dismissal. Rather, we should acknowledge that these scandals have pervasive worldly attributes that lie at the core of social worlds. These scandals and worlds call for careful elaboration, especially through efforts that question and affirm concepts and practices in the wake of outrages.34 It is such procedures of querying and affirmation that I call a history without warranty. Let me clarify the term. In speaking of a history without warranty, I am neither demarcating a distinct domain (or discourse) of academic enterprise, nor indicating a specific style (or school) of history writing. Rather, history 33 This section draws extensively on Dube (2004a). 34 See also, Timothy Mitchell (ed.) (2000:viii, xii-xiii).

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without warranty refers to particular dispositions toward the past and the present, social worlds and their critical understandings. My reference is to a practice of careful questioning and critical affirmation of social worlds that remains acutely aware of the limits of simply demystifying, pointedly unmasking histories and subjects, beliefs and practices. This registered, it is important to point out that for a long time now, in scholarly schemes and everyday apprehensions, the earnings and ends of progress in the past, entitlements and expectations of development in the present – conceived as ways of seeing, methods of imagining, modes of feeling, structures of sentiment, and textures of experience – have formed part of the guarantee of history under modernity. Here, engaging a history without warranty is a possible means of cautiously questioning the guarantees of progress under regimes of modernity, and of thinking through the projections and presuppositions, scandals and schemes that it produces and sustains. Now, if the invocation of a history without warranty brings to mind Stuart Hall’s celebrated call for “Marxism without guarantee”, it equally intimates its own emphases. The dispositions of a history without warranty participate in wider, ongoing critical efforts that intimate a “recent ontological shift” in contemporary theory. These are, in the words of the political philosopher Steven White, “the result of a growing propensity to interrogate more carefully those ‘entities’ presupposed by our typical ways of seeing and doing in the modern world”.35 The conceptions, propositions and outrages queried by a history without warranty are neither cast as simple objects of knowledge nor treated as mere ideological aberrations. Rather, they are understood as acutely intimating conditions of knowing, entities and co-ordinates that shore up our worlds, demanding critical articulation. Precisely such recognition learns, yet differs, from “anti-foundational” perspectives, primarily concerned with undoing “foundations” and “metaphysics”, whether intimating stout resistance to murky worlds that have come to pass or insinuating heroic resignation before the terrible truths that lie before us today. Echoing White, there is a certain shift of “intellectual burden from the preoccupation with what is opposed and deconstructed”, to equally engaging “what must be articulated, cultivated, and affirmed in its wake” (White, 2000:8). 35 Such a shift, then, implies even more than the “ontological turn” that both considers what “entities are presupposed” by theories and takes on “a commitment to the existence of certain entities” entailed in the affirmation of a theory. White (2000:4 – 5). Furthermore, critical work in the social sciences and the socially inflected humanities today can intersect with the kind of questioning that defines the recent ontological shift under discussion. To register this is far from denying the salience of distinctive procedures of interrogation and affirmation in contemporary political theory, but to prudently engage them in order to address related concerns, especially articulating worlds beyond the West.

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The dispositions of a history without warranty are intimately tied to the terms of a “weak ontology”. They acknowledge at once the contestable, contingent character and the unavoidable, necessary nature of “fundamental conceptualizations of self, other, and world”.36 Here there is no simple railing against the universal, no a priori championing of the particular. Rather, there is close attention to the shared entailment and mutual production of the universal and the particular, to their founding exclusions and constitutive contradictions, to their pervasive presence and urgent claims.37 This further implies careful consideration of analytical categories of an academic provenance by bringing them into conjunction with the quotidian configurations of these entities, the demanding terms of everyday worlds – privileging neither the analytical nor the everyday, but vigilantly unfolding both in view of their critical articulation –. Through such dispositions toward prudent interrogation, affirmation in wake of the interrogation, an affirmation open to revision – each an actual enactment and not merely a programmatic pronouncement – a history without warranty opens the possibility of holding a mirror up to the assumptions, categories, and entities at the basis of social worlds. Such measures call into question forceful scandals, which we have encountered already – namely, the scandals of the West and the nation; but also the outrage of other categories – entities such as the postcolonial. Yet, the protocols at stake do not treat such scandals as mere analytical phantasms, here now and gone tomorrow, easily excised through prescient knowledge. To repeat, these procedures recognize the dense presence of the scandals not only as objects of knowledge but as conditions of knowing. They remain aware of the analytical expressions and quotidian configurations of the scandals, the analytical and the quotidian that come together and fall apart. To speak of these scandals, then, is to resist the desire to turn the West and the nation (or empire and modernity) into monolithic manifestations of all-encompassing power. It is also to desist from the temptation to simply de-provincialize Western history and knowledge, to 36 Ibid., this further means that my proposal for a history without warranty, engaging the terms of a weak ontology, learns from but also extends the sensibilities and steps of “postfoundational” criticism. 37 For rather different expressions of such dispositions compare Chakrabarty (2000) and Stephen White’s emphasis on figurations of “universal constitutives of human being” as premised upon the recognition that the persuasiveness of these existential universals “can never be fully disentangled from an interpretation of present historical circumstances” –so that “gaining access to something universal about human being and world is always also a construction that cannot rid itself of a historical dimension” (White, 2000:9)–. See also, Saurabh Dube, “Presence of Europe: An interview with Dipesh Chakrabarty”, in Dube (ed.) (2004b); and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “North Atlantic universals: Analytical fictions, 1492 – 1945”, in Dube (ed.) (2010c). It seems to me that these distinct considerations nonetheless suggest shared horizons, both crucial to the interrogation and affirmation at the core of a history without warranty.

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merely demystify the modern state and nation. Instead, it is to re-encounter the parochialism of the West and the conceit of the nation. Such an approach entails attending to the formative heterogeneity that produces and probes the exclusive claims of the West and the nation. Clearly, we should neither approach the notion of the scandal as signifying stark sensation, nor treat the existence of scandal as a mere deviation from the social order. Instead, we must register the pervasive presence of scandal as intimating the familiar state of social orders. Thus, the obviously sensational projections of the West and the nation themselves insinuate routine renewals of dominant norms and governmental commands. Put differently, to stay with the scandals that shore up our murky worlds is to trace the intimate interleaving of nation and history, the uneasy braiding of the colonial and the postcolonial, and the intricate interweaving of empire and modernity.

References Adorno, Theodor (2005). Minima Moralia. London: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Apter, David E. (1965). The Politics of Modernization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (1992). Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge. Bear, Laura (2007). Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self. New York: Columbia University Press. B¦n¦, V¦ronique (2008). Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bilgrami, Akeel. “Occidentalism, The Very Idea: An Essay on the Enlightenment and Enchantment”, http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2008/09/occidentalismt.html, accessed 19 November 2010. Birla, Ritu (2009). Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India. Durham: Duke University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press. – (2000). Pascalian Meditations. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Burton, Antoinette (ed.) (1999). Gender, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities. London: Routledge. Calhoun, Craig (ed.) (1992). Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Postcoloniality and the artifice of history : Who speaks for ‘Indian’ pasts?” in: Representations 37, Winter 1992. – (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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– (2002). Habitations of Modernity : Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Childs, Peter (2000). Modernism: The New Cultural Idiom. New York: Routledge. Comaroff, John L. and Jean Comaroff (1992), Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder, Col., et al.: Westview Press. Comaroff, John and Jean Comaroff (eds.) (1993). Modernity and its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – (1997). Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on the South African Frontier, vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Daedalus, Special issue: Early Modernities, 127, 3, 1998. Daedalus, Special issue: Multiple Modernities, 129, 1, 2000. Donham, Donald (1999). Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution. Berkeley : University of California Press. Dube, Saurabh (1998). Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity, and Authority among a Central Indian Community, 1780 – 1950. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. – (2004a). Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles. Durham and London: Duke University Press. – (ed.) (2004b). Postcolonial Passages. New York and New Delhi: Oxford University Press. – and Ishita Banerjee-Dube (eds.) (2005). Unbecoming Modern: Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities. New Delhi and New York: Social Science Press and Berghahn Books. – (ed.) (2007). Historical Anthropology. New York and New Delhi: Oxford University Press. – (2010a). After Conversion: Cultural Histories of Modern India. New Delhi: Yoda Press. – (2010b). “Critical Crossovers: Cultural Identities, Postcolonial Perspectives, and Subaltern Studies”. In Margaret Wetherell and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (eds.). The Sage Handbook of Identities. London: Sage. – (ed.) (2010c). Enchantments of Modernity : Empire, Nation, Globalization. London: Routledge. – (ed.) (2011). Modern Makeovers: Handbook of Modernity in South Asia. New York and New Delhi: Oxford University Press. During, Simon (2004). Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Dussel, Enrique (1993). “Eurocentrism and modernity”. Boundary 2, 20. Fabian, Johannes (1983). Time and the Other : How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Ferguson, James (1999). Expectations of Modernity : Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley : University of California Press. Fischer, Sibylle (2004). Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham: Duke University Press. Gaonkar, Dilip P. (ed.) (2001). Alternative Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. Giddens, Anthony (1990). Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gilroy, Paul (1995). Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (1992). “A history of the concept ‘modern’”, in Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Making Sense in Life and Literature. Trans. Glen Burns. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1971). Knowledge and Human Interests. Trans. J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press. – (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action. Trans. T. McCarthy, 2 vols. Boston: Beacon Press. – (1987). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity : Twelve Lectures. Trans. Fredrick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press. – (1992). Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays. Trans. William Mark Hohengarten. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Harootunian, Harry (2000). Overcome by Modernity : History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kaiwar, Vasant and Sucheta Majumdar (eds.) (2003). Antinomies of Modernity : Essays on Race, Orient, Nation. Durham: Duke University Press. Kelley, Donald R. (1998). Faces of History : Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lutz, Catherine (1988). Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and their Challenge to Western Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Meyer, Birgit and Peter Pels (eds.) (2003). Magic and Modernity : Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mignolo, Walter (1995). The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press. Mitchell, Timothy (ed.) (2000). Questions of Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Owen, Alex (2004). The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pandian, Anand (2009). Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India. Durham: Duke University Press. Piot, Charles (1999). Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rao, Anupama (2009). The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. Berkeley : University of California Press. Rofel, Lisa (1998). Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. Berkeley : University of California Press. Rostow, W. W. (1960). The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saler, Michael (2006). “Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review”, American Historical Review, 111 (3). Seth, Sanjay (2007). Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India. Durham: Duke University Press. Subramanian, Ajantha (2009). Shorelines: Spaces and Rights in South Asia. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Weidman, Amanda J. (2006). Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India. Durham: Duke University Press.

II The Multiplicity of Human Experiences with and within a Global Modernity

Raewyn Connell

Antipodes. Australian Sociology’s Struggles with Place, Memory and Neoliberalism1

Introduction Contemporary Australia is a rich peripheral country, a product of long-distance British settler colonialism and its violent encounter with indigenous peoples, plus increasingly diverse immigration. A pastoral economy was partly transformed in the 20th century by import replacement industrialization, but under neoliberalism has returned to dependence on primary exports and services. Australia figured in nineteenth-century sociology as the “antipodes” in a social as well as geographical sense; news about its indigenous people provided two generations of Northern sociologists, from Spencer to Durkheim, with images for their scientific fantasies of the primitive. When sociology was institutionalized in Australian universities, from the late 1950s on, it forgot colonial history (in the new academic division of labor, indigenous people were now understood as the business of anthropology) and inverted the relation with the global metropole. Australian society was now read as part of modernity, virtually ignoring place and the land. Australian sociology imported functionalism, neoMarxism, empiricism and post-structuralism in a hybrid form of knowledge that combined local data with metropolitan concepts and methods. By the arrival of neoliberalism in the 1980s, Australian sociology was an “extraverted” discipline in the sense described by Hountondji in Endogenous Knowledge. Careers were shaped by travel to, and recognition by, metropolitan institutions; and what was studied as “theory” almost entirely consisted of texts from the metropole. Even models of globalization were imported from the metropole. Responding to neoliberalism, therefore, was difficult. Australian sociology produced a pioneering study of social processes underlying neoliberalism in the state, Pusey’s Economic Rationalism in Canberra, and a pioneering discussion of the interplay between neoliberal reform and feminism, Yeatman’s Bureaucrats, Technocrats, Femo1 Paper for Conference of the Council of National Associations of the International Sociological Association, Taipei, 23 – 25 March 2009.

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crats, but was slow to turn these into an analysis of the specific form taken by neoliberalism in the global periphery. Neoliberal governments have made such thinking more difficult by the imposition of development-oriented “national priorities” in research that never include critique or theory ; and by higher education policies that force universities to compete within a regime of performativity with output measures (e. g. journal ratings, citation counts) centered on the U.S. academic system. Australian sociology has recently been taking much more account of place and history, indigenous experience and imperialism. Examples are Bulbeck’s Re-orienting Western Feminisms, my Southern Theory, and the first special issue of Journal of Sociology edited by indigenous sociologists. We have begun to examine metropolitan thought consciously as readers from the antipodes with a colonial history ; and to search for connections with sociology in other countries of the periphery. But this trend is in sharp tension with the neo-colonialism inherent in the neoliberal university system.

1

Orientation

This essay on sociology in Australia concerns the relationship between a social science created as an ongoing enterprise in Europe and North America, and the inhabitants of a country almost as far away from those centers as it is possible to go. My title “Antipodes” is symbolic as well as literal. The story concerns the troubled negotiation of place and historical memory across huge distances – not entirely abolished by the Internet or by neoliberal globalization. This essay could not have been written twenty years ago. It rests on the active re-thinking of relations between knowledge in the global metropole and the global periphery that has been undertaken recently by social scientists around the world. This movement of thought includes Chilla Bulbeck’s (1998) examination of world perspectives in gender analysis, Syed Farid Alatas’ (2006) explorations of Asian discourses in social science, Jos¦ Maur†cio Domingues’ (2008) rethinking of modernity from a Latin American perspective, and others. I have been particularly influenced by Paulin Hountondji’s (1997, 2002) approach to the political economy of knowledge, building on African debates and investigations. I will be using Hountondji’s key concept of “extraverted” knowledge systems below. A fuller account of the approach underlying this paper is given in my Southern Theory (Connell, 2007). Rich materials, and other interpretations of the story, can be found in John Germov and Tara Renae McGee’s (2005) Histories of Australian Sociology.

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Introducing Australia

Australia is a small rich country of the global periphery, a few hundred kilometers south-east of Indonesia. It contains about twenty million people and vast deposits of coal. The population, mostly here as a result of long-distance migration over the last two hundred years, continues to grow by a controlled importation currently running at about 140,000 people per year. The coal, laid down in the Permian era perhaps 250 million years ago, is currently being dug up as fast as possible by large corporations and exported to be burned for power and the coke used in steelmaking. This process makes Australia a significant threat to the rest of the world, in terms of global warming. The national government is promising large subsidies to the coal industry to enable this traffic to grow. With the exception of oil-producing Gulf States, Australia has the highest proportion of immigrants of any country in the world. Until the 1940s these were overwhelmingly British. The country now has an ethnically plural population, still mainly European in background but with significant groups from Lebanon, Vietnam, China and the Pacific (including New Zealand). Australian intellectuals since the nineteenth century have been fond of declaring this a new country, a place where the injustices of Europe could be forgotten, a paradise for the working man. “Working man” is correct: the colonizers brought a patriarchal social order that subordinated women, and created a strong gender division of labor in the new colonial economy. A men’s labor movement did develop in the late nineteenth century, and in the early twentieth century Australia was the first country to have a series of elected Labor governments, at both the state and national levels. Australian “egalitarianism” became a favored cultural selfimage, at least among the men, and indeed it still is. However, Australia is actually an old country : geologically the oldest continent, and, more important for our purposes, the home of the oldest continuously existing civilization known. The famous egalitarianism of the colonizers was not extended to the country’s indigenous population, who have undergone a sustained trauma of dispossession, rape, evangelism, racist contempt, heavy-handed government, alcoholism, and premature death over two hundred years. A remarkable artistic and political revival in the last generation has changed the cultural position of Aboriginal people, bringing back the memory of colonization. So far this has done little to change poverty, policing, or death rates. “Australia” is not an indigenous term. It was the name given to the island continent by an explorer who had been among the first British officers of a penal colony planted in the aftermath of the American Revolution, as part of the second British Empire’s expansion in the Asia-Pacific region. Its literal meaning

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is “South-ia”, more elegantly “The South Land”, and the word embodies the British colonizers’ sense of being a long way from home. Australian intellectuals were to grapple for a very long time with the problem of where home is. I work at the University of Sydney, which began teaching in the 1850s. The Latin motto it adopted then – still part of the University’s logo – reads “Sidera Mens Eadem Mutato”: roughly, “Despite changed skies, the same mind”. The tiny British settlements scattered around the southern and eastern coastline of the continent gradually grew into towns, and two of them, Melbourne and Sydney, into substantial cities. This was the consequence of pastoral and agricultural expansion in the interior, the process that shattered most Aboriginal communities; gold rushes, which tripled the settler population; and then an autonomous urban growth, sustained by heavy investment and migration from Britain. By the early twentieth century, when the colonies federated, Australia was a large-scale exporter of minerals, meat, grain, and wool – a classic example of dependent development in the periphery –. It was distinctive mainly in the strength of its labor movement, which led to a system of government-regulated class negotiation that produced a male wage-earner’s welfare state. The vulnerability of dependent development was proven in two devastating depressions, in the 1890s and 1930s. Australia’s political and capitalist elites gradually shifted to another economic strategy : import replacement industrialization (IRI). Led by the rich mining company BHP, which became a modern steelmaker and steel products fabricator, the local economy shifted towards secondary industry. Australia was, in fact, independently following the peripheral development strategy famously articulated by Raffll Prebisch and CEPAL, the UN economic commission for Latin America. Industrial growth brought in a fresh migrant population, and the associated growth of service industries brought large numbers of married women into the money economy, triggering cultural changes that found political expression in the 1970s as multiculturalism and feminism. Industrial growth lasted until the 1970s; but things began to change in the era of the oil price shock, and changed dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s. Under the care of neoliberal economists, now ensconced in the commanding heights of the bureaucracy (Pusey 1991), the mechanisms of support for industrial development were dismantled: tariffs, capital controls, infrastructure, public enterprises and planning processes. Light manufacturing, such as clothing, fled to low-wage countries. The pursuit of comparative advantage, the banner strategy of neoliberalism on a global scale, replaced IRI. Coal mining for export, not for steel production, became the leading industry, and BHP, amalgamating with a South African company, rose to new heights as a transnational mining corporation. Even universities were transformed into an export industry, in which

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Australia was supposed to have some comparative advantage. Where Australian universities had formerly offered free education to south-east Asian students as a form of aid, they now (following government policy) suck money out of southeast and east Asia by charging high fees for degrees. Australian party politics is now a contest between hard-line conservative neoliberalism, and a milder Labor neoliberalism. Except for neoclassical economics, the social sciences find themselves marginalized in the public culture. Perhaps surprisingly, sociology enrolments in universities remain steady ; and TASA, the Australian sociological association, is flourishing. But Australian sociology has come down a strange path to get here.

3

Sociology’s antipodes

The cultural project called sociology that was constructed by intellectuals of the global metropole – Western Europe and Eastern North America – in the second half of the nineteenth century, centered on the concept of social progress. Contrasts between “primitive” and “advanced” social forms were the essence of the new science. Different theorists propounded different models of progress, but all were agreed on the fact. The fact of progress was confirmed, through the first two generations of sociology’s growth, by data from the frontier of colonization. Since most sociologists today never read texts from that period (except three or four retrospectively-canonized and atypical “classics”), it is not often realized how intimate were the relationships between the birth of sociology and the growth of imperialism. Data about the colonized, sent back to the metropole by explorers, colonial officials, missionaries, traders, travelers and memoirists, made up a large part of the discipline’s empirical base. They are extensively quoted in the texts of Spencer, Ward, Sumner, Durkheim, Tönnies, and their contemporaries. These data were crucial to sociology’s claim to scientificity, in the 1890s and 1900s, when sociology was transforming itself, in the universities of the metropole, from a speculative branch of philosophy into a teaching discipline. The concept of progress arrayed societies on a scale. This hierarchy had necessarily both a top and a bottom. The top was, of course, the imperial powers themselves – who had shown by their compassion, enlightenment, tolerance and respect for human rights that they stood at the pinnacle of human development –. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t make jokes about this. The criteria actually mentioned by evolutionary sociologists which placed their own societies as the top of the scale included technology, science, military power, stable state institutions, economic productivity, and respect for women.

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And the bottom? There had to be a bottom. The societies identified in sociological texts of the period as the most primitive, the most degraded, were the San people of southern Africa, the indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego, and, most often, the Australians, meaning the Aboriginal people of Australia. It is no accident, I think, that these were three of the southernmost populations known to European colonizers, literally the most distant. They were also populations that the colonizers generally failed to incorporate into colonial workforces, which was taken as a sign of the incorrigible primitiveness of the natives, rather than the dynamics of the colonial economy (exceptionally, the pastoral industry in northern Australia did rely on Aboriginal workers; this was however a relatively late development in Australian colonial settlement). When I say that these societies were understood as primitive, I am actually being gentle. Sociological texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are peppered with lurid statements about Aboriginal people and societies, statements that are brutal and contemptuous – and in many cases, one must say, amount to pseudo-scientific lies. I don’t propose to quote the worst here, as they are so offensive. But to make the point strongly I will quote Êmile Durkheim, who was not a racist, but whose sociology embeds a deep ethnocentrism nevertheless. On the opening page of his last book, published in 1912, he wrote: “In this book we propose to study the most primitive and simple religion which is actually known”, and the case on which he built his theory was the Arrernte people of the central desert in Australia. (Arrernte people actually have a very complex religious and artistic culture.) I am amazed and appalled that Durkheim’s book is still taken seriously by some sociologists as a foundation for the sociology of religion and culture. This intellectual colonizing of indigenous Australian societies, using them as an anchor or end-point for a sociological doctrine of progress, died away after the epistemological break in metropolitan sociology around 1920 that I have described elsewhere (Connell 1997). From then on, social analysis of Aboriginal societies was left to anthropology, which did not eliminate the problem of colonialism but did lead, over time, to a more respectful engagement with Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal people.

4

Settler society, social science, and the lost leader

Australian settler society was of no interest to nineteenth-century sociological theorists – not even to the author of the colonies’ first major contribution to sociological thought. The Aryan Household (Hearn 1878) was a treatise on the development of social institutions among “our remote forefathers”; i. e. a contribution from the colonies to the metropolitan genre of speculation about social

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progress in European antiquity. It was written in Melbourne, but could as easily have been written in Heidelberg or Edinburgh. Settler society, though outside the purview of formal social science, was nevertheless an object of administrative knowledge. The British settlement in Australia was, in fact, one of the most thoroughly documented societies of its time – as might be expected in what was originally an open-air prison –. Periodic censuses (originally called “musters”), transportation records, commercial archives, official correspondence, court records, and Governors’ reports to the authorities in London, are quite abundant. The Australian colonies were also the target of British official enquiries in 1812, 1819 – 21 and 1837, and though these were partisan, they collected rich evidence about social patterns among the settlers (for extracts, and an account of the social structure revealed by these sources, see Connell and Irving 1992). Colonial society also became the object of unofficial enquiries of various kinds. In the 1850s the young immigrant William Stanley Jevons, later famous as an economist in Britain, conducted a social survey that explored urban poverty in the era of the gold rushes. Davison (2003) sees this as the first episode in a discontinuous history of social surveys which developed momentum in Australia only in the 1940s. But the story is not quite so discontinuous. There was active debate about social questions, and some investigative journalism, in the lively newspapers of colonial Melbourne (less so in Sydney, then the more conservative city.) Literary visitors such as the famous English novelist Anthony Trollope moved through Australian settler society and wrote extended accounts of their experience. The colonial parliaments addressed social questions and sometimes collected substantial evidence about them; for instance an enquiry into workers’ housing and health by the NSW Legislative Assembly in 1875 – 76. The growth of the labor movement and class conflict in the late nineteenth century intensified these debates and gave them a focus: the strategy to be followed by Labor parties. By the early twentieth century an intellectual milieu existed in the major cities that supported an interest in social science ideas ranging from Marxism to eugenics (Melleuish 1995). It had many similarities to the metropolitan milieu out of which academic sociology crystallized. Academic sociology was not established in Australia’s small universities at this time, and there is much debate about why (Germov and McGee 2005). One thing that did happen was the launching of the careers of two Australians who became famous social scientists after migrating to the metropole, Elton Mayo and Vere Gordon Childe. Childe is the more interesting, both because he was the more powerful thinker and because he kept an emotional connection with Australia, where he died in 1957. He was a radical democrat who became an unorthodox Marxist, and probably the world’s most influential pre-historian. His left-wing politics denied

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him an Australian academic job, and perhaps an Australian academic career (and later denied him entry to the USA). His sharp, disillusioned account of Australian working-class politics, How Labor Governs (1923), long stood as the classic text on Australian party politics. This book is the focus of the only attempt I know to evaluate Childe as a social theorist, in which Beilharz (1995) places Childe in the context of Michels, Weber, Ostrogorski and the European agonizing about modern political parties and movements. But it was the prehistory that made Childe famous, and it is there that his power as a social theorist is best seen. Childe called himself “an archaeologist”, and he certainly did some digging in sites in Scotland and Ireland – with controversial results –. But his forte was synthesis and interpretation on a continental, and then world, scale. I think there is a good case for seeing him fundamentally as a historical sociologist, who poured an immense knowledge of archaeological detail into the reconstruction of ancient social structures and dynamics of societal change. Curiously, Childe’s opening masterpiece, The Dawn of European Civilization (first edition 1925), overlaps the topic of The Aryan Household, but the approach could hardly be more different. The Dawn is a tremendous compilation of Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age data from eastern, western, southern and northern Europe, carefully sorted by region and time, out of which Childe maps the succession and overlap of cultures, and debates the issues of dating, diffusion and autonomy from the urban civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Several features of his later work are already visible here: a massive empirical base, a vigorous classification, a concern with the cultural meanings of the material remains, and an attempt both to reconstruct the functioning societies that gave rise to these remains, and to construct an intelligible narrative of large-scale social change. Is there anything Australian about this? Technically, it could have been written by someone brought up in Europe; and Childe never described it as a perspective from the colonies. And yet… there is something about Childe’s powerful sense of space and distance, and his concern with the complexities of center-periphery relations in the ancient world, that is easy to see as coming from a colonial. There is a memory of structure here that is different from the concerns with racial ancestry, with national distinctiveness, or with schemes drawn from Engels, that preoccupied many of his contemporaries in archaeology. There isn’t space here to explore Childe’s social thought in his later writings. I will simply note that he produced, as well as syntheses of prehistory on a broader canvas than The Dawn, an influential account of urbanism, a historically-based social ontology, and a sophisticated sociology of knowledge that differs markedly from the Scheler-Mannheim tradition (see e. g. Childe 1949). Of course his

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thought was limited in ways characteristic of his generation, so his legacy has been controversial among archaeologists. He remains, however, the most influential social scientist ever to emerge from Australia. As a lost leader of Australian intellectual life, he provokes reflection on whether a different path for intellectual workers in the periphery might have been possible.

5

Tectonic illusion: the antipodes become metropole

In the 1940s survey research on Australian settler society became familiar, associated with a new era of social reform. Between the late 1950s and late 1960s sociology was institutionalized in Australian universities, with a growing number of named departments, a professional association, a professional journal, and an increasing output of research. This enterprise, as we see it in the early issues of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology and in the first sociology textbook, Australian Society (Davies and Encel 1965), was modeled on the academic and policy sociology of the United States (and to a lesser extent, Britain) that had become hegemonic after the collapse of Comtean sociology. This is particularly clear in its methods: sample survey research and demographic studies based on censuses were prominent; urban ethnography, elite studies, studies of the assimilation of immigrant communities, and other descriptive studies were also undertaken. Jerzy Zubrzycki’s Settlers of the Latrobe Valley (1964) and Jean Martin’s Refugee Settlers (1965) are perhaps the finest examples of this genre. There was not much theoretical discussion in the 1950s and 60s; the excitement was provided simply by doing professional sociology (in Burawoy’s sense) in the virgin field of Australia. To the extent there was theory, it was mostly some variant of functionalism (Fallding 1962), or an uncomplicated social psychology. The situation in these decades was so different from the relation between metropolitan sociology and Australia in the nineteenth century that it calls for thought. Rather than seeing Australia as the antipodes, the site of extreme difference, sociologists were now treating “Australian society” as virtually the same thing as metropolitan society. It was as if, by a tectonic miracle, the Australian plate had sailed up the Atlantic and joined the European and North American plates. To put it another way, Australia’s first generation of professional sociologists forgot the history of Australia as a settler colony, and thought of it as one of the species of “modern society”. In a truly bizarre turn of speech, social scientists – as well as politicians and journalists – when thinking in this mode, frequently call Australia a “Western” country (West of what? New Zealand… Easter Island… Chile…). The qualification that must be noted was the empirical concern with immi-

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gration. Immigration was the most common topic of research projects by Australian sociologists in the 1950s and 1960s. But this did not lead them to see Australian society in terms of place in the periphery. Rather, the modern Anglophone culture of the British settlers was taken as normative, and the central problem was about how non-Anglo arrivals assimilated to it, culturally, psychologically and economically. Immigration was thus conceived as if it were into Europe or North America. From the perspective of the global political economy of knowledge, we could say that professional sociology in Australia was created as an extraverted science (Hountondji 2002). In this pattern, the theoretical (and methodological) moments of science are produced in the metropole, while the raw materials – data – are produced in the periphery. From the point of view of Australian sociology, the concepts and techniques were imported from North America and Europe. Unlike the pattern in natural science of which Hountondji writes, for Australian sociology the main audience was located in Australia: students, policymakers, journalists, and for a few, a wider reading public. However, crucially, the main professional audience was located in the metropole. So Australian sociologists sought to publish papers in US and UK journals, often received their graduate training in the U.S. or the UK, and almost always travelled to those countries on sabbatical and to attend international conferences. The cultural difficulties of extraverted social science are particularly well brought out in a now forgotten document, a 52-page monograph The Dilemma of an Australian Sociology by the young Warren Osmond, published by a leftwing magazine in 1972. This was an extended review of the 1970 book Equality and Authority written by Sol Encel, who at the time held the chair of sociology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and was one of the three or four most prominent sociologists in the country. Encel’s book, a bulky monograph about Australian elites, was perhaps the most striking product of Australian professional sociology in its foundation era. Encel himself was no ivory-tower academic; he sought to be a public sociologist and was a frequent commentator in media and an advisor to Labor governments. In the book, however, he sought to do the academic job of relating Australian social stratification to theoretical models and debates, derived of course from the USA and Europe. I cannot do full justice to Osmond’s critique here. I think he was right about the conceptual vagueness and methodological limitations of the book, though he underestimated Encel’s empirical knowledge of hierarchies and power-holders in Australian life. But the point of particular interest is Osmond’s analysis of Encel’s “Australianism”. He argued that Equality and Authority could not offer a coherent sociology of power – though Encel invoked Mills, Weber and others – because it was trying to do this while simultaneously committed to a consensual, ultimately

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functionalist, view of Australian culture. The content here was drawn from the “egalitarian” view of Australian life, which we have already encountered. Like many other intellectuals of the time, Encel treated this theme as the keynote of the local value system or political culture. It was the really distinctive thing about society in this place: being Australian was about inhabiting an egalitarian culture. It is this, ironically, that led to the growth of bureaucratic authority in the form of an intrusive, regulatory state. Thus, to render Osmond’s critique into somewhat more modern language, the specificity of the settler colony renders incoherent the intellectual borrowings by which extraverted professional sociology seeks to merge periphery and metropole. Although this conclusion is clear, the terms of Osmond’s argument too were drawn overwhelmingly from debates in the metropole. He had no more conceptualization of periphery-metropole relations than Encel had; both professional sociologist and radical critic operated in an extraverted intellectual domain. What Quijano (2000) calls the “coloniality of power” was nowhere in view, even in an intense debate on Australia’s power structure.

6

Critical empiricism and the neoliberal turn

The second generation of professional sociologists in Australia, who became influential in the late 1970s and 1980s, were further to the Left than their predecessors – some owing their political formation to the student movement, the anti-war struggle and the Women’s Liberation movement – and were sharply critical of dependence on US functionalism and cold-war consensus or stratification theory. Yet they too drew heavily on concepts from the metropole, if a different set of concepts; among them Marcuse’s critique of advanced capitalism, feminist theories of patriarchy, Gouldner’s critical sociology, Althusser’s structuralist Marxism, and a little later, Foucault’s post-structuralism. Since this is my own generation of Australian sociology, it is hard for me to gain perspective; but for what it is worth, I would see the originality of this moment more in a new style of empirical work than in formal theory. For instance, Ann Game and Rosemary Pringle’s Gender at Work (1983), later voted one of the ten most influential books in Australian sociology, included industryby-industry studies of women’s employment combining statistics, personal experiences, and industrial relations narratives. This project originated in a socialist-feminist group of activists involved in equal pay campaigns, and this political project gave intellectual edge to the finished book. In such cases there was an attempt to link professional sociology to a form of practice and a body of people who could make political use of the findings:

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feminists, unionists, teachers, health workers. This was also true of Yoland Wadsworth’s best-selling Do It Yourself Social Research (1983) in the social welfare sector, and other studies. A test of practical relevance, more than methodological rigor, was sought for sociology. Writers were seeking audiences who were different from those made up of the policymakers whom the public sociology of the previous generation had pursued. If I am right in thinking that the hallmark of this generation was a critical empiricism that hoped to connect its production of knowledge to social movements rather than policy elites, it may help to explain why Australian sociology was blindsided by neoliberalism. Neoliberalism gained a grip, as it did everywhere in the periphery, as a change of strategy by state and corporate elites, not on the terrain of social movements. Some of the key moves, financial deregulation and privatization of public assets, were made not by the conservative parties but by the Labor Party, which held federal power from 1983 to 1996. Most sociologists continued to see Labor as a social-democratic party of moderate progressive reform, long after Labor had actually become neoliberal. The exception – and it is a notable one – was Michael Pusey, whose Economic Rationalism in Canberra (1991) caused a local stir at the time of publication and in retrospect seems important in world terms. It was one of the first empirical studies of neoliberalism as a social phenomenon, not just a political agenda or package of economic policies. Pusey studied the state elite through which neoliberal policies had been introduced in Australia, and traced a transformation in the composition of the federal bureaucracy. Economists trained in neoclassical economics had been rising to the top of the system, bringing in more of their own kind, and gradually changing the common sense of government from an ethos of public service to an ethos of market forces. In a sequel, The Experience of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Reform (2003), Pusey collated statistics showing that the benefits of the market agenda were concentrated at the top, among the corporate rich. Over a period of five years Pusey interviewed people from deciles 3 to 9 of the income distribution scale, finding insecurity and anxiety as the market agenda penetrated all spheres of life, but no political consensus on a response. By the time this study was published, other social scientists had the message too – partly because the universities were among the institutions strongly impacted by neoliberalism –. Bronwyn Davies and Peter Bansel (2005), for instance, have published a subtle analysis of the creation of a neoliberal subjectivity among some academics, who take on the new performativity and competitive system as personal projects; while other academics resist the process, or struggle to find ways to limit its impact. Simon Marginson (1997) opened up the market agenda in education; while Richard Teese and John Polesel (2003) brought the sociology of education up to date with a devastating statistical analysis of how social privilege works

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through competition in matriculation exams, “league tables” of schools, and the rest of the neoliberal apparatus for education. What this work has not yet addressed is the relation between neoliberalism and the process of the production of social-scientific knowledge. I will make just one observation on this. The impact of performance management, output measures, institutional and departmental ranking, and the other techniques of neoliberal management in Australian universities, must be to reinforce intellectual dependence on the metropole. Key metrics of “performance”, such as publication in high-impact journals, are based on U.S.-created and U.S.-centered scales. One earns a publication in a U.S. journal by meeting the U.S. editor’s and reviewers’ criteria of relevance and by addressing problems in the literature with which they are familiar. It is hardly reasonable to expect American academics to act differently! But the result in the periphery is ever more extraverted fields of knowledge.

7

Rediscovering place

Even this second wave of critical realism, however, did not necessarily grapple with place, or try to develop a locally distinctive social science. Davies’ use of post-structuralist theory, Pusey’s use of Habermas and Teese’s use of Bourdieu still follow the pattern of importing theory and combining it with Australian data, as if Australia were simply an extension of the metropole. The tectonic illusion survives. In 1997 another well-known Australian sociologist, Peter Beilharz, published a book called Imagining the Antipodes. This was not in the vein of critical realism; it was, rather, an extended study of a particular Australian intellectual, the art critic Bernard Smith. A generation earlier, Smith had written a widely admired historical study, European Vision and the South Pacific, and was also the author of a 1959 “Antipodean Manifesto” that attacked both abstraction and socialist realism in visual art. Beilharz sees Smith’s work as “the most sophisticated social theory which has yet been developed in Australia”, notable for its awareness of imperialism and its grappling with periphery/center relationships. In the same year, another Australian sociologist, Chilla Bulbeck, published Re-orienting Western Feminisms. This too departed from the critical realist model, being a study of the theories, language and political programs of feminist movements around the world. Bulbeck had already begun mapping the political movements ten years before in One World Women’s Movement; but now she turned to the problem of the incompatibility of perspectives arising in metropole and periphery. Her conclusion, as suggested by the title, involved a re-making of feminist thought in the metropole to open it to a world of multiple theories and

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conflicting agendas on a global scale. Bulbeck (1992) was already the author of a pioneering study of gender relations in Australia’s own colonialist adventure in Papua New Guinea; and has since led multi-national research on youth and gender ideology in the Asia-Pacific region (Bulbeck 2009). These two projects are leading examples of a wider trend in Australian sociology to concern itself with comparison, colonialism, and the place of Australia in the global periphery. Gillian Bottomley’s (1992) work on migration and culture, and Michael Gilding’s (1997) comparative analysis of family patterns, are other examples. This has, so far, grown out of the sociology of settler society in Australia. Indigenous people appeared from time to time in professional sociology, as a minority ethnic group or as subjects of stratification processes; the memory of colonization was, still, repressed. The study of indigenous cultures had long before been assigned, in the division of labor within universities, to the discipline of anthropology. Anthropological work with Aboriginal people has, however, come to look less like classical anthropology and more like critical-realist sociology ; strikingly so in Gillian Cowlishaw’s (2004) brilliant study of race relations in the outback town of Bourke. As the numbers in higher education have grown, sociological work by Aboriginal people themselves has become more of a practical proposition. A network is emerging now, and a Thematic Group has been established in the Australian sociological association. Both the Journal of Sociology (Maggie Walter et al. 2006) and the TASA bulletin Nexus have published issues concerned with indigenous questions, and debates are beginning about the relationship between indigenous knowledge and the social sciences. A process of collective remembering is under way.

8

Conclusion: the spectrum of Southern sociologies

A rich urbanized country with a European-derived population, whose Englishspeaking politicians declare themselves part of “The West” and repeatedly send troops to join US military attacks on Asian countries… this does not sound like part of the global South, as that term was used in UN debates in the 1960s and in development discussions now. True. At the same time, Australia is not part of the metropole, whatever posturing our politicians do. It is geographically remote from the metropole; its modern society was formed by colonialism; it carries forward the tension between indigenous people and settlers; it has a dependent, resource-exporting economy ; it is militarily a joke; and its intellectual life, like other areas of culture, is massively extraverted.

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This is part of the global periphery, though a very different part from its nearest neighbors, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. The dilemma of an Australian sociology, to use Osmond’s phrase, is closely bound up with the place in which that sociology is made, though it has been a struggle to recognize that, and there will be more struggles given neoliberalism’s tendency to homogenize both teaching and research. If I am right in the lines of thought above, the sociology growing from the experience of a settler colony has some inherent tensions. A simple importation of metropolitan theory and method on the basis of the tectonic illusion is not sustainable. But what other basis can be found? Even critical sociology in Australia has depended overwhelmingly on ideas from the metropole. Indigenous knowledge may provide a starting-point for Aboriginal sociologists (though that too is troubled). But indigenous knowledge is certainly not open to wholesale appropriation by sociologists whose formation derives from settler society. Nor is settler society itself culturally coherent. The oppositions between Christian and Islamic, European and Asian, secular and religious, patriarchal and feminist, bourgeois and proletarian, are internal to contemporary Australia. If we accept that the future of sociology (together with the other social sciences) crucially involves recognition of knowledge produced in the global periphery, then it becomes important to recognize the diversity and internal complexity of the periphery. We must try to chart the relations between the different social and cultural dynamics generated around the periphery. Perhaps I was wrong to use the title Southern Theory rather than Southern Theories, though I intended Theory as a collective noun. This conference offers an excellent chance to think about both the diversity of knowledge production within structures of global domination, and the relations among diverse knowledges and their producers.

References Alatas, Syed Farid (2006). Alternative Discourses in Asian Social Science: Responses to Eurocentrism. New Delhi: Sage. Beilharz, Peter (1995). “Vere Gordon Childe and Social Theory”. In Gathercole, Peter, Irving, T.H. and Melleuish, Gregory (eds.). Childe and Australia: Archaeology, Politics and Ideas, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, pp. 162 – 182. – (1997). Imagining the Antipodes: Culture, Theory and the Visual in the Work of Bernard Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bottomley, Gillian (1992). From Another Place: Migration and the Politics of Culture. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Bulbeck, Chilla (1988). One World Women’s Movement. London: Pluto Press.

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– (1992). Australian Women in Papua New Guinea: Colonial Passages 1920 – 1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – (1998). Re-Orienting Western Feminisms: Women’s Diversity in a Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – (2009). Sex, Love and Feminism in the Asia Pacific: A cross-cultural study of young people’s attitudes. London: Routledge. Childe, Vere Gordon (1964) [1923]. How Labor Governs: A Study of Workers’ Representation in Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. – (1950) [1925]. The Dawn of European Civilization. Fifth edition, revised. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. – (1949). Social Worlds of Knowledge. L.T. Hobhouse Memorial Trust Lecture No. 19. London: Oxford University Press. Connell, Raewyn (1997). “Why is Classical Theory Classical?”. American Journal of Sociology, vol. 102, no. 6, pp. 1511 – 57. – (2007). Southern Theory : The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Sydney : Allen & Unwin Australia; Cambridge: Polity Press. – and T. H. Irving (1992). Class Structure in Australian History : Poverty and Progress. Second edition, revised. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire. Cowlishaw, Gillian (2004). Blackfellas, Whitefellas and the Hidden Injuries of Race. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Davison, Graeme (2003). “The social survey and the puzzle of Australian sociology”. Australian Historical Studies, no. 121, pp. 139 – 162. Davies, A.F. and Encel, S. (1965). Australian Society : A Sociological Introduction. Melbourne: Cheshire. Davies, Bronwyn and Peter Bansel (2005). “The time of their lives? Academic workers in neoliberal time(s)”. Health Sociology Review, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 47 – 58. Domingues, Jos¦ Mauricio (2008). Latin America and Contemporary Modernity : A Sociological Interpretation. New York: Routledge. Durkheim, Emile (1976) [1912]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Second edition. London: Allen & Unwin. Encel, S. (1970). Equality and Authority: A Study of Class, Status and Power in Australia. Melbourne: Cheshire. Fallding, Harold (1962). “The scope and purpose of sociology. Australian Journal of Politics and History”, vol. 8, pp. 78 – 92. Game, Ann and Rosemary Pringle (1983). Gender at Work. Sydney : Allen & Unwin Australia. Germov, John and Tara Renae McGee (eds.) (2005). Histories of Australian Sociology. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Gilding, Michael (1997). Australian Families: A Comparative Perspective. Melbourne: Longman. Hearn, W.E. (1878). The Aryan Household, its Structure and its Development: An Introduction to Comparative Jurisprudence. Melbourne: George Robertson. Hountondji, Paulin (ed.) (1997). Endogenous Knowledge: Research Trails. Dakar : CODESRIA. – (2002). “Knowledge appropriation in a post-colonial context”. In Catherine A. Odora

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Hoppers (ed.). Indigenous Knowledge and the Integration of Knowledge Systems. Claremont: New Africa Books, pp. 23 – 38. Marginson, Simon (1997). Markets in Education. Sydney : Allen & Unwin Australia. Martin, Jean I. (1965). Refugee Settlers: A Study of Displaced Persons in Australia. Canberra: Australian National University. Melleuish, Gregory (1995). “The place of Vere Gordon Childe in Australian intellectual history”. In Gathercole, Peter, T.H. Irving and Gregory Melleuish (eds.). Childe and Australia: Archaeology, Politics and Ideas. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, pp. 147 – 161. Osmond, Warren (1972). The Dilemma of an Australian Sociology. Melbourne: Arena Publications. Pusey, Michael (1991). Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation-Building State Changes its Mind. London: Cambridge University Press. – (2003). The Experience of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quijano, An†bal (2000). “Coloniality of power and Eurocentrism in Latin America”. International Sociology, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 215 – 232. Teese, Richard and John Polesel (2003). Undemocratic Schooling: Equity and Quality in Mass Secondary Education in Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Wadsworth, Yoland (1983). Do-It-Yourself Social Research. Sydney : Allen & Unwin Australia and Victorian Council of Social Service. Walter, Maggie, Priscilla Pyett, Bill Tyler and Annie Vanderwyk (eds.) (2006). “Beyond the margins/ beyond marginality”. Special issue of Journal of Sociology, vol. 42 no. 4. Zubrzycki, Jerzy (1964). Settlers of the Latrobe Valley : A sociological study of immigrants in the brown coal industry in Australia. Canberra: Australian National University.

Bidhan Roy

Imagining a World of inequality: Representing Class Identities in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles… The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other : Bourgeoisie and Proletariat (Marx and Engels, 1998). In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx articulates a theory of class defined by the relationship of individuals to the mode of economic production. As the epigraph of this chapter indicates, according to Marx, modern capitalism has increasingly bifurcated society by dividing it into the “two great hostile camps” of the “Bourgeoisie and Proletariat”. Within this formulation, classes are objective categories in which the bourgeoisie controls the means of production and is able to profit from it, thereby forcing economic dependence upon the proletariat. Yet this seemingly objective conception of class is complicated by Marx because of the idea of class consciousness: the recognition of the common interests that a particular class shares. The idea of class consciousness is important to Marx because it provides the basis around which class struggle takes place. More specifically, working class-consciousness is understood as a dialectical identity : that is, an identity that both recognizes its shared interest as exploited wage-laborers (a sense of objective class position within capitalist society) and, at the same time, a consciousness that organizes the working class as a revolutionary force for seizing power and building a socialist society.1 Class 1 Despite agreeing on the importance of class-consciousness, the concept of the working class remains a contested term within Marxist theory. As Hardt and Negri note: “The concept of the working class has come to be used as an exclusive concept, not only distinguishing the workers from the owners who do not need to work to support themselves, but also separating the working class from others who work. In its most narrow usage, the concept is employed to refer only to industrial workers, separating them from workers in agriculture, services, and

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consciousness is so important within Marxist theory then, because there can be no class struggle without some sense of class identity that enables such a struggle to be conceived in these terms.2 Yet the concept of class-consciousness renders class a somewhat slippery category because it introduces a subjective, peoplebased dimension to class. In other words, class is not only something that can be conceived objectively in terms of positionality with respect to the mode of economic production, but also a category that must account for individual awareness of this position. This subjective dimension of class raises all sorts of complications in how we conceive of class in society, and has caused numerous debates in social and critical theory following Marx. Certainly, one of the most complex of these debates is that Marx ultimately regards class as a global category (“Workers of all countries, Unite!”) yet establishing a globalized working class consciousness faces numerous challenges because of national, racial, gender and ethnic differences amongst workers. In recent years, theorizing class has become more complex in light of discourses of globalization that have caused numerous scholars working within Marxist theory to re-think traditional ideas of class, as well as many non-Marxist critics to question whether Marx’s conceptions of class remain tenable today. For instance, the economic spatial re-structuring of globalization has caused a dramatic shift in how workers experience their relationship to economic production. As David Harvey notes, such spatial re-organization has important implications for class-consciousness because it forces a re-evaluation of the factory as the “traditional beginning point for class struggle” (Harvey, 2000: 50). This raises a number of questions, such as “what happens when factories disappear or become so mobile as to make permanent mobilizing difficult if not impossible? And what happens when much of the workforce becomes temporary or casualized?” (Idem.). For Harvey and others working within the Marxist tradition, such questions demand extending Marx to account for our particular historical moment and theorizing new globalized articulations of working-class identity. However for non-Marxist theorists, such as Arjun Appadurai and Paul Gilroy, they bring into question Marx’s ability to explain the complexity of the contemporary global economy. Indeed, for Appadurai and, for different reasons, other sectors; at its most broad, working class refers to all waged workers, separating them from the poor, unpaid domestic laborers, and all others who do not receive a wage”. This chapter employs the broadest definition of the working-class outlined above, which it uses to include a range of workers from rural peasants in South Asia to postindustrial workers in America (Hardt and Negri, 2005: xiv). 2 For Marx, writing in the nineteenth century, conceiving of class identities was a relatively straightforward task because of the clear divisions between the consumption patterns, tastes, and income of industrial workers compared to the bourgeoisie. Marx: November 15th 2006.

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Gilroy, the chaotic, de-centered nature of globalization, as well as the increasing importance of diaspora, have eroded traditional class identities and the power of class to motivate and organize political action. Consequently, as these two divergent perspectives suggest, globalization has led to fierce debate over whether it renders Marxist conceptions of class obsolete, or whether it enables the articulation of what Frederic Jameson calls a “class consciousness of a new hitherto undreamed of kind” (Jameson, 1998: 418). This essay proposes that South Asian diasporic fiction offers a useful way of thinking through these debates of the effects of globalization upon class identities. As the three novels examined in this chapter show, the imaginative spaces of such fiction often extend across a global terrain that ranges from impoverished rural regions of the postcolonial world to the metropolitan West, as well as much in between. Such scope is useful because it provides representation of what Harvey calls the “unevenness” of globalization and shows how its effects are experienced in everyday life. It makes Transmission a particularly rich source for exploring how the different scales of economic globalization operate in the affective realm and the implications of this for class identity. In particular, the protagonist of Transmission, Arjun, attempts to come to terms with a complex world that is at once integrated within a global economy and fractured by economic inequality. In so doing, his experience raises a number of important questions, such as: how does South Asian diasporic subjectivity apprehend a world that has “become more phantasmagoric than it had ever been”, to use the words of V.S. Naipaul? (Naipaul, 2004: 156) How is Arjun able to connect the concreteness of his experience of global inequality to the abstractness of the global economy? What role do empathy, dignity, kinship, guilt or other emotional aspects of identity play in making such connections? To what extent do the experiences of diaspora in a globalized world signal that traditional class identities have been eroded? And what possibilities does diasporic subjectivity represent for the articulation of new transnational class identities? By exploring these questions, this essay shows how Transmission extends a view of class identities beyond the national boundaries that have traditionally defined the praxis of class politics. At the same time, it demonstrates how diaspora and globalization produce numerous inflections to traditional class identities that render mapping global inequality to a global class-consciousness a challenging task.

1

Theorizing the effects of globalization upon class identities

Before discussing the novels themselves, I wish first to examine in more detail the Marxist and non-Marxist explanations of the effects of globalization upon

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class identities previously mentioned in the introduction to this chapter. With respect to Marxist accounts of globalization, Immanuel Wallerstein’s World System Theory remains a seminal attempt to theorize globalization. One of the great strengths of Wallerstein’s work is that it conceptualizes class from a global perspective and proposes that the concept of class must be understood in conjunction with “people-based” identities (race, nation and ethnicity) due to an inherent contradiction in the world-system (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991: 79). Specifically, Wallerstein argues that on the broadest conceptual level, class is an objective category, emerging from relations to a global mode of production. However, these objective class categories are complicated by the presence of state political boundaries and the position of states within the global economy. For example, Wallerstein notes how the establishment of welfare states in core countries such as Britain is built upon the exploitation of labor abroad. This implies that the working classes in Britain, from a world systems perspective, comprise part of the world’s bourgeoisie because they benefit from the surplus created by labor in peripheral states. In addition, core states contain a disproportionate number of the world’s bourgeoisie, while peripheral states are comprised of a disproportionate number of semi-proletarian workers and peasants – the most impoverished status of all global citizens –. Thus, on the one hand, class is defined as the relationship to the means of production, and hence in one’s position in the economic system, which is a world-economy. On the other hand, a class is a real actor only to the extent that it becomes classconscious, which means to the extent that it is organized as a political actor. But political actors are located primarily in particular nation-states. Class is not one or the other. It is both (Wallerstein, 1977: 196). Class is objectively conceived in relation to global production then, but because the nation-state is the primary political actor within the world system class has historically been conceived of in national terms. Class identities are further complicated because race, nation and ethnicity have developed as three distinct categories that establish the hierarchal division of labor in the world system. Wallerstein explains this global division of labor in the following way : …the concept of “race” is related to the axial division of labor in the world economy, the core-periphery antinomy. The concept of “nation” is related to the political superstructure of this historical system, the sovereign states that form and derive from the interstate system. The concept of “ethnic group” is related to the creation of household structures that permit the maintenance of large components of non-waged labor in the accumulation of capital (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991: 79).

It is this configuration of the world-system that has led group identities (“the races, the nations, the ethnic groups”) to “correlate so heavily, albeit imperfectly,

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with ‘objective class’” (Ibid., 84). This is not to suggest that group identities should simply be seen as some kind of political red herring to class politics. Rather, they should be understood as a “historical product of the capitalist world-economy through which the antagonistic forces struggle with each other” (Ibid., 85). Thus, class identities remain bound to other group identities because of the dispensation of the world-system, which has produced political struggles along these lines of division. While Wallerstein’s position here at first appears similar to the work of Paul Gilroy that will be discussed later in this chapter, what distinguishes the former is an insistence that these various group identities all retain an objective position within the world economy and, therefore, must ultimately be regarded as expressions of global class strata.3 One shortcoming of Wallerstein’s model of the world system is that its emphasis upon national boundaries and center-periphery spatial divisions fails to fully account for the “unevenness” of contemporary globalization and, in particular, the often complex relationships that exist between diasporic communities and the global economy. As recourse to this, David Harvey’s conceptualization of “uneven geographical development” provides a useful image of globalization, which does not rely on mechanistic metaphors and fixed conceptions of identity that overlook how diaspora has complicated the neat geographical mapping of identity. For instance, citing the example of Chinese diasporic businessmen in New York City, Harvey identifies how the desire to retain cultural particularity enables “highly exploitive and often illegal relations of labor practices” to be established “in Chinatown under the control of the global diaspora of Chinese entrepreneurs” (Harvey, 2000: 79). Consequently, to understand how low-cost immigrant labor pools are created in global cities like New York requires attention to specific local cultural practices as well as global economics. Harvey uses this example to question Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a clash of civilizations, which he argues cannot account for such instances because of its fixation on the global scale and a static conception of cultural geography. Likewise, Harvey’s work also provides a challenge to Wallerstein’s model of the world system that overlooks how processes operating at scales

3 Indeed, from a Marxist perspective, the heterogeneity of identity politics that Gilroy and Appadurai (in particular) emphasize bespeaks a desire “to wish class away” that Terry Eagleton diagnoses within certain post-structuralist cultural theory. As Eagleton sees it, as long as we live in a capitalist economy, class will continue to exist as an identity, because it remains central to the experience of oppression. Therefore, overemphasizing the plurality of political identities that exist today risks playing “straight into the hands of the oppressor”. To be precise, it is not that Eagleton and other prominent Marxists, such as Jameson and Wallerstein, ignore the complexity of class identities that globalization has produced, but that they insist identity must be thought in relation to global economic production if identity is to retain any political purchase (Eagleton, Jameson and Said, 1990: 23).

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other than the global, or national (such as the local desire to retain cultural particularity) impinge upon class identities in diasporic communities. For Harvey then, understanding class in diasporic communities requires a multidimensional perspective that does not myopically view the global economy acting in a top-down manner upon them, but rather accounts for how the local scale shapes the global. Harvey’s example of Chinatown illustrates the complex relationship that exists between cultural identities and class and the challenge that this represents to Marx’s imperative in the Communist Manifesto for workers of the world to unite. In particular, Harvey claims that Marx underestimated the powers of capital to fragment, divide and differentiate, to absorb, transform, and even exacerbate ancient cultural divisions, to produce spatial differentiations, to mobilize geopolitically within the overall homogenization achieved through wage labor and market exchange (Idem).

In Harvey’s reading then, an important weakness of Marx is his assumption that class-consciousness will sweep away “social divisions in the geographical landscape of capitalism” (Idem). On the contrary, Harvey maintains, globalization has, through neo-liberal market penetration, co-opted and exploited communitarian interests, suggesting that Marx potentially underestimated the power of capital to fragment “workers of all countries”, rather than unite them. Nevertheless, if Harvey’s work shows that globalization has produced a complex fragmentation of class identities then, like Wallerstein, he argues that this does not make class obsolete but rather necessitates news ways of thinking through the dialectic of commonality and difference in order to fulfill Marx’s injunction for workers of the world to unite (Idem). The issue of how to conceive of class-consciousness on a global scale, in light of the strong fragmenting impulse of globalization that “converts the principle of market choice into a mechanism for group differentiation”, is a pressing issue for many Marxist cultural critics (Idem). Among the most prominent of these is Frederic Jameson, whose Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism provides an important response to this issue. Jameson argues that the rise of pluralized identity politics conceals the structural dynamics in which political intervention is grounded (Jameson, 1998: 412). For Jameson, non-class-based group identities have no implicit relationship to economic structures because they position themselves in relation to other groups, with the result that “the lively social struggles of the current period are largely dispersed and anarchic” (Ibid., 348 – 9). According to Jameson, this sort of identity politics is ineffectual because, unlike class, non-class group identities are unable to offer narratives that might lead to meaningful political intervention. Hence, rather than provide resistance to multinational capitalism, plural group identities sit comfortably

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within a neoliberal worldview and are, therefore, more likely to be appropriated by global capitalism than provide resistance to it.4 Jameson goes on to argue that vast changes in the global economy have had significant effects upon classes, which demand a significant rethinking of their meaning and extension. Nevertheless, despite such destabilization Jameson writes: How classes could be expected to disappear, save in the unique special-case scenario of socialism, has never been clear to me; but the global restructuration of production and the introduction of radically new technologies – that have far-flung workers in archaic factories out of work, displaced new kinds of industry to unexpected parts of the world, and recruited workforces different from the traditional ones in a variety of features, from gender to skill to nationality – explain why so many people are willing to think so, at least for a time (Ibid., 319).

In particular, recent changes to the global economy have not “allowed classes to form in any stable way, let alone acquire a genuine class consciousness” (Ibid., 348). The problem here, as Jameson sees it, is that class formations and identities materialize slowly and are produced by “transformations in the mode of production” (Ibid., 346). Therefore, because transformations in the new global economy have taken place so rapidly and resulted in such complex reconfigurations of production, traditional ways of identifying with class have been undermined. Despite such challenges, he maintains the need for a plural, yet united, global class identity that he calls a “class consciousness of a new hitherto undreamed of kind” (Ibid., 418). The aim of such a political identity is to conceive of disparate political struggles as part of a unified global working class movement. Central to this identity, for Jameson, is a need for “‘cognitive mapping’ of a new and global type” in order for the working classes to position themselves within the structural complexity of the global economy and organize politically (Ibid., 417). Such an identity holds the promise to synthesize the contradictory nature of traditional class identities in the world-system, enabling class to function as a totalizing framework around which a coalition workingclass identity responds to the fragmenting impulse of neoliberal globalization.5 Like Jameson, both Wallerstein and Harvey make calls for their own pluralized versions of class unity in slightly different ways with Harvey, in particular, alert to the ways that capitalism produces “commodified cultural divergence” as Jameson maintains (Harvey, 2000: 83). Nevertheless, if global capitalism does 4 For example, Jameson views ethnicity as “primarily a yuppie phenomenon” and, by-andlarge, a function of the market and fashion, rather than as the portent of any real political resistance on the part of oppressed peoples (see Jameson, 1998: 341). 5 For Jameson, Jesse Jackson stands as an example of how such a coalition identity might be forged around “working-class experience” (see Jameson, 1998: 331).

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indeed commodify cultural identities, then the distinction that Harvey makes between “real (by which I mean affective and socially embedded)” and “commodified cultural divergence” remains more problematic than Marxist critics often acknowledge. In particular, it raises two important questions that this chapter is well-suited to address. The first hinges upon the issue of exactly how we are able to ascertain what a legitimate cultural identity is, what a commodified identity is, and who gets to decide this. We can certainly run into all sorts of problems here because one person’s “real” cultural identity might not pass the test of another. The second, in light of this, is the problem of how to promote the sort of globalized working class identity that Wallerstein, Harvey and Jameson envision. The danger here is that western Marxist intellectuals, acting as arbiters of what constitutes false or “commodified” consciousness, might prove counterproductive to their goals, however noble their intentions might be. For instance, the politicization of religion in diasporic communities might appear as a misunderstood version of class politics to Marxist theorists, though it is clearly not perceived in this way in the minds of those who practice such politics. This is not an easy issue to work out, and while it may not be the focus of Marxist accounts of globalization, it remains an important concern of the novels considered in this chapter. ***

In contrast to Marxist accounts of the effects of globalization upon class identities, Arjun Appadurai and Paul Gilroy argue, in different ways, that globalization and diaspora have brought Marx’s conception of class into question. For Gilroy, recent transformations in the global economy force us to reconsider how we think of class: or as he puts it, how “new types of class relations are being shaped and produced in the novel economic conditions we inhabit” (Paul Gilroy, 1987: 30). Similarly, Appadurai argues that these new economic conditions demand a rethinking of the class categories that Marx developed in the nineteenth century because today the global economy is inexorably chaotic and disorganized. Indeed, for Appadurai even “the most complex and flexible theories of global development that have come out of the Marxist tradition” have failed to come to terms with what Lash and Urry have called “disorganized capitalism” (Appadurai, 1996: 32). Consequently, both Appadurai and Gilroy argue that the complex nature of the new global economy precludes the direct relationships between economic production and class consciousness that Marx theorizes. These two authors cite a number of reasons for globalization’s destabilizing influence on class consciousness. The first of these is expressed in Appadurai’s call for a rethinking of the “relationship between production and consumption

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in today’s global economy” (Ibid., 41). Appadurai argues that Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism has now been replaced by two “mutually supportive descendants: production fetishism and consumer fetishism” (Idem). Production fetishism suggests that fixation upon local sites of production overlooks “the globally-dispersed forces that actually drive production processes today” (Ibid., 42). Consequently, in today’s global economy workers are not only alienated in a Marxist sense because they must sell their labor to earn a living, but also because the power behind the production process is no longer located within a specific locality (either the actual site of production or in the extended sense of a nationstate), but within a complex series of transnational flows. In contrast to Harvey, Appadurai does not think that class consciousness can be established in such an economic environment, because unlike previous periods of industrial capitalism, globalization has made the forces behind production too dispersed, fluid and ephemeral for workers to identify with. Rather than act as the harbinger of a new globalized class consciousness, therefore, globalization has in fact intensified social alienation by making production subject to a “complicated spatial dynamic that is increasingly global” (Idem). The obfuscation of workers’ relationship to the economic mode of production is compounded by the emergence of “consumer fetishism” that Appadurai argues is an outcome of the increasingly sophisticated role that the media plays in the global economy. The interplay between the global economy and the media has resulted in global brands penetrating the farthest reaches of the world, producing vast global networks of consumer images that are “so subtle that the consumer is consistently helped to believe that he or she is an actor, where in fact he or she is at best a chooser” (Idem). This shift toward a consumer-based model of identity, predicated upon questions of status and prestige, further destabilizes traditional class identities as envisioned by Marx. This is because while Marx argues that a globalized class consciousness will emerge from workers’ becoming aware of their relationship to the mode of production, Appadurai maintains that globalization has made consumption, not production, central to identity today. Consequently, Marx’s relatively stable divisions of class, defined through a direct relationship to production, have now given way to a more arbitrary and unstable set of demarcations grounded in consumer taste that do not necessarily hold a direct connection to economic production. For Appadurai, the constantly shifting global landscape of flows that characterizes production fetishism and consumer fetishism also underpins the contemporary labor force that is now increasingly mobile. This new mobility means that more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move, or the fantasies of wanting to move. What is more, both these realities as well as these fantasies now

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function on larger scales, as men and women from villages in India think not just of moving to Poona or Madras, but of moving to Dubai and Houston, and refugees from Sri Lanka find themselves in South India as well as in Canada, just as the Hmong are driven to London as well as to Philadelphia. And as international capital shifts its needs, as production and technology generate different needs, as nation-states shift their policies on refugee populations, these moving groups can never afford to let their imaginations rest too long, even if they wished to (Ibid., 34).

This conception of a new globally-mobile labor force suggests two further challenges that globalization represents to traditional class identities. The first is that the sheer scale of the mass migration that Appadurai identifies disturbs class identities in host countries because it produces a labor force that is not only increasingly transient, but also ethnically and culturally diverse. This not only fractures traditionally homogenous conceptions of working class identity in countries such as Britain, but also disturbs traditional conceptions of class in the migrant worker’s country of origin after he or she returns from working abroad. For instance, Appadurai argues that “professional transients” such as the large number of Indians who work in the Gulf States have transformed Indian cities like Bombay. These returning workers shift the consumption patterns of the city by establishing new transnational routes of commodities and unsettle South Asian class identities because of the higher incomes they earn abroad. The second, more subtle, implication of Appadurai’s comments is that not only does the emergence of a globally-mobile labor force erode traditional class identities, but also suggests new ways in which workers imagine their relationship to the economy. For Appadurai, this way of imagining the global economy has little to do with Marxist conceptions of class because, rather than develop class consciousness, workers are forced to “deal with the realities of having to move, or the fantasies of wanting to move” (Idem). This fixation upon labor mobility signals both a lack of interest in developing class consciousness and a growing restlessness of the imagination that represents a significant barrier to developing the sort of stable working class identity that Marx envisioned. Indeed, the outcome of all this instability and movement that globalization has produced is a proliferation of political identities that are less likely to be concerned with the class struggle as traditional Marxists understand it. South Asian diasporic subjectivity is central to this claim in Appadurai’s work, as it provides evidence that diaspora leads to conceiving of politics in terms of ethnic identities, rather than class. For instance, Appadurai stresses the emergence of deterritorialized political identities in which diasporic populations vie for political control of their home states whilst living outside of them. In the case of India, Appadurai argues that “the cultural reproduction for Hindus abroad has become tied to the politics of Hindu fundamentalism at home” (Ibid., 38). Such political identities signal the increasing transnational nature of politics, but are

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not meaningful in terms of class struggle. Rather, they represent political identities that are motivated by a search for cultural purity in response to diaspora. The conjunction of the growing politicization of ethnic identity, as well as the concealment of the relationship between labor and the control of economic production, means that working class identity has now given way to a far more nebulous sense of economic inequality. This leads Appadurai to speak of “Sikh cabdrivers in Chicago” as, “less enfranchised migrants”, rather than as members of the working class (Ibid., 197). For such diasporic workers, Appadurai suggests that fixation upon their countries of origin precludes a sense of class solidarity amongst ethnically diverse diasporic labor forces. Therefore, we find that the Sikh cab driver’s “counterparts from Haiti, Pakistan, and Iran” all participate in the “global flow of audiocassettes, especially devoted to popular and devotional music and speeches”, in order to retain links with their respective homelands. What gets lost in these workers’ fixation upon their countries of origin is the possibility of a class-consciousness emerging that might unite them in recognition of their common economic position and, therefore, lead to the sorts of political interventions that Wallerstein, Harvey and Jameson advocate. Despite Appadurai’s challenge to Marxist conceptions of class, one of the limitations of his explanation of how politics are now played out in a globalized world is that it does not offer a framework for thinking through how globalization has caused, as Harvey points out, the greatest polarization of wealth in human history. A striking statistic that Harvey quotes to support this claim is that by 1991 the income of the world’s richest 358 people was equal to that of the poorest 45 % of the world’s population (Harvey, 2000: 43). Not only does this sort of empirical evidence suggest that economic globalization is not as chaotic and decentered as Appadurai argues, but also that he might underestimate the desire amongst the world’s poor to address this inequality. Certainly, the sort of global inequality that Harvey alludes to is an important thematic concern for the novels examined in this chapter that provide a useful perspective from which to examine Appadurai’s claims. These novels raise questions such as whether low paid diasporic workers in the West only see themselves as “less enfranchised migrants” and identify with cultural and ethnic politics rather than economic inequality as Appadurai suggests. Are Appadurai’s claims of the mobility of labor, and the “fantasy’s” that go along with it, true for everyone in the world? And is “consumer fetishism” as evident amongst workers in South Asia as it is for those in metropolitan areas or the West? While, like Appadurai, issues of diaspora, race and ethnicity complicate traditional Marxist conceptions of class for Paul Gilroy, they do so in a different way. In There Ain’t No Black in The Union Jack, Gilroy explains that it is not that class is no longer important to group identities, as Appadurai’s work often implies, but that the analytical framework of class needs to be rethought in a

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globalized, plural society. What Gilroy argues is that class has become so heterogeneous that attempting to frame it simply within the contradiction between capital and labor overlooks the complexities of how political alliances and mobilization now take place. Therefore, he argues that: Wallerstein (1979) has argued forcefully that “class analysis loses its power of explanation whenever it moves towards formal models and away from dialectical dynamics”. To reconstruct class so that it is adequate to the task I have outlined involves turning away from being a polarized concept and towards becoming a multi-modal one. The emphasis found in traditional Marxist writing about “race” must therefore be inverted: “race” can no longer be reduced to an effect of the economic antagonism arising from production, and class must be understood in terms qualified by the vitality of struggles articulated through “race” (Gilroy, 1987: 28).

For Gilroy, then, social movements and identities that emerge in response to oppression “include class but are not reducible to it” (Ibid., 30). It is not as Marxist critics assert, therefore, that class functions as a unifying narrative or identity that unifies disparate struggles against racial oppression, but rather that class must be reconceived through a broader framework than economic production in light of these struggles. For instance, Gilroy argues that it is a mistake to view the “race riots” that occurred in Britain during the 1980s as simply a function of Britain’s shrinking industrial core. Instead, he maintains, they reflect a more complex set of conditions that include poverty, but also racial subordination. Hence, the diverse political movements that emerged in response to the conditions of 1980s Britain cannot be conflated with traditional labor and union movements of the period, such as the miners’ strike, which were direct responses to changes in production. While Gilroy’s position may not be wholly incompatible with more flexible Marxist accounts of globalization, it nevertheless brings into question the extent to which class captures people’s political imagination in the contemporary world, particularly amongst diasporic subjects. In exploring this issue, an important premise of this chapter is that despite the divergent claims of Marxist and non-Marxist theorists, neither addresses the extent to which class is able to provide narratives that are compelling to individual subjectivity on an emotional and existential level. Put simply, is class an identity that is still relevant to people’s lives in an age of globalization? This is a particularly pressing question given the complexity of the global economy that both theoretical paradigms identify and one that the novels considered in this chapter are well positioned to address. In particular, the South Asian protagonists of these novels represent identities that destabilize the boundaries of nation, race, and ethnicity, which have historically produced the division of labor within the world system. This raises a number of questions of how class identities might be conceived from a

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global perspective. Can recognition of global economic inequality lead to the remapping of class identity that Wallerstein and Jameson envision? Can South Asian diasporic subjectivity transgress the group identities that have historically concealed identification with “objective” class strata in the world system? And therefore, are these texts able to imagine transnational forms of class solidarity, or do they signal the waning narrative power of class to shape identity?

2

The whole situation was very old economy: Hari Kunzru’s Transmission

Transmission interweaves three stories, which detail Arjun Mehta’s migration from New Delhi to Silicon Valley, Guy Swift’s Internet entrepreneurialism in London, and the life of Bollywood actress Leela Zahir in Mumbai. These three stories are fatally connected through the global Internet boom of the 1990s. The view of the world that emerges from this interconnectivity is one that is deeply, but unequally, integrated economically and in which post-industrialization has transformed traditional class identities in Britain and South Asia. One response to this “new economy” is associated with Guy Swift’s character in London and provides a detailed examination of the erosive effects on traditional class identities that Appadurai’s work charts. The second centers upon the migratory experiences of Arjun Mehta and highlights the unequal experience of this “new economy” and its effects upon class identities from a South Asian perspective. Guy’s character in Transmission is emblematic of the hyperbolic discourse that surrounded the Internet boom of the 1990s. For Guy, conventional business strategies and fiscal responsibility are dismissed as being “very old economy” (Kunzru, 2005: 122). In the “new economy” what mattered was image and branding, or what Guy calls “Total Brand Mutability” (Ibid., 170). Thus, it is not the production of tangible goods that is now important, but rather the seamless integration of culture and commerce that gives the “brand” value. Within such a dematerialized economy it becomes very difficult to identify exactly who controls the means of production and, at times, what is in fact being produced. Nevertheless, despite the ephemeral nature of this new economy of signs, Guy’s identification with it is so complete that he “felt it was physically connected to him”, and that he had a “personal relationship” with its “future” (Ibid., 20). From Guy’s perspective, it is precisely this deep connection and understanding of the postindustrial economy that distinguishes him from “the trivial temporality of the impersonalized masses of the earth” (Ibid., 21). Thus, in contrast to the “package tourists” and “mall shoppers”, Guy believes that “as the CEO of a

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world-class agency, he should have a world-class pad” (Ibid., 110). Kunzru describes this “pad” in the following way : And so the white leather table with the cut-out airport city code motif, the vicuna ottoman, the Danish ergonomic salad servers and disposable cardboard fruit bowl, the nest of matte-black powder-lacquered steel cubes by the conversation pit, the cablesuspended Vuitton-print-polyvinyl vanity unit on which he had mounted the plasma screen and electrostatic-speaker array, the knitted ornamental pods on the bedroom ceiling and the low-rise smuggled-teak patio furniture on the balcony ; all of it was personalized, individual, signature. It was all – every sandblasted bathroom faucet of it – him (Ibid., 102 – 103).

The detail with which Kunzru describes this interior is crucial (the Danish ergonomic salad servers) and gives a wonderfully satirical rendering of how central consumption is to the identity of Guy, not to say his self. Indeed, Guy is a character that remains, until the end of the novel, almost completely devoid of internal life or self-reflection, whose identity is produced only through deliberation upon the objects he owns and the lifestyle he leads (Ibid., 112).6 In one respect, Guy’s obsession with “world-class status” and his propensity to regard himself as above the masses might be seen as the harbinger of a new global class identity. The attention to finer points of global designer brands in Guy’s apartment puts class into the global register – a “world-class” status –. Reading this obsession with world-class status as the portent of a new global class identity is supported elsewhere in the novel by Kunzru’s description of another mover and shaker. Like Guy, the identity of one Indian IT entrepreneur in New Delhi is rendered through a similar set of global designer brands, implying that he too desires to be identified as part of the same select group as Guy. From his gelled hair to his slightly burnished penny loafers, every particularity of his appearance carried a set of aspirational associations, some explicit (the branding of his tennis shirt, his belt buckle, the side arms of the UV sun goggles perched on his head), some implicit (the heft of his Swiss watch, the Swissness of that watch), and some no more than hints, wafts of mediated yearning written in the scent of his scuffing lotion, the warp and weft of his Khaki slacks (Ibid., 8).

On the surface, the parallel between Guy’s identity in London and this IT entrepreneur in New Delhi suggests a convergence of national class identities into a global elite class. Yet a more detailed reading of Guy’s character yields little evidence to signal he desires to connect with such an identity. It is not that Guy rejects class because of egalitarian ideals, but that his individualism and solip6 The irony, of course, is that an interior design firm has been hired to buy all these items for Guy to ensure “everything would be of the best possible taste”. Consequently, while for Guy his apartment might signify his own individuality and identity, we are reminded of how shaped by others these choices always remain.

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sism prevents him from associating with any collective identity, including class. And in this respect, he represents a considerable shift from his father’s generation. For Guy’s father, class identity is constructed around a sense of “people like us”, grounded in “breeding or something equally dogs-and-horses sounding” (Ibid., 206). The hierarchy that emerges from this is a collective one: “We are better than other people. We don’t lose” (Idem). Yet, while Guy agrees with his father’s dictum he simply is unable to translate his sense of superiority into a collective identity. Consequently, Kunzru wryly comments that “Guy’s ‘we’ was different from his father’s, though it would be hard to specify who other than himself was included” (Idem). Guy’s subjectivity then is too individualistic to identify with the abstract global elite that he later theorizes – the “We” that “were on top because we were better adapted to the environment of the global city” (Idem. Kunzru’s italics) –. For Paul Taylor, this makes Guy “a character who, cosmocratically flying over communities of the dispossessed, is like the flaneur, he is in but not of society” (Taylor 2006). And the sheer depthlessness of Guy’s character strips him of the emotional qualities necessary to identify with others, upon which class identity must at some point depend. Consequently, Guy at once erodes the traditional upper class identity of his father, and at the same time does not represent the bourgeois counterpoint to Jameson and Wallerstein’s global proletariat. Rather, as Taylor has pointed out, he symbolizes a powerful example of the “uberpostmodern person” that Eagleton finds particularly egregious, because of the “centerless, hedonistic, self-inventing, ceaselessly adaptive” qualities he represents (Ibid.). However, it is not only that Guy’s postmodern subjectivity resists class identification, but also that the position he occupies in the new global economy obfuscates traditional class strata. In this respect, despite his identification with “world class pads”, which impresses upon the reader his membership amongst a new global bourgeoisie, the novel ultimately shows this not to be the case. Consequently, although Guy professes to “manipulate the flows of money and information” and at first appears in control of economic production, the novel reveals him to be nothing more than a highly paid worker, or, as Jameson prefers, a “Yuppie” (Kunzru, 2005: 207). Indeed, in this chaotic new economy even Yves, the ostensibly powerful venture capitalist who funds Guy’s company, has little control over production and confides to Guy : You want to know a secret? I need this deal to work as bad as you. This fucking market is so down, I can’t tell you. All these technology companies we funded? They turned to shit. Every one. And if we don’t make some money soon I’m going to be fucked too (Ibid., 245).

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The whims of the market and the relentless flux of capital alluded to here by Yves signal how traditional class strata have become increasingly slippery. In this new postindustrial economy the high salaries and conspicuous consumption of “yuppies”, such as Guy and Yves, certainly make them appear as a new ruling class. Yet, as Jameson has pointed out, “yuppies” should not be regarded as a new ruling class, despite the dominance of their “cultural practices and values” within late capitalism (Jameson, 1998: 407). Thus, although Guy’s wealth and supreme arrogance are reminiscent of Dickens’ numerous vilified bourgeois characters, he is not, in a Marxist sense, their contemporary counterpart.7 Rather, the economic instability of the global economy shrouds Marx’s view of the class struggle, because the relationship between class identity and the control of production becomes confused. One important question that arises from Transmission’s representation of this new economy is: what does it now mean to be a worker? And more importantly, who now identifies themselves as such? On one hand, as Hardt and Negri note, “at its most broad, working class refers to all waged workers” (Hardt and Negri, 2005: xiv). Therefore, within this definition, the traditional British workingclass, as well as Arjun and Guy might all be considered part of the working-class. However, highly-paid, postindustrial workers, such as Guy, have little in common with the traditional British working class in terms of the work they perform, their lifestyles and incomes. Moreover, in a Marxist understanding, identification as a worker must at some point involve recognition of one’s relationship to economic production. After all, as the epigraph to this chapter indicates, the class struggle as envisioned by Marx is one between the workers and the bourgeoisie over the control of production. Yet, Guy’s character suggests that in contrast to Marx’s vision of class, global networks of consumer images have diminished an understanding of economic production in contemporary British society. Thus, Guy exemplifies the belief that a high income and the ability to buy designer brands make him an actor in the global economy. But by identifying so completely with consumer culture and overlooking the control of production, Guy not only overstates his own economic power, but also fails to recognize how those who produce the designer brands he consumes shape his perceived individuality. Therefore, while the importance of consumption to Guy certainly produces status identities, these identities do not connect to economic structures in a way Marxist critics argue leads to meaningful political intervention. Indeed, from a British perspective, a high standard of living, coupled with the 7 For example, Coolridge argues that Dickens has a tendency to depict wealthy entrepreneurs as wicked and self-serving embodiments of class oppression. There are numerous examples of such characters in his fiction, including; Ralph Nickleby, Hawk, Squeers, Gride, Quilp, Tigg, Pecksniff, Heep, Smallweed, Krook, Merdle, Flintwich, Casby, Fledgeby, Wegg, and Hexam (Coolidge, 1967:189).

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shift of much industrial production overseas means that class has become increasingly removed from mundane experience. Or, to put it another way, class has become an abstracted identity that no longer carries an immediacy to people’s everyday lives. In light of this, a significant challenge to identifying with the sort of global proletariat that Jameson and Wallerstein call for is the ability of class to capture the public’s imagination. Thus, while identification with consumer culture is shown to appeal to a range of characters in Transmission, there is no Marxist counterpoint to this in the British cultural imagination. In short, the theories of class identity that Wallerstein and Jameson posit simply do not appear to have the seductive power to shape identity that consumer culture does. Nevertheless, if in this way consumer culture is shown to erode class-consciousness in Britain, then South Asian diasporic subjectivity highlights how such erosion is experienced unevenly around the world, because Arjun’s experiences of the new global economy extend the novel’s representation of class to a global horizon. Importantly, reading Transmission in light of globalization theory helps clarify the relationship between Arjun and Guy’s characters in the novel. In particular, it highlights a structural logic to the narrative that Amardeep Singh finds missing in his review of Transmission. For Singh, Kunzru is unsure what do with the novel’s protagonist after his migration to America and, therefore, he argues that Kunzru turns to Guy’s character as an easy target for satire. Singh writes: When in doubt, make fun of corrupt corporate stooges. When you’re not sure what to do with your protagonist, what do you do? Kill him off or make him go crazy, and shift the burden of narration to someone else. Kunzru opts for the latter. As a result, the Mehta plot begins to dry up, and the novelist is forced to shift his attention to Guy Swift, a fast-talking British executive, whose marketing company is on the rocks. Here Kunzru’s target is easier, and he readily satirizes the rich (and ripe) world of Corporatespeak through Guy, who is very concerned about his bank account, as well as Guy’s girlfriend Gabriella Caro, who appears not to be concerned with much at all (Singh 2006).

While Singh is right in pointing out that there is “not much material for comedy” in detailing Arjun’s exploitation, his comments overlook how the interconnected narratives of Arjun and Guy provide a rich representation of the new global economy (Ibid.). More specifically, the interconnection of Guy and Arjun’s narratives reflects the extent to which the new global economy is now integrated. At the same time, it also shows how these characters’ different experiences of an integrated economy reveal its asymmetrical nature and uneven effects upon class identities. From Arjun’s perspective, the new global economy does not appear to be as chaotic and decentered as Appadurai describes, but rather a Western – and in particular, American led – process. One way we see this is through the influence

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of American cultural markers upon the middle and upper classes of India, who seek to align their identities with the perceived center of the global economy. For instance, Kunzru shows the inscription of American influence upon the landscape of India. Here India’s middle- and upper-class communities are distinguished from the rest of the country through American-style suburbs and housing developments, replete with “shopping malls, multiplexes, temples and stadia” (Kunzru, 2005: 15). In this way, the Americanization of space within South Asia symbolizes one way of connecting Indian class identities to the core of global production. For Arjun’s family in India, identification with American-led neoliberal globalization signals the diminished importance of the Indian state to defining middle class status. Of this shift Kunzru writes: The leap from government service (whose values had been so eroded over the years) to the private sector had paid off. The Mehtas were no longer the family of a small-town administrator but modern people, participating in the great Indian boom. The apartment was proof. It stood for The World, with which his son appeared to be disastrously out of touch (Ibid., 14).

Consequently, when the hitherto introverted computer geekiness of Arjun finally translates into a computer programmer position in America, the very mention of the word leads his father to respond ecstatically : “But now Amrika! God be praised!” (Ibid., 16). For Mr. Mehta, Arjun’s entry into the American economy is not only significant for its financial consequences but, even more importantly, for its implications for the family’s class status within India. It represents a final cementing of the Mehtas’ position within the global economy, the community of “modern people”, “the World” (Ibid., 14). In this sense then, American led neoliberal globalization does not erode traditional Indian class identities but reconfigures them in congruence with American cultural symbols. The most significant differences between Arjun and Guy’s experiences of the new global economy, however, are not revealed by Arjun’s procurement of a programming position in America but by his eventual dismissal from this position. The firing of Arjun from his computer-programming job in America enables Kunzru to show how national citizenship remains significant to gaining highly paid work in the Western core of the postindustrial economy. Therefore, while Guy may find the global economy to be comprised of “flows of money and information” in London, the fate of Arjun shows such fluidity is not the case with respect to labor from South Asia (Ibid., 207). The contrast between Arjun’s experiences of the new global economy as an Indian citizen and Guy’s as a British citizen represents a more subtle representation of economic inequality than the “two worlds” that Willie posits in Magic Seeds. In Transmission, the divide between these two worlds is not as sharply pronounced as that between the rural

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poor of India and the metropolitan West. Instead, economic inequality is reflected in the lack of labor opportunities that Arjun is afforded compared to his counterparts in the West. This difference in economic opportunity is both actual and reflected in the differences in attitude toward the workplace between Arjun and his American co-workers. For instance, unlike Arjun, his American coworkers at the Virugenix Corporation exhibit a profound indifference to money and status, as the following passage indicates. The youngest Ghostbuster was twenty-one-year-old Clay. A native of Marin County, he was an object of special wonder for Arjun, who had yet to come to terms with the Virugenix corporate culture. While he tended to wear his blue blazer to work, Clay slouched about the office in shorts and Birkenstock sandals, his blonde dreadlocks tied up in a strange hairy pineapple on top of his head, like a Hindu mendicant (Ibid., 53).

Arjun’s dismissal from Virugenix lays bare the extent to which Clay’s laissezfaire attitude described here is predicated upon his status as an American citizen and, therefore, his access to the highly-paid American labor market. While Clay remains unaware of such privilege, Arjun’s anxiety and seemingly uptight attitude toward work is a result of being acutely conscious of a different economic reality outside of the Virugenix Corporation. In this way, a global sense of economic inequality is expressed through the anxiety that Arjun feels with respect to his status in the core of global postindustrial production. However, Transmission shows that while Arjun’s South Asian subjectivity may provide recognition of the global division of labor that Wallerstein identifies in the world system, translation of this sense of inequality into a cogent global class identity is another matter altogether. The most important reason for this in the novel is simply because of Arjun’s lack of political will. Therefore, unlike Bhoj Narayan in Magic Seeds, Arjun’s unfulfilled ambitions do not motivate him to identify with class politics as a response to his disenfranchisement. In large part, Kunzru suggests this lack of motivation to be bound to an absence of tangible symbols with which Arjun is able to locate himself in the global economy. This sense of disorientation is reflected in the turgid corporate language that surrounds Arjun’s dismissal from Virugenix: Mr. Mehta, as I understand it there are no indicators of short-term recovery. It’s a sector-wide trend. This is what our public relations team has been trying to underline to investors. It’s not just Virugenix, it’s across the board. And Mr. Mehta, that’s the take home for you too. You shouldn’t see this as a sign of personal failure. You’re a valuable individual with a lot to offer. It’s just Virugenix can no longer offer you a context for self-development (Ibid., 97).

Kunzru is adept here at capturing the opacity of the relations and structures of the global economy through language that leaves Arjun confused and later alienated from the corporate world for which he had held such hope. What Arjun

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is unable to fully come to terms with in the passages that surround his redundancy is that his dismissal is not the decision of his boss, or his company, but the distant forces of the global economy. It is, in the e-mailed words of Darryl, the head of Virugenix, “nobody’s fault” (Ibid., 94). Such dematerialized e-mail exchanges between Arjun and his employer erode the sort of direct relationships between owner and worker that we see in earlier fictional accounts of industrial Britain, as well as Naipaul and Islam’s representations of South Asia. For Arjun, there is simply no one to protest to, no tangible symbol to resist and no way to situate his own individual place within this world of “sector-wide trends” hidden behind unfathomable public relations rhetoric (Ibid., 92). Consequently, Arjun’s response to losing his job is as confused as the language that surrounds his dismissal. In a nave attempt to get his job back, he therefore unleashes a computer virus in the hope that his ability to solve it will ensure his re-employment. Although the virus does not achieve the desired objective, it does spread throughout the world leading to a barrage of competing political groups using it to publicize their own ideological agendas. Of this Kunzru writes: In the first few days of the outbreak, various groups and individuals claimed responsibility. Maoist revolutionaries in Chiapas sent a fax to a Mexico City newspaper announcing that Leela was the latest step in their campaign to cripple the infrastructure of global capitalism. A Lithuanian hacking group called the Red Hand Gang revealed that they had concocted it to demonstrate the superiority to their rivals… (Ibid., 147).

The global implications of Arjun’s computer virus described here certainly signify the power with which the disaffected worker can strike a blow to the integrated contemporary global economy. At the same time, however, they highlight a second problem that faces the sort of global class solidarity that Sarojini advocates in Magic Seeds. Here, despite the almost instantaneous global platform that Arjun unwittingly achieves through the virus, Kunzru does not show this act as a point around which a sense of global solidarity might be forged. Rather, the computer virus simultaneously symbolizes the extent to which the world has converged and also how common global events are seized upon to further very different political ends. Consequently, while “Maoist revolutionaries in Chiapas” may claim the virus as a means to foster global classconsciousness, other political movements use it to publicize different ideological agendas. In such a world, the idea that class may somehow function as a unifying framework, as Jameson and Wallerstein argue, appears unlikely. Rather, the range of competing political interests that emerge in response to the computer virus show the heterogeneity of identities that globalization enables. The representation of South Asian diasporic subjectivity in Transmission then, reveals the hierarchical structures of the world system and, at the same

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time, highlights the challenges that face translating this recognition into global class solidarity. Transmission ends with Arjun criminalized and pursued by U.S. authorities before his eventual disappearance without a trace “into legend” (Ibid., 249). Thus, “one day he is spotted at an anti-globalization rally in Paris and the next coming onto the pitch in a hockey match in rural Gujarat” (Ibid., 275). By stepping into “legend” in this way, Arjun can only be subsequently represented in the narrative through rumored sightings, conspiracy theories, and Internet speculation. If then, as Amardeep Singh comments, Arjun is a figure that questions many Indian computer programmers’ dreams “of working in Silicon Valley” – the American dream writ on a global scale – what are we to make of this ending to the novel? (Singh 2006). To be sure, by shifting Arjun’s character into the realm of rumored sightings, Kunzru erases his subjectivity from the narrative: Arjun ceases to be a fully-defined character and instead becomes a myth, a “legend”. On the one hand, this erasure of Arjun’s subjectivity certainly does not represent an endorsement of neoliberal globalization, as he is unable to become part of the network of multinational capitalism as he had hoped. Rather, Kunzru clearly shows global capitalism to have failed Arjun and to have not delivered the dreams of upward mobility it promised to many South Asian postindustrial workers. However, on the other hand, Kunzru does not turn to Marxist class identities as a means by which Arjun can respond to this disenfranchisement. Consequently, Arjun can only be represented through rumors, theories and hearsay, none of which are able to represent his subjectivity and the new type of South Asian migrant worker he stands for in the global economy. In other words, Arjun comes to represent the invisibility of a new class of highlyskilled South Asian worker in the postindustrial global economy for whom new formulations of class identity have yet to be imagined or realized. The difficulty that Arjun’s character faces in identifying himself within a cogent class identity, despite an acute recognition of the structural inequality of the world system, is a telling point with which to draw this discussion together. It captures the ambivalent responses to the effect of globalization upon class identities that Transmission represents. Such ambivalence provides some important qualifications to the theoretical models considered in this essay. In particular, the novel shows how global consumer culture has captured the cultural imagination of a wide range of characters in Britain and metropolitan South Asia, as Appadurai has argued. At the same time, there is a strong recognition of economic inequality in these texts that Appadurai’s work largely overlooks. It is not therefore, that these writers reject Marxist class identities because they are not concerned with economic inequality or social justice, but that production-based identities no longer fully reflect how individuals desire to self-identify in Britain, America and metropolitan South Asia. In response to this, the fictional accounts of South Asian diasporic subjectivity in Transmission

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provide more flexible ways to think about class and economic inequality in contrast to theoretical Marxist accounts of globalization. The novel, therefore, offers a way of conceiving of the global economy in human terms, in which the reader is confronted with the often unseen costs of consumer culture that pervade metropolitan spaces. Thus, the experience of exploited Indian computer programmers in Silicon Valley reminds the reader of another narrative of globalization: a narrative of the labor upon which the consumption and lifestyle patterns of the metropolitan West depend. Re-thinking class identities in this way, while perhaps unlikely to convince Marxist theorists, represents one way of responding to the transformations that globalization has wrought. Certainly from the perspective of the South Asian diaspora represented in these texts, the advantage of such an approach to global economic inequality is its ability to account for the numerous inflections of traditional class identities that migration and globalization produces – a point that the novel is unequivocal in making.

References Appadurai, Arjun (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel Wallerstein (1991). Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London, New York: Verso. Coolidge, Archibald (1967). Charles Dickens as Serial Novelist. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press. Eagleton, Terry, Frederick Jameson and Edward Said (1990). Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Gilroy, Paul (1987). There Ain’t No Black in The Union Jack. London: Hutchinson. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2005). Multitude. London: Penguin. Harvey, David (2000). Spaces of Hope. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. Jameson, Frederick (1998). Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso Books. Kunzru, Hari (2005). Transmission. New York: Plume. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1998). The Communist Manifesto. London: Signet Classics. Naipaul, V.S. (2004). Magic Seeds. London: Picador. Singh, Amardeep. “A Review of Hari Kunzru’s Transmission”. 18 June 2006: http:// www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2004/08/review-of-hari-kunzrus-transmission.html Taylor, Paul. “Pattern Recognition in Fast Capitalism: Literary Time on the Theorists of Flux”. Fast Capitalism 2.1 (2006). Accessed February 18 2007: http://www.uta.edu/ huma/agger/fastcapitalism/2_1/taylor.html

III Latin American Experiences

Luis Villoro

A Negative Path towards Justice1

In recent decades we have witnessed an effervescence of philosophical reflections on justice, its foundations and characteristics, perhaps expressions of a renewed interest in political ethics. Most of these works share a common point of view: that of the developed societies that have surpassed both insufferable thresholds of economic and social justice and regimes based on tyrannical domination. In those societies, especially after World War II, one common process has brought about the inauguration of political regimes based on procedures that regulate accords among citizens endowed with equal rights. Given their natural inclination for topics concerning human society, philosophers cannot but reflect the historical milieu to which they belong, and it is for this reason that the theories now most in vogue for establishing the foundations of justice tend to take as their starting point the idea of a rational consensus among equal subjects who interrelate on terms that reproduce the characteristic features of a well-ordered democracy. However, for good or bad, there are those among us who must reflect on these same issues, but from very different spaces: societies where democracy has not yet been so solidly implanted, where there reigns an inequality inconceivable for some developed countries, where the index of those excluded from the social and political benefits of the association to which they theoretically belong is high. Our perspective cannot be the same. In our social reality, consensual behaviors based on the norms and principles of a justice that embraces all subjects are hardly common; indeed, they are sadly lacking. What strikes us so strongly when we contemplate the reality that surrounds us is marginality and injustice. If our starting point is to be our personal knowledge of the world around us – in my opinion, the starting point of all authentic ethical reflection – then we are obliged

1 Formerly published in Spanish: Luis Villoro, ”Una v†a negativa hacia la justicia”, in: Luis Villoro (2007), Retos de la sociedad por venir. Ensayos sobre justicia, democracia y multiculturalismo, Mexico City : Fondo de Cultura Econûmica, 15 – 41. Translation: Paul C. Kersey.

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to ponder those same problems that concern philosophers from developed Western countries, but from a very distinct perspective. We could, then, test a line of reasoning that is equally valid: instead of establishing justice on the basis of consensus, we may posit the absence of concord; in lieu of moving from the determination of the universal principles of justice to their realization in a given society, we could set out from the perception of real injustice to project that which might remedy it. This theoretical path corresponds to a vision more suited to the context of societies in which the permanent conditions required for the realization of a rational consensus do not yet exist; those whose perceptions of justice cannot but be impacted by the quotidian experience of its absence. Here, the idea of injustice assumes the inoperativeness, in a concrete society, of the rational accord upon which the very idea of justice rests. Our situation in such societies invites us to counterpose to the via of rational consensus its negative design: instead of searching for the principles of justice in a possible accord arrived at by free, equal and rational subjects, we must strive to determine them from the base of their inoperativeness in the real society.

1

Escape from unjust power

Let us, then, set out from a reality : the experience of suffering caused by injustice. While pain, physical or psychic, is a reality of our everyday existence, one particular lived experience stands out: pain caused by the other. It is only when we experience unjustified injury suffered in our relations with others that we obtain a clear perception of injustice. The experience of injustice expresses an original experience: the experience of an unjustified gratuitous evil. An injury suffered can adduce various justifications: it may be a means to prevent or combat a greater evil, to achieve a higher good, or to project a better life. But when such injury is bereft of justification, then suffering unjustified harm is an experience of radical evil, and the unjustified evil brought about by others may be a consequence of a situation of power. Does justice then entail an escape from power? From the moment at which various human beings came to live together, they realized that they could not do so without establishing a bond among themselves. That bond was power. Thus we begin by inquiring into the relationship between power and injustice. Power is the capacity to act such that one causes effects that alter reality. Men or women have power if they have the ability to satisfy their desires and achieve their goals, whatever they may be. A society has power if it has the capacity to expand in the natural environment, to dominate over it, and to etch its objectives

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into it. Power is domination over the world that exists, both natural and social, that enables one to attain that which one desires. Society cannot be understood without the presence of power. The first political philosopher of the modern era, Thomas Hobbes, understood that the force that propels us through this life is desire. If the original drive from which all others derive is desire, then its negative face is the fear of death. The desire for life with the fear of death constitutes the founding principle, the simplest of all human actions. From it emerges hunger for power ; power to assure the preservation of life, power to protect us from death. There is, wrote Hobbes, “an inclination in all humankind, a perpetual and incessant thirst for power that only ceases with death” (Hobbes, 1940: ch. XI, p. 97). What may escape from this yearning for power? Those actions that are contrary to the search for it. A well-ordered city would be one that could go without the desire for power. If it were governed by good men, Socrates warns, “they would maneuver to escape from power as today they maneuver to achieve it”.2 In the face of this universal desire for power there is only one alternative: the search for not-power. The attitude of a man who has been freed from the passion for power of which Hobbes wrote would be, precisely, that of an individual who would strive to act not to achieve power, but to escape from it. According to Socrates, the opposite of the man who covets power is not, then, one who is impotent, not one who is lacking power, but rather he who refuses to make obtaining power his goal, who seeks a life not marked by power, but one free of all coveting of power. This is the objective that, contrary to the thesis that Socrates attributed to Thrasymachus, would constitute the life of the good man. The good man is not a slave to the yearning for power that moves other men; rather, he is moved “to escape from power”. Hobbes’ statement turned on its head.3 Escaping from power is not equivalent to resigning oneself to impotence. It is not succumbing to the domination of multiple maneuvers of power ; not allowing power to prevail. It is to resist power. In the face of power a counter-power 2 Plato, Republic, 347 d. 3 Is this not also the position that, in its essence, the popular movement in Mexico –Zapatismo– proclaims? Here, a quotation is appropriate: “What makes us different –they say– is our political proposal. Political organizations, parties of the right, the center, the left, and revolutionary parties seek power ; some through electoral means, others through parliamentary [means] and fraud, others through the use of arms. We do not… We are not fighting to take power ; we are struggling for democracy, liberty and justice. Our political proposal is the most radical one in Mexico (and perhaps in the world, though it is too early to say). It is so radical that the entire traditional political spectrum (right, center, left, and other, at one extreme or the other) criticizes us and distances itself from our delirium” (“Libertad, democracia y justicia, delirio del ezln”, La Jornada, Mexico, September 3 1994).

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is proposed. We can use “counter-power” to refer to all efforts of resistance brought to bear to combat domination. Counter-power manifests itself in any conduct that resists power ; that defends itself from power. Opposition to power can help explain the dynamics of any society. Counterpower can be exercised in many forms. It may be passive resistance by groups within the society that cease to participate, that keep to the margins, and that no longer collaborate in common actions. When power is present, they prefer to absent themselves as a means of protection, a tacit defense. Resistance to power may vary in degree and adopt distinct social, political and ideological attitudes. This is also true of the varied forms of submitting to domination. One way of contemplating history is to see it as an ongoing engagement between the will to dominate and attempts to escape domination. Anti-power dynamics reveal themselves in common behaviors that do not obey a general goal or follow one sole pattern. In the dynamics of many struggles and diverse forms of resistance there emerges a varied current that nourishes a counter-power. Resistance to power can neither be attributed to one sole subject nor manifest the same character in all cases. It is only through abstraction that we can come to imagine it as a multiplex force that takes a common direction. Though the concrete actions that comprise it are too numerous to count, we can conjugate them into one single concept: namely, the pursuit of a shared goal. This shared goal would be the abolition of domination. And since the State exercises domination through various means – political, juridical, ideological, military and the police – the ultimate goal of counter-power could thus be understood as the very abolition of the State. Here, naturally, we are dealing with an imaginary final objective. With the abolition of the State the will to dominate would be torn out by its roots. This imaginary goal would be the ideal of a world opposed to power. This gradual realization leading to a world liberated to its furthest reaches from the universal yearning for power would constitute a regulating idea that would imbue our actions with ethical meaning. This regulating idea gives meaning to the course of history. All of history could be seen as a path, though one constantly interrupted and deviated, towards the realization of a human society freed from the anxiety of domination. Can human history not indeed be seen as a trail that leads from its origins, ensconced in the universal reality of power, through successive attempts to escape from it? Gaining freedom from a world where injustice prevails is not the same as postulating the unjust world that Thrasymachus debated with Socrates. Rather, it consists in opting for the possibility to act so as to escape from that unjust reality. The idea is to trigger the drive to slough off a world where injustice holds sway. This is why Socrates does not express the idea as “searching for justice”,

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but as “an escape from unjust power”. This is the genesis of a negative route in the face of power.

2

The first moment: the experience of exclusion

The path that leads to escaping from power can be described through three moments. They are not to be understood as successive stages in time, but as conditions of increasing complexity in the development of a moral order. Though these are historical moments that partially overlap and coincide, they can be distinguished in the interests of greater clarity. They are as follows: – The experience of exclusion. – Equivalence with the excluder. – Recognition of the other. It is, in fact, precisely this process that individuals and social groups have followed in order to attain a more rational conception of justice by setting out from its absence. Let us then attempt to delineate the stages through which this route against unjustified power might proceed. It would have three distinguishable moments, though they would not necessarily correspond to successive stages but, perhaps better, to states of complexity in the development of a moral order. The first moment of this route against power would be gaining awareness of a want caused by an injury provoked by the actions or omissions of others who do not belong to the group that is left wanting. The starting point would entail demonstrating the real society as wanting. A wanting society is an injured society. The absence of value within it is experienced as injury. Injury is not only wanting, needs gone unsatisfied, but also suffering caused by an agent. The agent of injury is the other ; who may be personalized or conceived as a vague, indeterminate, impersonal subject, like “society”, “the system”, “the dominant class”, or “others”; that is to say, those who are not like ourselves, who do not share this same absence of value. We shall call the agent of injury the “aggressor” and its victim the “aggrieved”; because the experience of injury for the group that suffers it can be seen as a relation of aggression, if we take this term in its broadest sense. It may be expressed through violent offense, permanent oppression, or exploitation; or simply in attitudes of disdain or indifference. It may be conscious or unconscious, systematic or sporadic, but will always mark a relation through which a power imposes its dominion upon others and causes them injury. It is in this way that the dominated become conscious of the fact that they are aggrieved. Perceiving wanting as injury can have diverse psychological consequences in the individuals so aggrieved, including resentment, rage, envy, and even de-

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pression or feelings of worthlessness. It can also generate vague, collective sentiments associated with a sense of being abused or feelings of inferiority. But it is not the psychological level that interests us here – that is a topic for other disciplines – for we are concerned with what it can tell us about morality linked to the public sphere. The absence of a value among those who are wanting tends to go hand-inhand with some specific characteristic that the members of a social group or class share: such as the condition of being industrial workers, immigrants, Indians, or women. This trait expresses a kind of collective specific need of that group and propitiates awareness of a specific value that they lack. While the thing that workers lack is not the same thing that Indians or women lack and, therefore, their consciousness of this absence cannot be identical, the awareness of wanting is linked to an injury inflicted on the characteristic that is common to the members of the group. Individuals who become aware of such injury may thereby attain consciousness of belonging to a social group or class with which they share the common condition of wanting, and a notion of social identity may be bound up with this first awareness of belonging. “I have a wanting that I share with others in the same situation, I am similar to them, [thus] I gain consciousness of myself as a worker, as poor, as marginalized, as an Indian, or as a woman”. The consciousness of belonging entails recognition of a demarcation between the group with which one identifies and those who are outside of it; hence, it signals a difference that separates us from a diffuse totality that does not share that difference. In this way, the experience of suffering – or of having suffered – the same injury can constitute a step on the path towards an initial form of spontaneous solidarity among those who suffer it; the first impulse of a movement against power. Now, the consciousness of differentiating oneself from the social totality by virtue of a certain wanting, or injury suffered, can be defined as personal awareness of exclusion. I say “personal experience” because it involves a direct knowledge that the individual gains; perhaps knowledge of the rejection of which he is an object, or perhaps of confirming the relegation to which other individuals or groups with which he maintains contact are subjected. This is not about a general rejection, but a relation lived in the heart of a concrete society. In effect, being excluded means not forming part of the totality like other individuals; not being fully recognized in that totality ; or not having a place in it like everyone else; precisely because one is somehow different. Hence, consciousness of the identity of wanting is linked to the awareness of being different and this, in turn, is associated with the experience of exclusion. Thus, injury emerges as a forced, imposed exclusion from certain specific goods that vary according to the precise wanting of each group. It manifests itself in different milieus that reflect the precise kind of goods from which the wanting

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group finds itself excluded. This rejection may be greater or lesser, according to the nature of the social or political relation from which the different ones are excluded. It may be total exclusion from the community of consensus, as in the case of slaves or Indians under conditions of colonization, or relegation from certain social or political relations that are restricted to certain, specific goods. In the latter, those who are different are not excluded totally, but are somehow deemed to be lesser, and so are not taken into account as full participants in the social consensus or the political pact. This can occur in the economic sphere, in the distribution of basic material goods, manifested as poverty, or in the domain of production, where workers perceive how they are exploited in the workplace: a distinct form of exclusion may occur in the cultural milieu that affects ethnic groups whose lifeways are disdained, or in society itself, where social considerations deem women to be lesser beings. Finally, exclusion may be political, when a group is barred from participation in the instances of collective decisionmaking. In all of these cases, it is a mark of difference (race, gender, ascendance, belonging to a class or ethnic group, etc.) that makes those individuals somehow lesser within the existing social or political consensus. The community of consensus cannot take into account their preferences as their own, for those individuals are not considered fully equal subjects, nor can it admit them as full participants in the political pact, except in aspects that do not touch upon their difference. Thus, the consciousness of the social identity of an offended group carries with it the stamp of exclusion. “Who am I? I am part of a group that is characterized by the absence of certain values from which it is excluded”. Upon finding themselves marginalized from certain social or political goods, the excluded experience their rejection as a wanting: they lack access to the concrete goods from which they are excluded, but for which they have need. In the face of the sense of justice generally accepted by the social consensus they perceive their wanting as an injustice, and understand directly that the injustice consists in the absence of a good that the community of consensus, in contrast, accepts for itself.

3

The second moment: equivalence with the excluders

The experience of suffering exclusion can be lived through the passive acceptance of the rejection suffered, or by discordance from it; i. e. countering their rejection with our dissent. Unconformity with the rejection received from power is the impulse that initiates, and propels, a movement of rebellion against injustice. This rebelliousness manifests our opposition to the power that rejects

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our inherent value. From the humiliation they experience, the excluded may develop a self-understanding based on an opposition to those who reject them. This brings us to a second moment: from the experience of rejection suffered to equivalence with the rejecter, awareness of the equivalence of the two, and of the consequent impulse to identify with the other. Injury is taken as a challenge. Whereas the wanter once said: “I am excluded from the goods you enjoy”, he now affirms: “I am worth just as much as you”. The excluded has taken up the gauntlet. The duel begins. It may take on varying degrees of violence, or shroud itself in different forms of competition, find expression in contests subject to rules, or in verbal sparring; but whatever shape its manifestation may take, through their new attitude the excluded go from saying, “I am different”, to proclaiming: “I am equal to you”. For through action the duel equalizes the differences in a common denominator: the space of the contest. Both contestants sustain that they are not subject to the other, but are free to confront one another. Equivalence with the aggressor places the contest in its true terrain. For as different as their strengths may be, power and counter-power test each other in the arena of society. Rebelliousness against power has a double effect: it reinforces both the forms of solidarity among the dissidents and their shared resistance. Solidarity may be transformed into the outlines of new forms of community. Thus, new communitarian relations may develop as counterpoints to various defensive attitudes towards power. By asserting equivalence to the other we proclaim that we are worth just as much as they ; we recognize ourselves as subjects worthy of value, a value that makes the two adversaries equal by transcending difference. Unconformity with the reasons of power as a path to self-justification opens the possibility to dissent. Dissenting from the justification that power adduces is the first manifestation of opposition to it: it is to rupture the social consensus that power invokes. This rupture of consensus is, in and of itself, a manifestation of counterpower. It may produce resistance – violent or not – that constitutes a break in the existing consensus. It is the first condition for “escaping from power”. Equivalence with those who exclude us may also give rise to a battle of words as well as to a confrontation between the reasons that each party adduces as it attempts to justify its dissent. Unconformity may propitiate resistance to power in different forms: perhaps defense and protection from the acts of power, or a challenge in which the aggrieved party calls the other party to account for its aggression. The latter would be expressed in a pragmatic statement that Enrique Dussel calls “interpellation”. In the context of a “philosophy of liberation” Dussel writes that his intention is to speak with the voice of the oppressed in our nations; the voice, he says, “of the majority of current humanity (the ‘South’)… the other face of modernity…

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the one that strives to validly express ‘the reason of the other’, of the Indian murdered in genocide, of the African slave reduced to a commodity, of the woman as sexual object, of the child dominated pedagogically…” (Dussel, 1993: 35). Dussel presents his proposal as a pragmatic dimension of communicative discourse. By “interpellation” – Dussel writes – we understand a sui generis pre-formative announcement emitted by someone (S) who with respect to a listener (L) (in this sense transcendental) finds himself “outside” or “beyond” the horizon of the normative, institutional framework of the “system”. By interpellating on the basis of existing law and as a member of the real community of communication (as one who demands from “without”, one who is “excluded” from existing law, one without rights, the rechtloss) – and it is in this that the difference between simple intra-systemic demands and interpellation consists – the interpellater on principle opposes the existing consensus, the accord obtained intersubjectively in the past that excludes him. His argumentation will be radical and hardly accepted in fact […] By definition, the interpellater cannot comply with the existing norms (Ibid., 37).

Rather, he questions those norms from their very foundations: from the dignity that has been denied to those who interpellate (Ibid., 40 – 41). Exclusion as discussed by Dussel refers not only to exclusion from the rule of law, but also from an existing community of communication. Interpellation by the excluded does not come from someone who can accept the intersubjective rule of law, but from one who considers himself outside the existing normative order. The interpellater thus fails to fulfill the conditions of all communication and so becomes, in this sense and from the perspective of the listener, an “incompetent” communicator. The act of speaking that I have called “interpellation” has a “propositional content” (for it strives to fulfill the condition of “intelligibility”; that is, it announces an interpretable “meaning”) that the speaker (S), as a “poor” person excluded in exteriority, can only with great difficulty come to formulate correctly due to a certain linguistic incompetence in the view of the listener (L) (Ibid., 39).

This is how one may describe the situation of people or groups excluded from a concrete (not ideal) community of communication, for they are not judged to be valid speakers in any qualitative dialogue and, therefore, cannot participate in any possible rational consensus for they do not satisfy the norms of argumentative discourse. Expressed in this way, interpellation opens us up to the experience of the “exteriority of the other” in a radical sense. How are we to interpret this “exteriority”? The interpellater would feel foreign to an ideal community of com-

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munication that is simply assumed in argumentative dialogue, though he may belong to a real, historical community. Thus, “all argumentation always presupposes an ideal community of communication, free of domination and respectful of the equality of all possible participants (i. e., positively) as persons, where each one of the real or potential members, assumed a priori, pragmatically and transcendentally speaking, has the same right to always place himself virtually as another, distinct from the community itself (i. e., negatively) (Ibid., 43). In this way, Dussel distinguishes an “ideal community of communication” from a community in which no one would be excluded, for everyone would be part of a “community of justice”. In the real community, Dussel writes, “each member has the right to place himself in a certain ‘exteriority’ with respect to the community itself”. But this exteriority “does not deny the community ; rather, it reveals it as the ‘gathering’ or ‘convergence’ of free persons and […] [n]o agreement […] can ever grant itself the pretension to negate the possibility that each real or possible member will place himself before the community as an other”. We could interpret the “exclusion of the other” of which Dussel speaks as a pragmatic action that presents two possible levels: 1) the exclusion of the other from the existing rule of law, though he is included in it; and, 2) the exclusion of the other as a subject in a community of communication. The latter is a radical exclusion. To give examples based on fact: while the exclusion of the other occurs in the framework of real social and juridical relations, his exclusion outside this framework breaks, or, at least, distorts communication. This is the case that can occur between two distinct peoples or ethnicities, but also between groups excluded from society due to poverty, race or indigence. This would be the final step along the road to negativity. Let us pause for a moment to review the steps on this path to justice. 1) It sets out from the experience of exclusion as awareness of an injury suffered. That injury may be passively accepted, but may also be rejected based on reasons. Thus, it gives rise to reasoned dissent. 2) This reasoned dissent may result in controversy, but may also lead to resistance. Equivalence with the aggressor – in controversy and social and political action – is the second moment of this negative path. It may culminate in a rupture, or in the deterioration of the community of communication. 3) However, exclusion also offers a possibility that leads once again to recognition of the other. Now, in order to go on to the third moment (recognition) we must first resolve a controversy that contrasts universal human rights with an “alternative of dissent”. This constitutes a dialectical introduction to the third moment.

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A parenthesis: human rights and dissent

The topic of reason-based dissent set off an important philosophical debate between Javier Muguerza and Ernesto Garzûn Vald¦s. Here, I would like to highlight what seem to me to be the most crucial points of this debate. Muguerza takes up the well-known Kantian formulation of the categorical imperative: “Work in such a way that you always take humanity, in both your own person and that of any other, also as an end and not solely as a means”. In this he sees an “imperative of dissidence”. In effect, by negating the taking of the other exclusively as a means, he establishes a principal opposed to that of the universalization of the affirmation of values. “In contrast to the principle of universalization – Muguerza writes – upon which he sought to base adhesion to such values as dignity, liberty or equality, what this imperative should establish is, rather, the possibility to say ‘no’ to situations in which indignity, inequality or the absence of freedom prevail” (Muguerza, 1998: 59). Instead of establishing human rights on incontrovertible universal principles, the idea is to base them, so to speak, “negatively”. “If after such insistence on, factic or contrafactic, consensus with regards to human rights – Muguerza asks – might we not extract greater gain from an attempt to ‘fundament’ them on dissent; i. e., an attempt at ‘negative’ or dissensual fundamentation of human rights; what I shall call ‘the alternative’ of dissent” (Idem). Muguerza never ceases to remind us that history gives testimony to the fact that individuals’ or groups’ refusal to consider human rights as universal lays beneath multiple declarations of the rights of man and citizens that date from the 16th century to the 1948 United Nations’ “Declaration”. And it is still today the ongoing struggle to realize those rights that incites the dissidence of libertarian movements. But to Muguerza’s line of argumentation on the “alternative of dissent”, Garzûn Vald¦s offered a solid retort. The “dissent” of which Muguerza speaks presents a negative formulation: one that can only refer to a previously existing consensus that it denies; its ethical character depends on that which is denied. Through his dissension the dissident aspires to a new accord. Garzûn Vald¦s writes that “What the dissident aspires to is that others reach a consensus that concords with his dissidence. The final situation he seeks to reach is that of a consensus. In this sense, dissent is a transitory attitude framed by two consensuses: one that is denied and another that is sought” (E. Garzûn Vald¦s, Ibid., 100). The moral import of dissent would thus depend on the significance of the previous consensus. “If this is so, then the question concerning the moral significance of dissent can be answered if it is known precisely against which previous consensus it is directed, and what the moral quality of the

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dissent is. And just as the moral quality of the consensus cannot [be determined by] reference to the consensus itself, neither can that of the dissent” (Ibid., 101). Garzûn Vald¦s’ argumentation seems to me conclusive. The moral significance of both consensus and dissent, if based on reason, leads to the affirmation of the universal rights of man, perhaps through an affirmative path, or a negative one. In both cases, the insufficiency of consensus as the source of legitimacy is transmitted to the dissent that denies it; the moral quality of both consensus and dissent cannot be derived from the fact of consensus or dissent. What must be done is precisely to follow the reverse path: justify consensus and dissent from a regulating idea, from a moral point of view, for which the imperative of universality or impartiality offers good support (Ibid., 103).

This Muguerza-Garzûn Vald¦s debate allows one to reach certain conclusions. The first is that the formulation of dissent as per Muguerza would have little moral significance aside from expressing an attitude of rejection in emotive terms. But this could just as well have been posited in an affirmative tone. Instead of speaking – following the Kantian imperative of “trying not to treat anyone as a means” – he could have said “treat everyone as ends”. “Thus, the negative version – Garzûn Vald¦s concludes – fails to enrich the content of the imperative” (Ibid., 104). What the imperative would announce in both versions, affirmative and negative, would be what this author calls the “forbidden preserve” of fundamental human rights. “It is only beyond this ‘forbidden preserve’ that dissent, negotiation and tolerance can enter. Those who seek to open the door of the ‘forbidden preserve’ and transform fundamental rights into an object of dissent and negotiation would violate the upper limit of the ethical framework proposed by Muguerza” (Ibid., 105). Nonetheless, does the “imperative of dissent” not have moral significance of another kind? Though it is true that from a semantic point of view this would be equivalent to “everyone must be treated as an end”, from a pragmatic perspective, is not its function to exhort to concrete actions? Does it say to us not only that we should treat all others as ends, but also that, by so acting, foster an objective situation in which everyone can be treated as ends? Here the idea is that one should act so as to produce the conditions of a society in which no one is just a means for others. The possibility to act by saying “no” to situations where indignity and injustice prevail would constitute an attempt to establish universally valid human rights “negatively” by rejecting those situations in which its negation arises. An unworthy society is one that permits conditions that allow violations of human rights to prevail. This rejection can be expressed in the principle of dissent. Hence, Muguerza can express the “im-

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perative of dissent” as the possibility of saying “no” to concrete situations in which violations of human values prevail. In summary, the “imperative of dissent” might express the same idea as the “forbidden preserve”, but in a stronger formulation, to establish the universal validity of human rights. But it exhorts moral will to do so, in practice, by means of concrete actions. Thus, it justifies those actions that tend to realize, or indeed do realize moral value in the world of real situations. This involves, therefore, a concrete ethics; that is, one that does not limit itself to promulgating general norms, like that of treating everyone else as ends, but takes into account the conditions that would permit its applications. The “imperative of dissent” is not to be interpreted as an abstract norm but as a universal principle of a concrete ethics. It would function as a regulating idea of all action that, in practice, foments the realization of a worthy society. Allow me to quote from an earlier work of mine on the conditions of an ethics in the field of politics. “A political ethics – I wrote – cannot limit itself to promulgating general norms, or establishing abstract principles. It must be a concrete ethics; that is, one that considers circumstances, the relations of a particular action with its context and the real possibilities of applying the norms” (Villoro, 1997: 124). The justification required by a concrete ethics refers, in effect, to the realization, in real terms, of values that can have universal validity. “The moral end (I wrote) consists not in some idle desire for the common good, but in the will to realize it in concrete actions. An action is justified by the degree to which it propitiates a situation in which the moral values chosen are realized. Justifying an action entails demonstrating its realization in the world of real situations, of value. This relates to all moral action” (Ibid., 123). While the means that might justify an action can, without doubt, be expressed in affirmative statements on the realization of human rights, their expression in negative form is always clearer and more distinct: “To escape from injustice”, as Socrates wrote.

5

The third moment: recognizing the other en route to a concrete ethics

Universal human rights do not announce abstract norms, but express moral exigencies that must be fulfilled under all circumstances. Thus, they do not fit within the so-called “naturalist fallacy”; that is, under the error of inferring an ideal order from a real, effective situation. In reality, the intended fallacy indicates the circumstances that must exist, in fact, in order for those norms to be fulfilled. They pertain not only to the order of what must be, but also to the order

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of being, to the degree to which the facts possess characteristics within which the norms are fulfilled (Ibid., 48 – 52). In the “forbidden preserve”, formally negative expressions of universal human rights establish the validity of those rights that must be realized in every society. Thus, they form part of a concrete ethics that establishes the limits, not of the norms that must be fulfilled, but of their effective fulfillment in historical deeds. After equivalence with the other what may ensue is an alternative: conflict between the two, or the vindication of the rights of both. With challenge comes the pretension to accede to goods from which the aggrieved knows he is excluded. Vindication of a right is the demand that such a pretension be recognized by the other ; an exigency for the faculty to accede to a value without impediment. At the moment in which the excluded equates himself with his aggressor this right is vindicated. Upon measuring himself against the other, the subject is no longer seen as just different. Rather, at the same time as he affirms his difference, he proclaims his equality with his opponent. This is one step towards a possible establishment of shared values and norms, though those norms would not decree a uniformity among the adversaries; instead, they would allow the possibility of a reciprocal recognition of equality in the faculty to accede to common values, without eliminating differences. Each contender strives to have this equality crystallized through acceptance of a particular valorization that can be raised to a generally accepted norm. Each party holds the same intention: that this valorization come to be shared. Their valorization is distinguished, therefore, from the valorization of the dissident, in the sense that it must posit a right as a means to eliminate a situation of exclusion; thus its vindication carries the seal of no-exclusion. The excluded may present his demand as the vindication of a common, universalizable right. As long as dissent subsists, opposed valorizations confront one another, each striving to achieve objective validity and thereby become acceptable to the other. But discrepancy, as we said, opens up the possibility of becoming equal in the vindication of a common value: the value of no-exclusion. The claim of the excluded started out from a demand to satisfy a collective need through access to an objective value they lack. The rational foundation of their vindication of right, in order to realize it, thus leads to replacing contention with dialogue and rational argument. Vindication of the excluded can therefore lead to promulgation of universalizable norms. This process has not followed the path of achieving a consensus through agreement on the values and principles that would be acceptable to all but, rather, the negative path of showing those that would be non-exclusive. This end can be described as “negative” for it does not necessarily lead to a consensus.

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The criterion of universalization followed here is that of no-exclusion. The nonexclusive valorizations and norms that could be universalizable would not be those of any one subject, nor necessarily those that might propose substantive, consensual values. In fact, in the conflict of opposed valorizations the possibility of universalization proceeds through criticism of any attempt to impose one valorization to the exclusion of all others. The criterion of universalization through no-exclusion is compatible with maintaining the differences that emerge from the distinct situations of social subjects. Therefore, achieving universalizable principles of justice does not require that the subject have access to an impartial point of view or – as Nagel would say – to the “point of view of any place”; nor is it necessary to postulate purely rational subjects, abstracted from their particular desires and attitudes. Universalization, in fact, takes place through situated subjects by means of a specific vindication of rights unshrouded by any “veil of ignorance” (Nagel, 1986 and Rawls, 1971). The dissenter seeks to accede to a value he lacks, and it is that wanting that makes him different; thus his pretension may be exclusive, different from that of other groups. But demonstrating that this value resists the criterion of no-exclusion proves that, though it may well be exclusive, it is not excluding, and is, therefore, universalizable. Thus, it propitiates transforming dissent into a new consensus. But this consensus is not a criterion for reaching a universalization of the value, just a possible consequence of an argumentation that reflects the non-exclusive character of the rights vindicated by a group. The values made universalizable through this process, and the universal rights that correspond to them, are limited in every historical situation to those that are object of a specific vindication in a competition to gain recognition of rights. The process of universalizing norms cannot be abstracted from this historical vindication. In all cases, upon becoming aware of the lack of coincidence between the – social or political – community of consensus and another possible community that would include their difference, the excluded construct a moral subject; one governed by a general interest derived from their own desire to discard all others, and propelled by common values that are beneficial even for the subjects of the old consensus. This new moral subject does not set aside his personal identity because it reaffirms his difference. He is a subject situated in a specific historical context and it is thanks to this situation that he can accede to the personal experience of a new meaning of justice. The idea of justice based on the negative experience of exclusion does not conceive of justice as a defined, final order, but as a real historical process that may have several concrete stages. In each one, the historical sense of social justice moves closer to an idea in which excluding differences are suppressed.

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Each stage is an approximation to a full idea of justice in which differences would be suppressed. Thus it is important to distinguish clearly between a certain level of exclusion of historically-conditioned social conventions, and one that would contain the meaning of excluding any subject from universal human rights. The first genre of exclusion refers to the customs and dictates of a morality that might differ from the social practices commonly accepted by social morality or even existing legislation. The second level, in contrast, is founded on the norms of a concrete ethics that is valid in all historical circumstances. It is this concrete ethics that would sustain the validity of Muguerza’s “imperative of dissent” and justify Dussel’s “interpellation of the other”. Let us recall some examples of these distinct levels of exclusion. Friar Bartolom¦ de las Casas experienced exclusion in the form of the oppression that his neighbors, the Indians, suffered because they were different from the variants considered acceptable within the consensual community of the Spaniards. He understood that the injustice of the colonial regime rested upon the private, non-generalizable interests of the dominators. Thus he dissented by sustaining that the Indian is just as much a moral subject as the Spaniard, and must demand recognition as an equal member of the association. The Indian, like all men, is a child of God, subject to natural law and divine design. Therefore, all men have the same basic, universal rights. Las Casas’ doctrine is, in this sense, the first solid, clear expression of the modern doctrine of the universal rights of man. Nonetheless, he incorporates into the idea of the moral subject worthy of justice a racial and cultural difference that distinguishes him; such is the origin of exclusion from the society of New Spain. The Indian is a moral subject of law, but not an equal subject according to the consensual social morality, nor according to the existing Indian legislation. Despite the difference of his race, the Indian should have the right to be an equal subaltern of the Spanish, but not the right to be different in other characteristics that were still deemed inadmissible; for example, to affirm his political liberty, or express his “heretical” beliefs. The new notion of justice would be more rational because it would broaden the circle of differences that are considered admissible. And it would consist in the no-exclusion due to the rejected identitary trait or aspect that was rejected; instead, it would be able to continue asserting the rejection of other differences, in other respects. Later, Locke would experience another form of exclusion: namely, religious intolerance. This would lead him to identify another aspect of injustice, one that had long lain concealed. For this reason, he projected a new moral subject that included the virtue of tolerance, widened the circle of differences that should not be object of repudiation, and opened the field of options and private beliefs among the differences that are worthy of acceptance in the equitable treatment of

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justice. But even he would leave open the possibility that a community of social consensus could exclude other discriminations related to distinct aspects of the relation; for example, those that derive from property or even ascendancy. In another case, 18th-century revolutionaries experienced exclusion from the Third State in the domain of political power. That experience was accompanied, in hindsight, by the construction of a new moral agent: the universal subject of “human rights”, which included the demand of equality for all members of that State. Their new idea of justice embraced the individual rights of all citizens, though it continued to permit the exclusion of groups on the basis of economic and cultural differences, which would give rise to additional exclusions… and, later, to new disruptions in the context of unjust societies. Each experience of exclusion from a certain difference in one aspect of social relations makes it possible to raise in opposition to the community of consensus an idea of a moral subject that does not reject that specific difference in that particular respect. But that idea can include still other rejections of differences that may manifest themselves in later social experiences. The idea of justice is enriched by the progressive awareness of existing injustices. Since in each case mentioned above the demonstration of an injustice leads to the intellectual projection of a more just social order, that order is born from the disruption of a previous factic consensus, and conserves the peculiar characteristics of that disruption. Therefore, its objective character cannot be founded upon that consensus. Rather, it is justified in personal knowledge subjected to criticism of an injustice already suffered. But on the basis of this personal knowledge what comes to be projected is the possibility of a normative order in which that specific exclusion against which the dissenter rebelled will no longer exist. The new order would be constituted by the decision of moral subjects that include the formerly inadmissible differences, but is not freed from the possibility of including other differences, of which no consciousness yet exists.

6.

Universal human rights

To finalize, we can now describe the concept of justice to which we have arrived following this theoretical path. 1. Achieving a rational conception of justice does not require commencing with a hypothetical subject of practical reason that is equal in all individuals. Instead, we may set out from the personal experience of concrete men and women situated in a social context. In the face of a consensual morality with its sense of justice there can emerge the possibility of critical dissent. The dissenter sets out from the consciousness of an exclusion to project a distinct social order in which said exclusion no longer occurs.

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2. The dissenter is moved by personal interest: i. e., to eliminate the wanting he suffers and satisfy a need of his own. He is not propelled by an altruistic impulse that would lead him to sacrifice his own, personal interest. Rather, by pursuing his own interests he generalizes the no-exclusion of any other who shares his situation, thus vindicating the objective value of all. His pretension is, at one and the same time, self-interested and universalizable. 3. His demand refers to a specific wanting and to the recognition of a difference, both of which may vary in particular situations. For this reason it is futile to attempt to determine the positive characteristics that a concept of justice may contain as an abstraction constructed on the basis of all social-historical conditions. In addition to disruptive, an ethical posture in the face of justice is also concrete. 4. However, we can detect an element that is inherent in all concepts of justice and in any historical circumstance, though it is of a negative nature. The justice that is demanded, whatever the case may be, is the non-exclusion. 5. The idea of justice as non-exclusion implies a reformulation of the universal doctrine of human rights. We can consider that a right is the recognition of an objective value the realization of which satisfies a need and, therefore, gives rise to an obligation. For a right to be considered universal it must be accepted as valid in all historical circumstances. The basic rights of a person would thus be those that are a necessary condition for enjoying any other right. But the doctrine of the universal rights of man that is currently in vogue was formulated at a precise juncture of history : arising in a circumscribed epoch of the history of a culture. It does not form part of the idea of justice of any cultural tradition other than modern Western culture and, even there, it has existed only since the 18th century. It corresponds to a particular conception of the common good that begins with the historical experience of a fact: the exclusion of the bourgeois middle class in the community of the anci¦n r¦gime. Facing the domination of which that class was the object, it vindicated the freedoms that it was denied. The new, Enlightened, concept of justice is the result of the rational universalization of its concrete vindication of non-exclusion. The renewal of the liberal theory of justice in our time is the result of a similar experience: the exclusion of a personal life marked by freedom in the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. We have already seen that an ethical concept of justice results from its universalization to all members of the society. It is not surprising, then, that in such cases freedom is discovered as a basic condition of the recognition of all moral subjects in a non-exclusive society. But, as in all historical processes that lead toward a higher level of justice, that recognition of

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basic liberties does not necessarily include other experiences involving different exclusions. In fact, in most societies that do not belong to the developed nations of the West, and in distinct historical conditions, other concrete experiences of exclusion are the ones that will take priority. The right to freedoms is, without question, a basic right because it is a condition for the election of any other value. However, the right to freedom cannot be exercised in many societies without other equally fundamental conditions. In order to attain freedom, certain other, more elemental needs, must be satisfied beforehand: these are the needs of survival (alimentation, dress, housing, safety) and co-existence (belonging to a human community). In many countries, broad sectors are slaves to these elemental needs or, at least, are largely subjected to them; to the extent that they are impeded from choosing any other value. The difference that excludes them is the impossibility of gaining access to the minimum material goods and services required to survive as independent human beings. Often, basic freedoms are consigned to the juridical order and may even form part of the practices of one sector of the population, while another sector, though formally enjoying those same freedoms, finds itself in a situation of dependency such that it cannot follow its own will but is obliged to cling to that of others. The subjects in that sector are free according to law, but cannot exercise their freedom for they are subject to other men because of their need to secure, first, the needs that will assure their survival, or simply because exercising their rights would entail the risk of losing their way of life, or even their lives. These situations are not the exception in most areas of the planet, and are the most frequent ones in the nations of the so-called Third World. We can say that in those cases the basic freedoms of which liberalism speaks exist in the juridical order, and even in the moral consensus of one sector of the society, but that another sector is excluded from their realization. For this latter sector the experience of exclusion refers fundamentally to the lack of goods that would allow them to choose a plan for their lives and then go on to realize it. We would say that they correspond to what we might call the “freedom of realization”, not of election. As a result, the exclusions to which many people in broad sectors may be subjected are not simply those of freedoms but other wantings, the suppression of which would be of high priority for many. In each society, in each social sector, it thus becomes necessary to demonstrate which ones are the types of rights that earn higher priority for their vindication. Only in this way can we arrive at a theory of the basic rights of man that would be applicable to all cultures and societies. In summary, the path towards justice that I have presented has sought to

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reflect the process that men and women have followed historically as they strive to achieve this objective. The attainment of more just relations among men has been gained in successive stages. Its end has yet to be reached, for full justice is a regulatory idea that can orient the actions of the society without, perhaps, ever being fully realized.

References “Libertad, democracia y justicia, delirio del ezln”, La Jornada, Mexico, September 3 1994. Dussel, Enrique (1993). Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty y la filosof†a de la liberaciûn. Mexico: Universidad de Guadalajara. Hobbes, T. (1940). Leviat‚n. Mexico: FCE. Muguerza, Javier (1998). Êtica, disenso y derechos humanos, en conversaciûn con Ernesto Garzûn Vald¦s. Madrid: Argos. Nagel, T. (1986). Una visiûn de ningffln lugar. Mexico: fce. Plato, Repfflblica, 347 d. Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Villoro, Luis (1997). El poder y el valor. Mexico: fce.

Nicola Miller

Incorrigibly Plural: Translating the Modern in Latin America, 1870 to 1930 World is suddener than we fancy it. World is crazier and more of it than we think, incorrigibly plural Louis MacNeice, Snow

The republics of Latin America were founded upon the dream of building modern utopias, based on popular sovereignty and liberal freedoms, emancipated from the despotism and great power rivalries of the Old World. The nation-builders of Latin America were keen to learn from Europe about science, the arts and economic policy, but felt that it had little to teach them about politics. Well into the nineteenth century, Latin American statesmen were elaborating their own distinctive variations on the theme of manifest destiny, in the conviction that their republican experiments would ultimately result in free, equal and just societies, which would be far superior to any previous model. Yet by the late nineteenth century, it was the quasi-imperial United States of America that had become associated with all the legendary promise of the New World, while the Latin American countries had yet to achieve sustained economic prosperity, to realize the liberal aspirations of their constitutions or to exercise full sovereignty. However, they did experience significant, if erratic, economic growth as the volume of international trade increased from the 1870s onwards. As goods, capital, people and ideas from Europe and the United States flowed into Latin America, stimulating urbanization and industrialization, a lively public discussion developed throughout the region about what it might mean to become modern. Although many members of the elites were content to collaborate with capitalist-led modernization, politicized intellectuals and leaders of popular organizations articulated a variety of alternative projects committed to ideals of political and cultural freedom. Although by the 1870s liberalism, albeit liberally laced with positivism and Social Darwinism, had become the dominant discourse among those in power in Latin America, by 1910 it was in crisis. This was the result of a twofold failure by the ruling elites: first, while they were living very comfortably on the proceeds of export-led growth, they remained reluctant to extend individual rights beyond Creole men, thereby precluding the possibility of uniting their racially disparate

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populations through civic nationalism, as happened in the United States. Second, they also failed to rise to the challenge of creating some sense of a shared way of life, thereby abdicating leadership of cultural nationalism. In other words, they had promoted economic liberalism to their own benefit while taking steps to defend their privileged position by stultifying political liberalism and repressing social liberalism. Identifying mainly with an international, mobile capitalist class, their vision of the future of their own nation-states, insofar as they had one, was that modernization would gradually solve “the social problem”, sanitizing and educating the pueblo that was supposed to be sovereign in a modern republic. The elites may have had good reason to celebrate the independence centennials that began in 1910, but, as the leaders of new popular organizations argued, the majority of the populations had experienced precious little emancipation, either political or economic.1 The very processes of modernization also led to the emergence of various middling sorts, who resented being excluded by the elites, not to mention the exploitation, direct or indirect, of U.S. corporations with their professional management practices. All these tensions and conflicts came to mark political life across Latin America from the 1870s onwards, although at that stage it was only in Mexico that they culminated in a social revolution. Closely bound up with political struggles to secure access to the widely perceived benefits of modernization, which were enthusiastically pursued far beyond the elites, there were intense debates about how to create viable, modern national communities. The positivist prescription of order and progress trumpeted by the elites was widely challenged by a revival of idealism that drew upon independent Latin America’s founding values of liberty, sovereignty and justice. Thus, while modernization undoubtedly provoked a variety of anti-modern reactions across the region (for example, racial pessimism or hispanismo), as indeed it had done throughout Europe, in Latin America it also stimulated a widespread debate about how to become modern without succumbing to utilitarianism and instrumentalism. This challenge to a technocratic model of modernization was expressed most effectively by a newly-emerging cohort of petty-bourgeois intellectuals, but it can be detected in many of the new political and social organizations established during this period. In labor periodicals, in emerging popular magazines, and in the speeches and writings of union leaders and politicians of the period there are multiple expressions of the view that while modern life offered many enticing possibilities for emancipation, communication and connection, it was crucial not to sacrifice the founding values of liberty and equality on the altar of material gain. The intellectual elaborations of these arguments went beyond the idea that Latin America’s experiences did not “fit” European norms, to embark upon a 1 For example, Luis Recabarren, “Ricos y pobres”, 3 September 1910 (1976: 57 – 99).

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radical revision of the very categories of modernity. In so doing, they reinvented the possibilities of what it could mean to be modern.2 In the book upon which this article is based, I develop this argument and explore its implications for general theories of modernity by analyzing four aspects of social and political thought in early twentieth-century Latin America, namely : conceptions of epistemology, human agency, history and ethics (Miller, 2008). I aim to show how intellectuals throughout Latin America sought to counter scientific rationality with communicative reason; liberal individualism with participatory solidarity ; historical rupture with continuity and accumulation; and exclusion and uniformity with hospitality and heterogeneity. In this short article, I will illustrate the argument by examining two key terms from the discourse of modernity : reason and progress. For examples, I draw mainly upon the works of three leading intellectuals: Jos¦ Enrique Rodû (1871 – 1917), Alfonso Reyes (1889 – 1959) and Jos¦ Carlos Mari‚tegui (1894 – 1930). These three figures were chosen because their different national contexts, political orientations and intellectual approaches help highlight the salience of questions about modernity in their work, thereby offering a window onto wider debates. Rodû was a moderate liberal from Uruguay, a lifelong member of the reformist Colorado Party, who was most famous for his essay Ariel (1900), which invented a tradition of Latinity as a source of cultural identity for the region and stimulated an idealist intellectual movement, Arielismo, across the region. His work as a whole constituted an exploration of how it might be possible for Latin Americans to live autonomously in the modern world. Reyes was also a liberal, less conservative than Rodû but certainly not politically radical, who served as a diplomat during and after the Mexican Revolution. He established himself as an immensely learned and prolific figure, whose vast writings on a range of subjects in every possible genre constituted an enactment of his claim that it was in Latin America’s capacity for the amalgamation of different cultures that its own cultural distinctiveness could be found. Mari‚tegui was a revolutionary socialist who founded a Communist Party in Peru and rethought Marxism in the context of Latin America, developing ideas comparable to those of Gramsci concerning the importance of cultural practices in enacting political change. He went further 2 Modernity is a vexed term, which was little used in Latin American debates until the 1980s, when it appeared in association with posmodernidad. However, moderno and lo moderno frequently appear in Latin American newspapers, periodicals and other printed materials, not to mention political speeches, throughout the period covered in this article. For the purposes of this essay, I work on the basis that modernity connotes a generic promise that historical transformation is possible through rational human agency conquering space and time through scientific knowledge to create a society of greater justice, sovereignty and liberty. What might be meant in any particular historical and geographical context by any of those terms (rationality, liberty, and so forth) is the task of the historian to analyze.

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than any other intellectual of the period in attacking the limitations of the liberalism that had been implemented in Latin America and in developing a radically democratic and revolutionary alternative vision of a modern society.

1

Liberating reason from the rationalists The experience of rationalism has had the paradoxical effect of leading humanity to the desolate conviction that Reason cannot show it the way. Rationalism has only served to discredit reason. […] The rationalists have killed the idea of Reason (Mari‚tegui, 1950: 18).

The disillusionment with rationalism expressed by Latin America’s leading Marxist thinker was widely shared among the region’s intellectuals, as indeed it was in Europe, especially after the First World War. Yet in Latin America, an optimistic conception of reason as a route to liberation continued to have far greater purchase for most of the twentieth century than it did in Europe. Many Latin American intellectuals were reluctant to relinquish the original emancipatory promise of Enlightenment reason that constituted the founding discourse of their republics. They were all too aware of the potential for violence of unrestrained instrumental reason: how could this not be so, given that such rationalization was being so aggressively promoted by the rising imperial power of the United States and collaborative local elites? A history of colonialism and post-colonial dependency made them critical of the sovereign rational subject, and all too aware of the deficiencies of a Kantian model of reason as ahistorical, dispassionate and universal. Even so, they also had cause to be wary of the unrestrained subjectivity that could lead either to a chaotic mÞl¦e of competing interests or to the imposition of an authoritarian will. Reason still seemed to offer “the best option we humans have” for reconciling the conflicting interests of the individual and the collective (Reyes, 1967: 21). It needed rethinking, however, from their perspective, and that is what they did, arguing that rationalism – the elevation of Reason to an absolute good (or god), along with Science – had stifled the creative potential of reason in three main ways: i) its pretension to a monopoly over truth; ii) its authoritarian tendencies; and iii) its atomizing effects. For many Latin American intellectuals of that era, rationalism’s fatal flaw lay in its failure to address humankind’s need for a metaphysical understanding of life. Thus, for them, although reason was an important guiding principle it was unreliable unless complemented by other sources of knowledge, such as imagination, intuition, empathy, spirituality and passion. Like many of the eighteenth-century thinkers of the European Enlightenment, twentieth-century Latin

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American intellectuals saw no necessary contradiction between reason and faith. A commitment to a rational life was deemed to be perfectly compatible with openness to spiritual or even religious experience, though it almost invariably entailed opposition to the Catholic Church. Most intellectuals were committed to secularization; not in the sense of eliminating religion from public life but, rather, as a commitment to reducing the wealth and power of the Church, together with a respect for basic liberal freedoms, including the right to practice any religion. Secularism could have negative effects, it was argued, in that it could all too easily lead to a generalized skepticism about life, which would undermine people’s capacity to change themselves and their circumstances for the better. Hence Mari‚tegui’s famous claim that a revolution was always religious (Mari‚tegui, 1955: 196), by which he meant that it should command passionate devotion and catalyze spiritual transformation. He argued that religion could be positive or negative, ecumenical or dogmatic, depending on the socio-economic conditions that sustained it. He gave a series of historical examples in which religion had made a positive contribution: in Inca society, where it was integrated into the social and political structure; after the Spanish Conquest, when Catholicism’s capacity to absorb indigenous ritual had helped ease social tensions; and in the development of the United States, where religiously-inspired idealism played a formative role. The secret of organized religion’s continuing strength in the modern world lay in its power to inspire people to join together in collective action, something that reason alone was unable to do. That is why Mari‚tegui called for a unifying myth of revolution, which he thought would be crucial to inspiring the collective spirit necessary to bring workers and peasants into alliance. For him disenchantment, like most other ills, was an outcome of bourgeois decadence, not an inescapable feature of a modern society. As a socialist, he expressed the hope that, in time, contemporary revolutionary myths would displace “the old religious myths” (Ibid., 143). While far apart in temperament and political views, Mari‚tegui and Rodû were completely at one in their opposition to dogmatism which, they both argued, could equally as well be anti-clerical as clerical. Rodû, for example, condemned the sweeping anti-clericalism of the reformist government of Jos¦ Batlle y OrdûÇez (1903 – 1907), which renamed religious holidays with secular vocabulary and insisted on dios (God) being spelled without a capital letter. In a series of letters written in protest to an official edict to remove crucifixes from Uruguayan state hospitals, Rodû made an eloquent plea for toleration of Christian practice. The removal of crucifixes had not been motivated by liberalism, he suggested, but instead by “the inexorable logic of Jacobinism”, which “leads fatally to the most absurd extremes and the most provoking injustices when it is applied to the sphere of real live human feelings and action” (Rodû, 1957: 250 – 251). What he objected to in Jacobinism was “the dogmatic abso-

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lutism of its conception of truth”, which he traced back via Condillac, Helvetius and Rousseau to “the ‘reasoning reason’ of Descartes” (Ibid., 282). Jacobinism was “pseudo-liberalism”, he maintained, because it lacked any spirit of generosity. In his view, it was an example of precisely how reason should not operate: inflexibly and relentlessly pursuing its own logic without regard for human sympathies. The fear that the modern world was losing all sense of the integrity of human life was frequently expressed in early twentieth-century Latin America, where both civil society and cultural identity were more precarious than in Europe. Rodû’s work paved the way here, as in so much else: his critique of pure reason began with an attack on the analytic method. He saw the increasing specialization of labor, even among practitioners of knowledge, as an inevitable part of the modernizing process, and indeed as socially beneficial. Nonetheless, he urged that artists, scientists and politicians should all aim to sustain “an awareness of the fundamental unity of our nature”. “The fulfillment of a common destiny as rational beings”, he continued, “takes precedence over any modifications of human nature made by profession or culture. There is a universal profession, as Guyau so admirably said, which is to be a human being” (Ibid., 208).3 To fail to rise to that challenge could lead only to intolerance and exclusivity, he argued: “a disastrous indifference towards the general condition of humankind” (Ibid., 209). His stated ideals were “a harmonious culture and […] an integrated life” (Ibid., 1354),4 which could only be realized, he proposed, by reconceptualizing reason as a process of synthesis rather than an act of analysis. In other words, he refused to accept the reductionism inherent in a modern bureaucratic conception of rationality, which demands a single currency of reasons, thereby tending to exclude anything – such as feeling, spirit or beauty – that cannot be accommodated within an instrumental approach to life (Williams, 1985: 18). In order to shift the balance away from rationalism’s emphasis on differentiation (analysis), Latin American intellectuals, beginning with Rodû, developed a new critical method based on an impetus to connect (synthesis). In an early article challenging the conventional post-Romantic idea that criticism was opposed to creativity, Rodû proposed that the critic himself had to understand the creative process, and be open to a wide variety of experiences to inform his literary judgments. Like a traveler, the critic’s mind would be enhanced by experience of “the inexhaustible variety of things”; the good critic would open “the horizons of his thought” to “the four winds of the spirit” (Rodû, 1957: 145).5 3 Alfonso Reyes also cited this phrase of Guyau’s in “Homilio por la cultura” (1967: 100). 4 Original emphasis. 5 Original emphasis.

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Great critics, such as Schiller, Goethe and Diderot, were renowned for their tolerance and openmindedness. Criticism was much more than the well-argued expression of an opinion, he argued, and did not necessarily have to be severe in order to be penetrating. Criticism should be: “a spacious literary form, an impression, a reflection of art, a note of sympathy, the personal echo of a feeling that vibrates with the spirit of the age” (Idem). A good critic would be both an astute psychologist and an informed and imaginative historian (Ibid., 1411). Rather than relentlessly pursuing a destructive logic, criticism should be creative, generous, flexible and empathetic in approach. The modern critic was, by definition, “a man of perpetual metamorphoses of the mind and heart: a man of many souls, capable of being in tune with the most diverse characters and the most opposed conceptions of beauty and life” (Ibid., 947). Criticism should entail the bringing together of “objective contemplation” and “the impassioned subjectivism of aspiration and struggle” (Ibid., 944). Instead of the modernistas’ antithesis between modern literature and modernization (Dar†o: “The artist has been supplanted by the engineer” (Dar†o, 1955: 613),6 Rodû proposed a reciprocal relationship mediated by a new type of criticism committed to maintaining a balance between critical distance and critical closeness. Alfonso Reyes explicitly built upon Rodû’s work to develop a critical practice for analyzing not only literature and art but the whole panorama of Latin American history and culture. He insisted on the importance of the critical evaluation of evidence, arguing that “one of the most acute and unrecognized forms of mental laziness is […] the lack of capacity to be objective; failure to apply the procedures of logic to facts that should be accepted as facts” (D†az Arciniega, 1989: 156). Refusing to acknowledge certain historical developments due to an unwillingness to face up to the evidence, he argued, led to political demoralization. In order for Latin Americans to achieve a secure sense of identity that would enable them to avoid the twin temptations of uncritical emulation of foreign models or self-indulgent soul-searching, they needed to cultivate critical distance when analyzing their circumstances: “the best way to resist the attraction of the whirlwind is to raise one’s eyes and seek out the line of the horizon. A more distant perspective cures us of the ills of proximity” (Reyes, 1967: 70). Yet the critic had to perform a double operation of movement towards the desired object of knowledge and retreat from it, in order to balance identification and distancing. Criticism, which he defined as “rebellion of the spirit”, was thus, like the hand of Penelope, possessed of the two opposed capacities of creation and destruction, and was constantly caught in the tension of seeking to destroy the existing world in order to create a better future one. The critic had to

6 See Ramos (2001: 165).

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steer a course between openness to human life in all its suffering and a readiness to imagine and articulate alternative ways of being. Like most of his contemporaries among the public intellectuals of Latin America, Reyes firmly resisted any temptation to retreat into the world of the mind, in the conviction that to do so would result in an inability to be moved by human anguish and, therefore, an incapacity to change anything for the better (he accused Goethe of such “Olympian prejudice”). Likewise, any attempt to escape social realities through sensual experience (the frisson nouveau) was to live in a fantasy world. The dilemma was how to live fully in the social world and at the same time avoid the grotesque fate of becoming a “machine-man [running] after his engineer shouting… ‘Give me a soul, give me a soul!’” (Reyes, 1956 – 1993: 289). Reyes’ response was that writing in itself (el ejercicio de las letras) was a praxis, by means of which it was possible to enact the claims that there were no absolutes and that ideological certainties were always unsustainable. Thus, he suggested, it became possible to create a new mode of thinking (CastaÇûn, 1988: 18). Hence, even though Reyes’ writing style was not antagonistic or adversarial – not modernist in any conventional sense – it was highly experimental in terms of the context in which he was working. As a highly mobile, gymnastic style, in itself it demonstrated elasticity and plasticity, the unfixedness and indirectness of all things (eg., the title of his collection of essays, The Oblique Plane) (Reyes, 1920). Metaphors of movement abounded throughout his work: images of transportation, translation and transformation. For Reyes, the possibility of widespread dissemination of translated works of literature and philosophy was one of the great opportunities of the modern age. He undertook many translations himself, stating that translation removed barriers to “immediate contact between the souls of yesterday and those of today” (Reyes, 1949: 39). In his own work he emphasized measure, proportion and perspective, but he also opened up discursive space with metaphors of light and color. His root metaphors were primarily visual, but perspectives were constantly shifting in his texts, so that there was no one single voice of authority. Pedro Henr†quez UreÇa captured his approach well: “In Alfonso Reyes everything either is or can be a problem. His intelligence is dialectical: he likes to turn ideas upside down […]; he likes to change focus or point of view to confirm relativities” (Henr†quez UreÇa, 1955: 154). Mari‚tegui took this evolving critical methodology of multiple points of view even further by embedding it into his famous survey of Peru’s history and society, Siete ensayos de interpretaciûn de la realidad peruana (1928). There he started from the premise that Peru could not be understood through the purely rational and empirical methods that might be more valid in European countries. The explanation lay in Peru’s experiences of conquest, the resulting dualism of indigenous/European and the persistence of at least three types of economy

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operating simultaneously within its territory (i. e., the feudal economy introduced by Conquest, residual elements of a communal indigenous economy, and a bourgeois economy emerging from feudal and colonial foundations) (Mari‚tegui: 1955: 16). In order to grasp the complexity of Peruvian realities, therefore, intuition, imagination and will were required as supplements to reason (see Flores Galindo, 1991: 222). Correspondingly, Siete ensayos was not arranged in a linear narrative; its coherence derived instead from the themes common to the seven essays, such as the significance of economic structures, the inadequacy of the European model of linear progress, and the consequences of colonialism. It is a book full of highly vivid images and quasi-cinematic in approach. The author acts more like a cameraman, panning over the seven aspects of “Peruvian reality” – examining each one from a particular angle in turn, sometimes from afar, sometimes close-up – than the omniscient narrator pursuing the deductive reasoning characteristic of the Western intellectual tradition. Adopting a narrative strategy of creative juxtaposition, Mari‚tegui sought to highlight the limitations of conventional ways of seeing and open up new perspectives that could bring about changes in consciousness. The idea that there was one single “key” to understanding anything was anathema to him;7 he saw all knowledge as necessarily historical and provisional, and the whole positivist apparatus of categorization, cataloguing and classifying as counter to the true spirit of modern reflexivity. He offered, therefore, “a theory or thesis” to stimulate discussion, “not an analysis” that by definition claimed finality and thereby closed options (Mari‚tegui: 1955: 262). The very title, “Interpretative Essays”, is symbolic of the historic shift in the role of the intellectual from legislator to interpreter. In sum, leading Latin American intellectuals from the early twentieth century argued that while critical distance was necessary to lend perspective, critical closeness (empathy) was a necessary counterweight if any such judgments were to be made meaningful. Rather than logical thinking with its rigorous exclusions, they pursued analogical thinking, with an open-ended inclusiveness, thereby trying to sustain a creative equilibrium between distance and closeness. Rather than compartmentalizing different types of knowledge in positivist fashion, they sought to work across disciplinary boundaries. Like Bakhtin (who was writing around the same time), they preferred “novelistic” language – which is celebratory, playful, ironic, indeterminate, dialogic, explicitly representational and aware of the slippages between language and meaning – to “epic” language, with its emphasis on hierarchy, authority, unity, identification and seriousness (Bakhtin, 1981: 3 – 40). The Cartesian logic of understanding the 7 See his reproaches against Andr¦ Breton for saying that life had to be deciphered like a cryptogram, in Signos y obras (1950: 181 – 2).

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world by breaking it down into ever smaller units of analysis had little appeal in Latin America, where there has been a recurrent bias towards a holistic approach. The idea that to be truly free, to be “fully human”, individuals must be “open to the four winds of the spirit”, not bound by any single mode of apprehending reality, can be found in many Latin American texts.8 Generous, expansive, symphonic natures have long compelled Latin American admiration, the multitudes they were thought to contain eclipsing any contradictions. As An†bal Quijano has argued, “Rationality [in Latin America] is not the disenchantment of the world, but the intelligibility of its totality” (Quijano, 1990: 62). The haunting themes of twentieth-century Latin American discourse were the integration of theory and practice; the reconciliation of reason and spirit; the claim that reason does not necessarily exclude passion or imagination or intuition; and the view that reason is one source among others, rather than the font of all knowledge. Similar ideas were later explored in Europe by the Frankfurt School, but Latin American intellectuals went further in their prospecting for an alternative to what Edouard Glissant has called “theoretician thought”, seeking to develop a new mode of thinking that could encompass the incorrigible plurality of the world.

2

Preserving history from progress

The idea of progress was widely criticized in modernizing Latin America. One of its most unwelcome consequences, argued Rodû, was to encourage people to think of “the past and the present as two enemies perpetually at war with each other, instead of considering them as father and son, or as two workers on successive shifts, both pursuing the same task” (Rodû, 1957: 1150). In his view, the result was an underestimation of the importance of tradition, which he saw as crucial to the development of a non-utilitarian approach to modern life. Rodû explicitly contrasted the relationship between the modern and the traditional in Latin America with that in the Old World. In Europe, he argued, tradition carried weight. The prestige of the past had acted as a powerful corrective against the obsession with “progress” at any cost, that desire to obliterate the past for the sake of the future which had resulted in the violent excesses of Jacobinism. In Latin America, in contrast, no such balancing forces existed. Tradition there, which he seemed to define as the colonial tradition (though it is not clear exactly what he meant by that), had only “a weak and precarious element of con8 Rodû emphasized the phrase “the four winds of the spirit” in “Lema” [1896] (1957: 145). The same phrase occurs, along with “fully human”, in Pedro Henr†quez UreÇa’s classic americanista essay, “La Utop†a de Am¦rica” [1925] (1952: 11 – 19).

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servation” (Idem). Independence had brought not only political rupture from Spain but also cultural rejection, which he saw as a major error. The independence generation of liberals, “in their impatient, generous longing to integrate the spirit of these societies into the progressive movement of the world”, had deluded itself into thinking that all they had to do to emancipate themselves from nature and history was to ignore them, which was equivalent to assuming that an enemy could be avoided by turning one’s back upon him (Ibid., 499). The embrace of French, British and U.S. models, in defiance of collective traditions developed under colonial rule, had caused all the main problems of nation-state building in Latin America, he argued. Such a “radical excision” between colonial tradition and the principles of liberal progressive development had not been inevitable and, indeed, could have been avoided by recognizing that not everything in the past was “an indomitable force of reaction or of inertia” and by “trying to adapt, as far as possible… innovation to custom”. He maintained that if Latin America was to become modern in its own distinctive way, it would have to acknowledge its past: “Longing for the future, sympathy for the new, expansive and generous hospitality, are natural conditions of our development; but, if we are to maintain any collective personality we need to recognize ourselves in our past and keep it constantly in our sights” (Ibid., 1150 – 51).9 Memory played a determining role in any process of regeneration, he suggested. Thus, Rodû concluded, tradition was not an unchanging absolute; like anything else, it could be modified by reason, and would play a distinct role in different historical and cultural contexts. Tradition did not necessarily mean slavish obedience to superstition; nor did it have to be conservative or defensive. Indeed, such a concept of tradition was, he argued, opposed to his own idea of tradition as living continuity, sustaining itself down the generations precisely because of its adaptability (Ibid., 499). Traditions should be critically analyzed in light of the assimilation of the new, he maintained, but if they were ignored altogether then the danger arose that modernity in Latin America could only ever be a shallow imitation of foreign models, which would preclude any possibility of real improvement in the conditions of life. Alfonso Reyes built upon Rodû’s ideas in his own more comprehensive exploration of the relationship between history and the modern. In a series of essays on the philosophy of history, he deconstructed the liberal concept of “progress” as merely the latest in a long line of inadequate grand narratives of human experience, starting from Alexander’s concept of homûnia (political concord) and encompassing Saint Augustine’s city of God, Bossuet’s provi9 The significant fact that Rodû ignored indigenous contributions to “the past” does not in itself diminish the force of his point that the relationship between the traditional and the modern had to be rethought in Latin America.

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dentialism, Buckle and Taine’s natural law, Hegel’s World Spirit, Marx’s economic determinism and modern theories of geopolitics (Reyes 1956 – 1993: 240, 349 – 55). Reyes did not discount the possibility of progress, but nor did he see it as either inevitable or predetermined: societies, like individuals, could both lose their way and regress (Burckhardt, 1943: 28). Moreover, what was progress for some was not necessarily so for others. In the Mexico of Reyes’ youth “Progress” – the great sustaining myth of the Porfiriato – had meant British railways, Parisian boulevards, American soap, and the exclusion of most of the population from access to these goods. Indeed, not only the impoverished majority but also significant sectors of the national bourgeoisie had been deemed ineligible to participate in the Porfirian model of development through links with international capital, which was partly why revolution came early to Mexico (Cuspinera, 1981: 11). The cient†ficos, though Spencerians, “were afraid of evolution, of transformation”, mocked Reyes; they represented Mexico as a country in which history was over, a state of civilization having already been achieved (Reyes, 1941: 6). Witness to all that, Reyes questioned the supposed connection between progress, liberty and justice, coming to the conclusion that progress was just one more manifestation of humanity’s need, expressed throughout history, to believe in a better society, whether it lay in the past or the future (Reyes, 1956 – 1993: 335 – 89). It was not a guide for action, therefore, but just an appealing fiction, founded on illusion and deception, but still necessary to sustain ideals (Reyes, 1959: 57). Thus, although the aspiration towards progress was a constant, he argued, its actual realization was “uneven and never definitive, it appears here and there, yesterday or tomorrow, in a form of unstable equilibrium” (Burckhardt, 1943: 28). He saw a pendular oscillation in the rhythms of history, with a tendency for one extreme to correct itself by the other. Emphasis shifted in human affairs: what was negated during one period later came to be affirmed; issues lost and gained in significance: “A ‘yes’ often turns into a ‘no’. At other times, what used to seem indispensable becomes incidental and ornamental” (Reyes, 1956 – 1993: 146). History was not entirely arbitrary then, in his view, but capricious. In order to delegitimize the grand narrative of progress, which inevitably left Latin America stranded in the backwaters of history, Reyes emphasized the importance of cultural criteria in determining moments of historical transition (Ibid., 131). However, a revision of the criteria for periodization was a necessary but not sufficient condition for addressing the problem of how to write the history of Latin America. As An†bal Quijano has suggested, the difficulty was not that in Latin America time was perceived as simultaneous rather than sequential but, rather, that it was perceived as both simultaneous and sequential (Quijano, 1990: 62). In order to address the challenges of these realities, therefore, Reyes began to ponder the conditions of possibility for integrating space and time in a

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new conception of modern experience. Rejecting essentialism, he maintained that identities were realized “in time and space” as the outcome of historical processes (Reyes, 1954: 45). In saying this, he intervened in a longstanding debate about the relationship between space and time in the modern world, a debate summarized by Lefebvre (Lefebvre, 1991: 21 – 4). It began, as does the philosophical conception of modernity itself, with Hegel, for whom space came to eclipse time as the World Spirit of history achieved its ultimate realization in the state. Many of Hegel’s successors recoiled, however, from his absolutist conception of reason transcending history, and indeed only Nietzsche pursued his emphasis on space over time (from the very different standpoint of interpreting history not in Hegelian terms as the fulfillment of human destiny but rather as the source of tragedy because of its eternal return to weakness). After Hegel, there was a powerful movement in European thought to restore the place of time – upon which the ideology of progress was dependent – in modern consciousness: Marx envisaged historical time as revolutionary time; Bergson explored the immediacy of consciousness, and Husserl examined the flux of phenomena. All three had their constituencies in early twentieth-century Latin America. By the late twentieth century, when social scientists began to argue for a “reassertion of space”, the prevailing assumption was that the modern world had prioritized time over space with its ideologies of modernization, development and, most recently, globalization, all of which assume one inevitable path for all societies to follow, reducing the “simultaneous coexistence” of different lifestyles to the question of their “place in the historical queue” (Foucault 1980: 5; see also Massey 2005). Reyes’ own attempt to shift emphasis away from linear time towards a more spatialized conception of modernity was certainly related to his commitment to helping Latin America escape from the trap of belatedness. He conceived space rather as postmodernists do – not as an emptiness to be conquered, a surface upon which to place objects, or an assemblage of frozen moments in time – but, in Doreen Massey’s evocative words, as “a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (Massey, 2005: 7, 9). But while he would probably have agreed with Massey that thinking spatially was necessary in order to allow for the coexistence of histories, he would also have argued that merely countering an emphasis on time with an emphasis on space was not the solution, at least not for Latin America. It would not be enough, from Reyes’ Latin American perspective, to accept that historical time was plural. Plural historical time still left Latin America as always: already behind. Nor would it have sufficed to abandon oneself to the synchronic, glorying in its abundant creativity but ultimately accepting that Latin America would never be able to realize its founding values of liberty, justice and solidarity – that it would never escape, as Garc†a M‚rquez memorably put it – one hundred years of solitude. If historians tend to emphasize the sequential and literary

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critics the simultaneous, then Reyes, a literary critic turned historian, committed as he was to “the discipline of the documents” but also to the power of the imagination, tried to integrate space and time, rather than conceiving them as opposites (space conquered by time) as in technocratic models of modernity. In this, he was inspired by Einstein’s synthesis of space and time, which he saw as a model “in which solid objects and thoughts seem, even if metaphorically, to begin to amalgamate, giving new stimuli […] to philosophical idealism” (Reyes, 1956 – 1993: 321 – 2).10 For Reyes, then, history was not without meaning, but was unpredictable, diverse and multiple in its meanings. While Benjamin saw history as an angel11, Reyes evoked an Aztec bird: “I refuse to accept that history is the mere working of dumb fates. There is a voice that comes from the depths of our past sorrows; there is an invisible soothsaying bird that still sings: tihuic, tihuic, above our chaos of resentments” (Reyes 1922: 23). He represented history as both process and event, arguing for the importance of a hermeneutic approach and a diversity of perspectives. But – like Rodû – he emphasized the importance of adopting a historical, rather than a philosophical, approach to Latin American culture. Without a sense of history, he wrote, the American landscape would be “like a theatre without light” (D†az Arciniega, 1989: 98). But, moving on from Rodû’s conception of a distinctively “Latin” American spirit, Reyes argued that what was distinctive about the history of Latin America was its endlessly self-renewing capacity to be hospitable to a variety of histories, traditions and beliefs. His ideas are close to the theories of transculturation and hybridity that featured in Latin American cultural studies from the 1980s onwards. Even Latin America’s leading Marxist thinker, Mari‚tegui, did not see progress as either irreversible or inevitable. The Spanish Conquest, he argued, had imposed a feudal economy on the ruins of what he characterized as fundamentally socialist economic relations among the Inca (Mari‚tegui, 1955: 6). Again contrary to orthodox expectations, that feudal spirit – “the antithesis and negation of the bourgeois spirit” – had created a capitalist economy, which then turned out to be worse for the indigenous peoples because a new ruling class seized their communal lands and tried to turn them into independent smallholders (Ibid., 21, 24 – 25). Progress, like anything else, could prove to be fictitious, argued Mari‚tegui (Ibid., 26). Nor did he follow orthodox Marxists to their teleological conclusion, maintaining that there was no ultimate goal to human history and that the idea of one was merely an illusion necessary to motivate people to fight for a better future: “Humanity has a perennial need to feel itself 10 See also his “Einstein en Madrid” (n.d. 1918?) (1956 – 1993: 296). 11 For Benjamin’s discussion of the angel of history, see Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” [1940], in Illuminations.

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close to a goal. Today’s goal will certainly not be tomorrow’s goal; but for the theory of humanity on the march, it is the final goal. [T]he messianic millennium will never come. People arrive somewhere in order to leave again. They cannot, however, do without the belief that the new day’s journey is the definitive one” (Mari‚tegui, 1950: 24). Like Rodû and Reyes, Mari‚tegui refused to accept the European Enlightenment axiom that tradition had to be eradicated in order to create a modern world; drawing a similar distinction between tradition as “a combination of inert remains and extinct symbols” and tradition as a living force. Precisely because it had come down through history, he argued, tradition had undergone successive transformations that made it “heterogeneous and contradictory, so that to reduce it to a single idea was to see only its core elements and not its diverse crystallizations” (Ibid., 118). The significant divide, therefore, was not between tradition and the modern, but between seeing tradition as static (traditionalism, which Mari‚tegui claimed was “the great enemy of [living] tradition”) and as a vital process (revolutionary modernism). Through understanding the fluidity of tradition, revolutionaries would protect themselves from the dangerous illusion that everything began with them. To effect lasting change, they would have to be more than iconoclasts: they would need to draw upon those traditions that were vibrant and discard those that were not (Ibid., 118, 155). In the specific context of Peru, Mari‚tegui argued that a truly revolutionary perspective would have to acknowledge that the nation’s tradition was neither colonial, as the conservatives insisted, nor indigenous, as revolutionaries usually claimed. Instead, Peru had evolved a “triple” tradition: indigenous, Spanish and republican. The wars of independence had introduced a “foreign” element into the heart of the national tradition, and the only way to escape that paradox was to stop denying it (Ibid., 122). How people thought about history determined their capacity to make history, he maintained: revolutionaries ran the risk of being too “subjective”, but at least they had an image of the past as alive in all its anxiety and complexity, whereas traditionalists saw only a dead world of “mummies and museums” (Ibid., 119). What was needed was “a revolutionary theory of tradition” (Ibid., 117). Mari‚tegui began to develop such a theory by deconstructing many of the standard binary divides of liberal-positivist history in order to show how their misrepresentations of social relations served as an ideological justification for continuing domination by elites (adopting a strategy comparable to the Frankfurt School’s critical theory). For example, the fact that the indigenous peasantry had not embraced individual small-holding as liberal legislators had hoped was not, he argued, because they were hostile to progress, as was usually maintained. Rather, it was because in a situation that was basically feudal, they had no incentive to become individualistic. Collective work and action were their

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only realistic means of defense, and the indigenous peoples had in fact adapted to the onslaughts of the “modern” world in highly flexible and effective ways, he maintained. Thus, he refused to inscribe the indigenous peoples as “traditional” and, indeed, championed their particular fitness to contend with the difficulties of building a modern revolutionary society (Mari‚tegui, 1955: 60). Analogously, he unpacked the supposed opposition between regionalism and centralism in Peru, arguing that both, in their different ways, had served to perpetuate feudal social structures and practices. To insist on either was only to evade the main issue, which was economic reform, and acquiesce in the continuation of social inequalities that neither regionalism nor centralism would resolve (Ibid., 144 – 69). The challenge, as he saw it, was to bring old and new together in an adaptive, creative synthesis, “brushing history against the grain”, in Benjamin’s memorable phrase (Benjamin 1973: 259). It has often been pointed out that Siete ensayos devoted less than one-third of the text to the supposedly determining elements of the material base of Peru’s history – economic development, the “Indian problem” (included in that section because Mari‚tegui saw it in economic terms) and the question of land –. The remainder of the book was devoted to what Marxists conventionally regarded as the “superstructural” issues of education, religion, regionalism and literature. At less than twenty pages long, Mari‚tegui’s “outline” of Peruvian economic development must be one of the most concise summaries ever written of four centuries of history. The brevity is especially striking given that his economic interpretation was wholly at odds with other standard accounts of Peru’s history, most of which ignored social forces in favor of the glorious deeds of great men guided by God.12 The emphasis in the first three chapters is on structural features; in the last four spatial metaphors abound. It is as if the past has been telescoped into the present. Through the very structure of Siete ensayos, history loses its oppressive force, as authoritarian time is converted into democratic space, where it is possible to escape the weight of tradition and recreate oneself anew. Thus Mari‚tegui’s famous volume illustrates how a more spatialized view of history opened up new scope for selected elements of the past to be reconfigured with selected elements of the present to create a better future. In the place hitherto occupied by a normative vision of progress, there coalesces the more inclusive idea of renewal.

12 Jos¦ de la Riva Agüero’s works were typical, and continued to be used as textbooks in Peruvian schools for several decades. See, for example, his La historia en el Perffl (1910).

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Conclusion Public debates in progressive circles in early twentieth-century Latin America centered upon how to achieve a modernity that transcended the instrumentalism and individualism these intellectuals identified with the United States. They were trying to elaborate a modern way of life that was “fully and totally human” (Reyes, 1956 – 1993: 212). They all saw optimism as a moral imperative. They sought to take the ideas of the Enlightenment a stage further by focusing less on what had to be destroyed and more on what had to be created in order for modern societies to function well. Their visions of a modern future affirmed the liberating potential of modern life, the capacity of individuals and societies to develop strategies of communication and solidarity to resist alienation, and the importance of culture as a means of integrating past, present and future. Against taxonomy and fixity, suspicious of all claims to absolute truth, and repelled by dogma in any form, they sought to reconceptualize criticism to make room for empathy ; universalism to allow for relativism; individualism to bring it into balance with social solidarity ; and autonomy to create the conditions for authenticity. Latin American intellectuals were voicing doubts about the hierarchical dualisms of Western thought – modern/traditional, rational/ spiritual, universal/local and so forth – long before the French post-structuralists did so. To reject ideas from the outside world unthinkingly was to fall into the trap of dependency just as much as to adopt them uncritically. The best way to bypass the post-colonial dilemma, they maintained, was through creative appropriation, synthesis and dialogue. The kinds of metaphor that echo through the writings of Latin American intellectuals – architectural, musical and spatial – are characteristic of their incorrigibly plural approach. If Bauman is right that the “typically modern practice […] is the effort to exterminate ambivalence” (Bauman, 1991: 7), then it is also the case that Latin American intellectuals have long tried to suggest ways of living with it. The specificity of Latin American experiences of the modern led them into early explorations of the problematic of heterogeneity and a resulting call for a different way of thinking about difference, drawing on the values of empathy, solidarity and hospitality. In so doing, they developed the basis for rethinking the roles of reason and progress in the modern world.

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References Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981). The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (1991). Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity. Benjamin, Walter (1973). “Theses on the Philosophy of History” [1940], in Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana/Collins, 255 – 66. Burckhardt, Jacob (1943). Reflexiones sobre la historia universal. Trans. Wenceslao Roces. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econûmica. CastaÇûn, Adolfo (1988). Alfonso Reyes: Caballero de la voz errante. Mexico: Editores Joan Boldû i Climent. Cuspinera, Margarita Vera (1981). Alfonso Reyes: Homenaje de la Facultad de Filosof†a y Letras. Mexico: UNAM. Dar†o, Rub¦n (1955). Obras completas. Vol. 4. Madrid: Afrod†sio Aguado. De la Riva Agüero, Jos¦ (1910). La historia en el Perffl. Lima: Imprenta Nacional de Federico Barrioneuva. D†az Arciniega, V†ctor (1989). Vocaciûn de Am¦rica (Antolog†a). Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econûmica. Soja, Edward (1989), Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, Verso, London. Flores Galindo, Alberto (1991). La agon†a de Mari‚tegui. Madrid: Editorial Revoluciûn. Foucault, Michel (1980). “Questions on Geography”, in Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972 – 77. Ed. and trans. Colin Gordon. Brighton: Harvester Press. Henr†quez UreÇa, Pedro (1952). Plenitud de Am¦rica: Ensayos escogidos. Buenos Aires: PeÇa Del Giudice Editores. – (1955). P‚ginas sobre Alfonso Reyes (1911 – 1945): Ediciûn de Homenaje. Monterrey : Universidad de Nuevo Leûn. Lefebvre, Henri (1991). The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Mari‚tegui, Jos¦ Carlos (1950). El alma matinal. Lima: Editorial Amauta. – (1955). Siete ensayos de interpretaciûn de la realidad peruana [1928]. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria. – (1991). Textos b‚sicos. Ed. An†bal Quijano. Lima and Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econûmica. Massey, Doreen (2005). For Space. London: Sage. Miller, Nicola (2008). Reinventing Modernity in Latin America: Intellectuals Imagine the Future, 1900 – 1930. New York and London: Palgrave. Quijano, An†bal (1990). Modernidad, identidad y utop†a en Am¦rica Latina. Quito: Editorial El Conejo. Ramos, Julio (2001). Divergent Modernities. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Recabarren, Luis (1976). Obras. Havana: Casa de las Am¦ricas. Reyes, Alfonso (1920). El plano oblicuo (Cuentos y di‚logos). Madrid: Tipogr‚fica Europa. – (1923) “La voz solidaria” [1922], in Universidad, p. 23. – (1941). Pasado inmediato y otros ensayos. Mexico: El Colegio de M¦xico.

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– (1949). Junta de sombras. Estudios hel¦nicos. Mexico: El Colegio Nacional. – (1954). Marginalia, segunda serie (1909 – 1954). Mexico: Tezontle. – (1956 – 1993). Obras completas. 26 vols. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econûmica. – (1959). Marginalia, tercera serie (1940 – 1959). Mexico: El Cerro de la Silla. – (1967). Universidad, pol†tica y pueblo. Ed. Jos¦ Emilio Pacheco. Mexico: UNAM. Rodû, Jos¦ Enrique (1957). Obras completas. Ed. Emir Rodr†guez Monegal, Madrid: Editorial Aguilar. Williams, Bernard (1985). Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana Press.

Lidia Girola

Sociocultural Imaginaries of Modernity. Recent contributions and dimensions of analysis for the construction of a research agenda1 There is no such thing as modernity in general. There are only national societies, each of which becomes modern in its own fashion (Herf, 1990: 17)

Introduction We recognize many societies as modern in today’s world, even though the differences among these are as evident as their similarities. We have no problem thinking of Western European and U.S. societies as modern. The same applies for a country like Japan, and some even believe India to be a modern country. Even we Latin Americans regard ourselves as modern to some extent, although the characteristics of our respective modernities are different from each other and from those of the countries in which modernity originated – namely, Atlantic European countries and the U.S. Though a recurrent theme from the beginnings of the discipline, in recent years certain prominent European and U.S. sociologists have again been exploring – from different perspectives – the contents and dimensions of modernity, at both the economic-political and cultural levels. Through several distinct –and sometimes even opposing – approaches, they have attempted to point out not only the distinctive features of modernity, but also the way in which the societies of many countries perceive themselves within the modern sociocultural context. In the framework of the debates surrounding multiculturalism, the idea has also emerged that it is no longer possible to speak solely of modernity but instead, today more than ever, to make a distinction between modernity and modernization processes.2 On the other hand, it is 1 Formerly published in Spanish: Lidia Girola, ”Imaginarios socioculturales de la modernidad. Aportaciones recientes y dimensiones del an‚lisis para la construcciûn de una agenda de investigaciûn”, in: Sociolûgica, 22/64, May-August 2007, 45 – 76. Translation: Anna Popovitch. 2 This was already proposed some time ago by Jürgen Habermas (1989: ch. 1).

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necessary to recognize that there are, in these times of economic and cultural globalization and transnationalization, differentiated forms of access to modernity, to such an extent that many authors currently speak of “multiple modernities” or “alternative modernities” (Cf. Eisenstadt, 2000; Taylor and Lee, 2003; Roniger and Waissman, 2002; Berger and Huntington, 2002). As Jeffrey Herf notes in his book Reactionary Modernism when referring to the avatars of modernization in Germany during the beginning of the Third Reich, we can assume that modernity in general does not exist but, rather, that each society is modernized in its own way (Cf. Herf, 1990: 17 et seq.). Nonetheless, modernization processes in each country are effectuated by having as referents a set of social ideals and goals, manners and customs, organizational forms, institutions, sociability and socialization forms, and specific objectives and processes of change. In other words, it is necessary to differentiate the transformations through which the various societies have evolved and become “modernized” from the perceptions and representations that emerge from, and are nourished by, such processes of change. In very broad terms, these perceptions constitute something that we could denominate Modern Social Imaginaries. The references constructed in the so-called “original modern societies” have been employed – more or less implicitly and explicitly – as points of departure to approach these, or to be differentiated from them, by other societies that are, at the same time, immersed in complex processes of change of their societal structures, industrialization, and incorporation into the world market. Modern social imaginaries (hereafter MSI) – namely, implicit and common knowledge about the implications of being modern and living in a modern society – were conceived in Western Europe and the U.S. over the last four or five centuries, and corresponded – on the symbolic plane – with the changes that these places experienced in their economy, politics, social relations, culture, and subjectivity at the time. This is how we can pinpoint these MSI not solely by area, but also chronologically. The transformations that represented in Europe the change of an era – and for a long period of time configured the complex of sociocultural relations now defined as modernity – have been addressed by sociology and other social disciplines practically since the nineteenth century. I will not elaborate on this due to the very complex and diverse wealth of knowledge that already exists on this theme. However, within the framework of the debates that occurred between the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, a very interesting discussion has emerged on whether or not modernity could be thought of as a unique process of global proportions, or whether it is necessary, on the one hand, to differentiate among the processes of change that imply the emergence

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of new practices and institutions that to a certain degree present similar features – and, at the same time, great differences among societies – and, on the other hand, the perception of modernity as a model that members from each society have, and the changes that such modernity has brought to their ways of life.

1

A Tentative definition of modern social imaginaries

Cornelius Castoriadis worked out with extreme diligence the Social Imaginary concept. According to this author, the term comprises both the practices and representations that refer to the identities of the members of a sociopolitical community ; that is, to the ways of belonging, common norms and aspirations, the assignation of meaning to events regarded as crucial, and various narratives. The imaginary is a symbolic construction that enables relationships among persons, objects and images. According to Castoriadis, the imaginary accounts for the institutions in a society, the construction of motives and needs by its members, and the existence of its traditions and myths. Despite the insight it offers, the concept of the imaginary offered by Castoriadis cannot show the way in which social agents could challenge some of the imaginary’s own elements, as it is some sort of magma that impregnates all things (Castoriadis, 1983). More recently, the Canadian author Charles Taylor – one of the thinkers who espouse the multiple nature of modernity – has once again taken up the social imaginary concept in an attempt to redefine the constitutive symbolic elements of MSI, at least with regard to the “original modern societies” of Western Europe and the U.S. (Taylor, 2004). I will rely on Taylor’s formulations as the point of departure to reflect upon and propose some lines of research surrounding the aspects that must be taken into account when defining MSI. There are two reasons for this. First, because this author attempts to address how modern – Western European and U.S. societies – think of themselves and, more importantly, the features that they believe set their cultures apart from those of the rest of the world. And second, because Taylor’s proposals are also highly questionable, as he bases his work on what many prominent social thinkers have said about modernity, but fails to support his affirmations with empirical studies, something that, on the other hand, could be instrumental in defining the research agenda on imaginaries and discourses on modernity in Latin America. Taylor also proposes an overlyidealized vision of modern social imaginaries, which could lead us to question the validity of his formulations even with respect to Western European nations.3 For the aforementioned reasons, the text on which I will comment in the first 3 I am grateful for observations made on this point by an anonymous reader.

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part of this article is very controversial and offers elements that generate discussion. Taylor maintains that a social imaginary is the form in which people perceive their social existence, their interaction with others, the expectations that define what is regarded as normal, and the profound and implicit normative notions and images that underlie these expectations (Taylor, 2004:23). It is noteworthy that, rather than consisting solely of explicit and theoretically-constructed elements, social imaginaries are also shaped by legends, myths, stories, stereotypes, prejudices, and traditions; ideals and purposes considered appropriate for guiding social life and other interpretations that, while in some cases perhaps expressed verbally, in others appear as suppositions and images underlying interaction. This has something to do, although it is not exactly the same thing, with what Durkheim pointed out as the non-contractual part of contracts, or the collectively-shared representation of the world, which constitutes the shared symbolic constructs that form part of both the moral economy of the masses – to use Thompson’s terminology –4 and what Norbert Elias refers to as the affective economy of the majority of society, among other concepts.5 That is to say that, while the term is relatively new, the ideas that support it have been around for a long time in sociological thought. According to Taylor, the social imaginary is that common understanding of the very situation that gives meaning to social practices and, therefore, makes them possible; it is different from a social theory in that is not expressed in theoretical terms and is the patrimony of a group of persons – not of the elite or a minority intellectual group – and generates widely-shared feelings of legitimacy among its participants (Cf. Ibid.:23). The definition of what is normal – and, therefore, of what constitutes the expectations that actors have about the course of actions – possesses a cognitive facet that explains the situation, as well as an integrative facet that connects the participants in interaction, to the extent that it links them to a context of expected regularities and offers a feeling that things are done as they are supposed to be done, thus eliciting a feeling of shared legitimacy (Cf. Ibid.:24). Taylor indicates that MSI are the result of progressive constructions of a new moral order; i. e., they are based on the assumption of new ideas and suppositions concerning the way people should live together in a society. Taylor’s pluralistic approach when considering imaginaries becomes meaningful when, despite the existing similarities among the new orders appearing in Europe and 4 Thompson refers to the set of moral values and attitudes accepted in a society at a given moment, with the notion of “moral economy” (Thompson, 1963). 5 By “affective economy”, Elias refers to the prevalent conventional forms of expression, satisfaction, and control of the needs associated with human drives in a given sociocultural environment (Elias, 1987).

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the U.S. beginning in the seventeenth century, differences among these societies begin to emerge, not only in their substantive contents, but also in the chronology under which the modifications settle into the collective conscience. The modern moral order is based on ideas such as the need for consensus, the doctrine of popular sovereignty, limitations on the actions taken by the executive and legislative powers, the presumption of the equality of all people that rejects any relations of superiority or inferiority, and provisions against discrimination. It is also a reformulation of the idea of Divine Providence, of the functions of economy and politics, and of the role of the individual as constructor of the world. But perhaps the element of the modern moral order that is most prominent is its implied break with earlier notions of the importance of traditional manners and customs, the rejection – or, at least, reevaluation and criticism – of the laws that have ruled societies since time immemorial and, therefore, the resulting rupture with the hierarchical vision of interpersonal relationships (Taylor, 2004:7). The struggle for equality is deemed legitimate in the modern moral order. Any distribution of functions that a society may develop is contingent and can only be justified instrumentally ; it has no value in itself. The differentiation that exists at any given moment is potentially modifiable and constitutes a dynamic set of relationships that is open to the transformative action of subjects. One idealization that underlies the new moral order is that interpersonal relationships must be based on mutual respect, which is a source of reciprocal benefits. The activities of the members of society are geared toward satisfying goals such as providing individual and collective security, safeguarding lives and property – protected under the rule of law – and assuring prosperity through economic exchange (Ibid: 12). Another idealization supposes that collective life must be based on a theory of rights and freedoms, and that the government, in order to be regarded as legitimate, must defend the rights of individuals. Liberty is judged to be a particularly important right and is understood as both the ability to do, and as nonsubjection to any hierarchical order. To the extent that the modern moral order is conceived as a project for a society under construction, it is assumed that self-discipline is required to put it into practice; therefore, transformational activity by social agents must be organized according to the demands of the normative ideals derived from the very modern moral order that is being attempted. Taylor mentions the new “civilization” notions that emerged in Europe during the sixteenth century as components of the MSI. These imply not only government order and domestic stability – perceived as sources of discipline and

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training – but also suppose the image of “civility” as the result of the domestication of a wild, primary nature6 (Cf. Taylor, 2004:38). This is the basis for the ethnocentrism that brought Europeans to perceive the differences between themselves and, for instance, Native Americans, not as distinctions between two cultures, but between culture and nature or, to use a recurrent dichotomy, between civilization and savagery. Europeans felt that they were trained, disciplined and educated, and saw indigenous peoples as the complete opposite. Therefore, MSI assume the ideals of work: held to be above the natural world and self, not leaving things as they are but, rather, making them happen according to one’s own will; the struggle to reform oneself, politeness, kindness, affability, compassion, humanity, tact, and benevolence, as both public and private virtues (Cf. Ibid:39). Finally, the new imaginaries presuppose the detachment of individuals from their communities of origin and membership, together with the recognition of individual responsibility and autonomy. According to Taylor, there are three important forms of self-understanding of modernity : the first refers to the economy as an objective, external and constructed reality ; the second has to do with the constitution of the public sphere; and the third alludes to the practices and consequences of democratic selfgovernment and the notion of popular sovereignty (Cf. Taylor, 2004:69). Let us examine each one of these separately.

2

Society as economy

The great change in the perception of what society represents commences when it is observed as an economy ; in other words, as an interrelated set of production, exchange and consumption activities that form a system with its own laws and dynamic (Cf. Ibid:76). This perception of society as economy – conveyed as an organized set of relationships that follows its own logic and even operates behind the actors –7 is a part of the new Modern Social Imaginaries that emerged in the eighteenth century and continue to this day. They are notions that, in the beginning, were 6 As we know –and it is important to point out that Taylor does not mention this– the themes of self-control and the pacification of certain aspects of life as elements for the transition to modernity have been brilliantly addressed by Norbert Elias in his books The Civilizing Process and The Court Society, just to mention his better known works (Elias, 1989, 1996). 7 This conceptualization of an autonomous economic logic was already present in Adam Smith’s writings, and appeared as an invisible hand in Karl Marx’s work. Today it is presented in the proposals of Jürgen Habermas as the colonization of the life-world.

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generated by the intellectual elites but at some point came to form part of collective thought. In this dimension, MSI contain idealizations – by the subjects – about what economic relationships should be. Such idealizations seek prosperity and security through mutually beneficial exchanges. The importance of everyday life is affirmed, as is the role of equality as a crucial goal. MSI abandon the notion of Divine Providence in favor of the idea that human beings are in charge of their own destinies, and that both the external and internal nature can be modeled and controlled. Likewise, control and manipulation of an objectified nature lead to the increasing development of science, technology and the collection of facts and statistics concerning a diverse set of situations, such as health, education and population, while also generating a confident attitude toward the new form of knowledge and the exaltation of its future possibilities.

3

Society as public sphere

With respect to the second dimension, Taylor maintains that in the West the construction of the public sphere – i. e., a common place accessible to everyone based on the free exchange of opinions – results directly in recognition within the MSI of the virtue of consensus as the basis for coexistence. Relying mainly on Habermas’ contribution to the discussion of the public sphere, Taylor states that even if people do not participate in “face-to-face” encounters, they are connected in a shared space of discussion through the media (Taylor, 2004:83). While this began with the printed press and debates at cafes, today it takes place through the Internet and other electronic media. The public sphere is the place for potentially binding discussions that do not imply reaching agreements, but do require the ability to enter into reflective and civilized debates concerning the issues of import to all of us. As a result, this expression becomes a force that monitors and evaluates government performance, since government actions must be subjected to public scrutiny. Thus, the public sphere is visualized as a space in which proposals and criticisms are formulated in order to guide the government. The separation of this public sphere from state power generates a discourse that emerges from reason, one in which debate and conflict are regarded as inherent. Nevertheless, having formed a society outside of the state – and by speaking to and not from power – it can exert an impact on the functioning of such a state. To the extra-political status of the public sphere another crucial element is added: its radical secularity. This is radical because it relies on the free exchange of ideas, and not on something that transcends common, everyday actions. It is secular because it not only implies the separation from God, religion, or any

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other spiritual manifestation, but also a change with regard to perceptions about what really constitutes the basis of society. The relationships among the members in the public sphere – potential or virtual, as we now say – are not formed by traditions anchored in the past, but by the everyday practice of debates. Taylor maintains that the traditional “past” constituted not only a “before”, but that it was also viewed as “different” – and therefore “exemplary” – by pre-modern societies; the modern past is something that is revised and reconstructed, that is profane and common and, therefore, is not the basis for the public sphere, as the latter is only created in the present. Modernity reaffirms profane, everyday life; the bourgeois ethic of rational and peaceful productivity confronts the hierarchical and aristocratic ethics of honor and heroism. Finally, the modern construction of the public sphere is supported by the development of the growing individuation process. This supposes a new way of defining identity that, while private, is accepted by being defined and affirmed in the public space. Thus, from this contrast with the public sphere there emerges a private space that belongs to economic and political agents and their transactions, together with an intimate one, configured at home – even inside one’s mind – by each individual. MSI suppose not only the necessity of these differentiations, but also that people believe them to be indispensable, good and constitutive of the ambit of the social and individual liberties. MSI also consist of a high valorization of individuals with their rights and liberties,8 while also giving great importance to the diverse associations in which individuals construct and exercise their identity (Cf. Taylor, 2004:86 – 100).

4

Society as democracy

With regard to democratic life, in MSI the ideas of popular sovereignty, the impersonality of laws, equality before the law, the division of powers, the autonomy of citizens before the State, an increasing array of rights (civil, political, etc.), and other similar ideas, all prevail. The modern moral order perceives the people, the assembly, as the source of law. While there are notable differences among contemporary imaginaries in various countries with respect to the ways popular sovereignty is constructed – Taylor considers the cases of the U.S. and France, but others such as Great Britain or Germany could also be employed here – the important thing is that the MSI nourish actors’ practices and make them meaningful. People must know what to 8 Cf. the moral individualism to which Durkheim referred (Durkheim, 1987).

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do, develop behaviors that put what MSI prescribe into practice, and agree upon the endeavors in which they are to engage. The marked differences among societies are the result of the different ideas that each one entertains concerning the role of institutions, popular mobilizations, the importance of voting, the issue of representation, transparency, and deliberation, among others. Societies in which change was brought about by popular insurrections and revolutions will develop very different ideas about popular sovereignty than those of other societies in which change is achieved through representative means. If revolution propitiated the change then it may be difficult in the future to achieve stable institutions and understand market forces as impersonal mechanisms ruled by impersonal laws – a constitutive aspect of the capitalist market. Taylor points out that the origin of change strongly influences what will occur next: if the origin was a direct, even violent, intervention, there will be a tendency, on the one hand, to blame someone specific if things do not go as planned and, on the other, to seek out scapegoats. According to Taylor, this was precisely the reason behind the failure of the French Revolution: i. e., scapegoating became the response in the face of the inability to devise a solution to the problem of creating a stable institutional expression of the new idea of legitimacy, of popular sovereignty. Notwithstanding the fact that the U.S. also achieved its transformation through an insurrection, Taylor goes on to say that, in this instance, the search for representation and self-government prevailed thanks to an assembly freelyelected by means of the popular vote, and that the push for these forms of representation allowed the new moral order to be established on the basis of the supremacy of a federal constitution. In any case, it is important to take into account the idea that new imaginaries replace old ones, and at the same time reinterpret the evaluative clues contained in old traditions. The past is thus reconstructed according to the needs of the present. New origin myths are fabricated, and a particular meaning is conferred to events regarded as foundational for new identities. Thus, for instance, U.S citizens see themselves as the torch-bearers of the old tradition of freedom, while the French celebrate the storming of the Bastille, despite having representative and democratic governments today. Today’s political culture influences the selection of events from the past that will be accepted or rejected, as well as the meaning conferred to each (Cf. Taylor, 2004:110 – 104).

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Society as horizontal structure

Taylor indicates that the configuration imposed by the new moral order on politics and the economy did not initially expand to the whole of society, and

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only gradually reached other areas of social life; for example, the family. Where there once existed patriarchal and hierarchical relationships and others that enforced servitude, clientelism, and vassalage, the idea of a struggle for more equal and democratic forms of interpersonal relationships slowly began to gain ground. At the same time, the notion of the free, entrepreneurial, industrious individual is exalted and, along with it, the idea that each individual is the architect of her/his own destiny. This positive vision of breaking away from personal dependencies and the active role of each individual in modifying her/his circumstances is expressed in countless personal success stories of individuals who have overcome disadvantaged circumstances to succeed; in the U.S. there is the notion of the “self-made” man and the exaltation of the “American dream” and “the American way of life”. Taylor notes that changes regarding membership in society – that other authors refer to as changes in the bases of social integration – are manifested in the notion of membership through personal initiative or merit, and not due to class or social stratum. According to Taylor, modernity has produced a movement toward an egalitarian, impersonal order, a transformation from a vertical world – hierarchized and scaled through personal relationships – to horizontal worlds of direct access. These are societies with no mediated access to the public sphere, where people see themselves as participants in the national discussion and also in economic markets, and all agents are seen as being in contractual relationships with others on equal terms and, most importantly, with access, as citizens, to modern democratic life. There are also other forms of immediate access; for instance, to fashion spaces or to the global exposure of media stars, as well as to electronic media, information and knowledge. For Taylor, these models of “imagined direct access” represent aspects of modern equality ; they create uniformity among people that, according to this author, is a way of becoming equal (Cf. Taylor, 2004:110 – 174).

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Modern narratives

All of the foregoing entails a different sense of one’s own specific situation in time and space. Modernity produced secularized interpretations of history – according to Koselleck the latter were conceived as universal history (Cf. Koselleck, 1993). Taylor writes that history is narrated through categories of growth and maturation that are extracted from the natural world. History is understood as the slow development of human capacities, of reason, in a struggle against error and superstition. The idea of progress – that implies stages in which all later moments are superior, and the narrative of Revolution – and the decisive

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moment of breaking with the old forms of social organization that obstructed or distorted the desired moral order, are crucial notions of this modern narrative (Cf. Taylor, 2004:175 – 176). Another powerful narrative of modernity is organized around the idea of nation. Notwithstanding contingent historical issues or specific political circumstances, the perception of one’s own collectivity as a “nation” is structured around the idea of a common culture, a common religion, or a history of common action. Much of this shared past is pure invention, but has, nonetheless, been internalized and forms part of the official history. It is powerful because it justifies the practices of members. From this context emerge narratives denominated the “awakening of a nation”, “fighting for a nation”, or “fulfilling a nation’s destiny”. These three narratives can be combined. It is clear that MSI elicit the feeling of a “unified civilization” – obviously Western – whose unity is based on the sharing of certain principles of order and on the assumption of a role as sponsors and defenders of democracy, respect for human rights, and rationality. This also implies granting a normative sense to the term “civility” or “civilization” that is, as pointed out earlier, counterpoised to savagery. Moreover, it entails the condemnation of those who reject the modern moral order, such as terrorists and mass murderers, but also peoples who are viewed as backward, who maintain practices that go against what are regarded as the basic principles of civilization. The Western feeling of superiority – an outcome of the idealized regard for the moral order – allows people to feel that their very integrity and security as a group come under siege when confronted by any supposed exterior threat.

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The dark side of modern social imaginaries

Modern Social Imaginaries are explanations and notions of members of a society concerning the vital world as a whole. As such, they contain notions, prejudices and idealizations with regard to all aspects of life. Although throughout his presentation Taylor demonstrates a very forgiving vision of U.S. society and, most importantly, of how it is regarded by its members, toward the end of his book he devotes two pages to acknowledging the “dark side” of the Western social imaginary : that is, its sense of its own superiority as a civilization and the possible implications of this with respect to the persecution of scapegoats. As notions, social imaginaries can be both visions that idealize and even distort situations, in which case they are closer to being ideologies, and contain a set of ideals and social goals that could represent aspirations to a better world in the collective sentiment (Cf. Taylor, 2004:183)

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Some critical commentaries regarding Taylor’s formulations on modern social imaginaries

From this lengthy summary of Charles Taylor’s work we could conclude that his approach to the processes through which the construction of the new order is achieved focuses too much attention on positive aspects, while only superficially touching upon negative ones, such as the rejection and alienation of the poor and the wars and conflicts created by such a new order. These other aspects do exert an impact – one that should be determined – on the mental representations that emerge from, and are nourished by, them. A more critical and balanced approach that addresses the components of modern social imaginaries would allow for an understanding of the way in which recurrent practices have gradually modified the idea that moderns, in their respective contexts, have of themselves and of the world that surrounds them. It would appear that Taylor speaks of modern social imaginaries in terms of their origins and main characteristics throughout the first centuries of modernity with numerous mentions of Locke and Grotius. However, scarce attention is paid to the profound changes that occurred in the imaginaries of the modernity of the twentieth century. When he addresses the present, he often does so only very briefly, with “flashes” of actuality – as when he mentions the media impact caused by the death of Princess Diana – but such commentaries are not supported in other sections of his work (Ibid:170). Taylor’s somewhat descriptive presentation thus relies heavily on contributions (in most cases not adequately cited) from nearly all of the great sociological thinkers. He revisits formulations by Jürgen Habermas and Michael Warner, mainly with respect to the construction of the public sphere, but fails to mention other thinkers on whom he could base his pronouncements and who would be equally relevant. He relies on recent bibliography – convenient for the reader – while neglecting other sources that have for some time been responsible for laying the foundations of the themes on which he writes. For instance, although he clearly uses many of Norbert Elias’ thoughts on the new manners of discipline and selfcontrol that emerged at the beginning of European modernity, nowhere in Taylor’s work is there any mention of the Jewish-German author, though he does mention Foucault (Cf. Taylor, 2004:36 – 38, 45 and 46 – 48, 131). With regard to the discourse on the cultural changes it generates as a historical period, modernity has been characterized as proposing a model of society and set of ideals, projects and social goals. But moderns have also been very critical of the supposed changes and the consequences they have had. It is regrettable that Taylor sets aside the considerations of authors who, since the nineteenth century and up to the first half of the twentieth, have denounced the

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fallacies of both the project and self-perception of modernity. Such is the case of Nietzsche, for example, whom Taylor only mentions in passing (Ibid:82), though he points out the hypocrisy and mediocrity of modern values; or the Frankfurt School theoreticians, who added to the recognition of the increasing individualism of the masses in Western societies, a denunciation with respect to the extreme consumerism and materialistic values that accompany capitalist development. This critical vision also happens to be part of the ideas and representations of modernity shared by the members of Western societies. Another element that can be disconcerting to the reader is that Taylor’s description of the social imaginaries – as a set of perceptions, ideals, and common, shared representations –is supported only by theoretical sources. Would not another type of empirical study based on interviews, or at least surveys (that rely on currently available social science techniques), be necessary in order to contrast the claims of the texts with the observations of common people? I will engage this point in greater detail below. Taylor limits himself to presenting the components of MSI without fully addressing the prejudices or fallacies of conventional understanding. He only mentions certain clues that, if fully explored, would permit a different approach to the question. One of these is that the construction of MSI took a long time; modernization processes not only occurred at different rhythms in each society, but also the institutional and political structuring that they caused exerted different effects, even among different countries in Europe. Thus, for instance, it was not until the nineteenth century that the modern France we know was constituted through the incorporation of farmers into the imaginary and the national society, after the many forced eliminations of regional differences, and with the imposition of a common language by the national French state. Another clue resides in the fact that some societies have recently undergone modernization processes; a few very successfully despite not sharing the MSI – at least completely – of other modern societies, especially with respect to human rights, representative liberal democracy, materialistic economic values, and the secularization of everyday life which, according to Taylor, are central characteristics of modern culture. This is why Taylor, like many others, speaks of “multiple modernities” (Cf. Taylor, 2004 and Taylor and Lee, 2003), a term that refers both to European societies that reached modernity at different stages – i. e. the societies of “original modernity” – and “second-wave” modern societies. It also makes us think of the non-Western industrialized societies that participate in the global economy and in aspects of a transnationalized culture, but that do so according to their own specific sociocultural matrix. The paradigmatic cases frequently mentioned are Japan, India, some Asian countries with emergent economies, and Chile (Cf. Eisenstadt, 2000; Berger and Huntington, 2002). However, the mere mention of these clues is not sufficient.

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What are the components of modern social imaginaries in Mexico and Latin America? A pending agenda

In order to discuss what modernity has meant, and means, for Latin Americans, we must confront several issues. First of all, the place that Latin America occupies is not clear. For a long time, we have considered ourselves part of the West, and our Westernized notions are part of our social imaginary. Perhaps the reason for this is that European culture exerted such a dominant influence on our autochthonous cultures, or because Latin American elites were shaped and developed following the European template. Whatever the case, if we adhere to the formulations of many authors whose discourses make reference, to a greater or lesser extent, and positively or negatively, to the theme of multiple modernities, the idea that Latin America is Western is questionable at best. In some cases, this is simply because this region is invisible to, or irrelevant for, many theoreticians from Western industrialized nations. In other cases, this is because, far from being regarded as part of the West, we are perceived as a threat to its way of life and values. While Huntington’s case is the clearest example it is by no means the only one.9 It is true that modernization processes in Latin America, while clear and generalized, in some respects have generated changes in the societal structures that mimic the results of the original modern societies, though in other respects their consequences have been quite different. The possible causes for these profound differences are well known and have been debated and documented by our scholars. Second, the unequal, heteronomous and fragmentary modernization processes (Cf. Girola, 2005) that resulted in specific realities in the various countries of the region have not led to increasing autonomy or to the concretization and implementation of the processes that nourish the MSI; instead, they have resulted in their abstract and idealized adoption (Cf. Whitehead, 2002:29 – 65). In addition, there are the partialization of the imaginaries and the effects of globalization on them; namely, that as part of an off-shoring process, the several classes, strata and sectors tend to be viewed in connection with the industrialized metropolis, and to be identified with the members of a class in a metropolis whose situation is similar to theirs, all the while judging others according to their own sectorial interests (Cf. Giddens, 1994:11 – 13). Often, there is no clear national project, and an even lesser possibility of achieving Latin 9 In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, but mainly in Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity, one of his last books –praised for championing Western values– he proposes that Hispanic migrants represent “a great potential threat to the cultural identity, and possibly, to the politics of the U.S.” (Cf. Huntington, 2004:284).

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American integration, or even of the will to do so. Nor is the perception of one’s own identity univocal (Cf. Alduncin, 1995). What then would be the pending agenda for the study of modern social imaginaries in Latin America? First of all, it is necessary to rely on both theoretical texts that may contribute to the discussion, and on the empirical materials that can be found in each country. With respect to texts, we can track the modifications that have occurred in the imaginary, as Renato Ortiz (2000) for instance, has proposed. This entails a rereading of certain Latin American classics, such as the works of Sarmiento (1999) or Vasconcelos (1997). Ortiz points out that modernity in Latin America not only entailed profound processes of organizational change in the economic and political sectors, but also required successive discourses or narratives that led Latin Americans to acquire an awareness of what these changes meant. Thus, the nineteenth century brought forth a succession of ideas that valued the legacy of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the American Constitution. These ideas, on the one hand, emphasized the need for a united Latin America – as in the case of Simon Bol†var – while, on the other, stressing the importance of education to free Latin America from barbarism by “replacing indigenous blood with modern ideas”, in the words of Sarmiento (Cf. Ortiz, 2000:251). At the beginning of the independence period in the region, access to modernity appeared to be closely related to the libertarian, emancipatory and enlightened legacy. This was a task that Latin American nations would carry out within the context of their emancipation from the Spanish – or Portuguese – yoke; one that rejected any form of slavery. But for the second half of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth, it is possible to confirm a certain pessimism that surrounded the possibility of catching up with modernity. Autochthonous cultures were viewed as burdens that implied an undeveloped state. Racial and even racist interpretations of the obstacles that stood in the way of modernization began to emerge.10 At the same time, another current postulated the “superiority of the cosmic race” –a result of mestizaje– and its potentiality in the future, as in formulations by Vasconcelos. By the mid-twentieth century, economic development had begun to be viewed as an end in itself. The notion of development broke with the existing pessimism. Manifestations of popular culture that had previously been seen as barbaric were redefined as foundational, and came to be valued as potential symbols in the construction of a national identity. Modernity was perceived, above all, as a

10 Cf. Lorenzo de Zavala, quoted by Krauze (2007).

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project, something to be achieved in the future.11 But beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, some even declared that modernity had already been achieved. In several countries – Argentina, Brazil and Mexico are three examples – the creation of national markets attained great importance, and structural changes – not only in the economic field, but also in politics and education – implied the access of masses to modernity (Cf. Ortiz, 2000:256). One conclusion that could be drawn from this suggestive text by Renato Ortiz is that the construction of imaginaries of modernity in Latin America has undergone several stages, though always influenced by an awareness of the differences between the specific circumstances and the countries held up as models: first, France and England, followed by the U.S. At times, the self-perception of many Latin American intellectuals underscored the impotence and impossibility of their own cultures to become as rational, industrious and efficient as those of “other” civilized peoples, whose model of society was always the goal to be attained. In other cases, however, the construction of such imaginaries attempted to overcome the differences, either by treating economic development as the driving force behind structural change (as in the mid-twentieth century), or by reclaiming their own traditions and culture as a way of building a modern Latin American identity amid the multiple challenges generated by cultural and economic globalization. Other authors have tackled the modifications registered by the representations and idealizations of modernity in the region. In a recent text, Jos¦ Joaqu†n Brunner maintains that modernity must be analyzed simultaneously from four different dimensions: as period; as institutional structure; as vital experience; and as discourse. In developed countries – considered the centers from which modernity disseminates – as well as underdeveloped ones (the so-called ‘periphery’, of which Latin America forms part), the construction of modernity adopts a variety of forms with regard to the ideas, institutional structure and social agents that propel it. The processes of dissemination, adoption and adaptation to modernity on the periphery unavoidably generate hybrid cultural constellations, a mixture of heterogeneous cultural elements. However, it is important to remember that the “original” modernity was also made up of mixtures and contradictory superimpositions of standards of life, technologies and assessments. Likewise, we must consider that transformations in a field – the economy, for instance – are not automatically transferred to other fields, such as culture or the individual psyche. There is no such thing as a unique, prototypical experience of modernity but, rather, several modalities and experiences for diverse agents. 11 Although Ortiz does not mention this, I think we can rely on the articles and books published by the CEPAL as examples of this position (Cf. Revista de la CEPAL, 1950 – 2006).

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Brunner maintains that in order to understand modernity and its meaning for Latin Americans it is necessary to study the issue through several discourses: those of intellectuals, and also those of citizens and private persons; as Brunner would say, “from the street and from the soul”. This brings to light several versions of the imaginary of modernity. On the one hand, there are those who, like Octavio Paz, maintain that Latin America cannot aspire to a real modernity because it lacks the intellectual background and institutions that made modernity possible in Europe and that, therefore, Latin American modernity is solely a pretense, pure distorted imitation. On the other we find writers who take up the themes of central modernity as if they were their own, and give new meaning to the elements of what could be called the hard nucleus of modernity for the Latin American context. Of course, numerous interpretations can also be found between these two opposing views (Cf. Brunner, 2002). Thus, we are able to observe that in the perceptions of modernity manifested in Latin America there are recurrent tendencies that deserve future analysis and that must come to form part of the research agenda on modern social imaginaries in the region. Among these we would mention: – Visions based on an “ideology of want” that maintain that Latin Americans cannot be modern – as Octavio Paz said, “we did not have an eighteenth century” – and that have been shared by many intellectuals, politicians and leaders of public opinion, and even members of the dominant elite in Latin America. There was no Protestant ethic, there were no British colonizers, nor was there a work ethic, and so on (Cf. Paz, 2000; cf. Krauze, 2007:38 – 46). – Perspectives that maintain the idea of a dark, ancestral, primitive background that sets the native Latin American population apart, and so can be employed either to propose a pessimistic vision of the possibilities for accessing modernity, or to vindicate a sui generis and cherished identity that must be recovered and defended. An example of this could be the declarations on M¦xico Profundo12 (Cf. Bonfil Batalla, 1987). Here, it is not a matter of Latin American modernity being different; the issue is that we are different (Cf. Brunner, 2002). – Development theories claim the viability of modernization in Latin America and propose a series of measures to achieve it. They hold that if structural 12 In his most highly regarded work El M¦xico Profundo, una Civilizaciûn Negada (Deep Mexico, A Civilization Denied), Bonfil noted the resilience of a civilization that colonialism attempted to eradicate, and maintained that, symbolically speaking, there are two Mexicos: a deep one, rooted in a millenary civilization that has given its people, in a definitive and indelible manner, their own identity and a true heart. And then there is another Mexico, the imaginary one, imaginary not because it does not exist, but rather because its project is imaginary for it draws its aspirations from faraway lands with dissimilar cultures, all very different from its own (http://es.wikipedia.org).

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changes and the correct type of policies are implemented, modernity could become a reality (Cf. Germani, 1977,13 among many others). – Dependence theories (and others that followed) that point out the geopolitical challenges of modernization and utilize Marxist concepts to articulate a posture that emphasizes the conditions of inequality and exclusion, and the struggles for power in Latin America are, therefore, critical of the possibility and consequences of modernity (Cf. Gonz‚lez-Casanova, 1983, among others). – Positions that renounce the need for Latin American unification, emphasize the differences among the countries of the region, and believe that the concept of nation is obsolete. For these, economic and cultural globalization implies a resignification of modernity (Cf. Ortiz, 2000; Brunner, 1998). – Interpretations that emerge mainly from the field of cultural studies to propose the hybrid nature of culture in Latin American societies, which confers a specific profile on their modernity while also recognizing the failures of successive projects of modernization (Cf. Garc†a Canclini, 1989:15; Whitehead, 2002:29 – 65). We must take into account that just as Habermas stressed the need to differentiate among modernity, modernization and modernism,14 several Latin American authors are of the opinion that in their home region the modern was addressed before modernization, and that only relatively recently (and to a great extent echoing discussions such as that of Habermas) did the meaning of modernity begin to be debated15 (Cf. Nun, 1991:375 – 393). It is not my goal here to present a list of authors but, rather, to frame the scope and depth of the controversy surrounding the multiple meanings of modernity in Latin America, as well as to point out that this comprises an issue that still generates much attention today. 13 Although Germani’s theoretical framework with regard to the problematic of modernization recognizes a clear Parsonian precedent, it is necessary to point out that he clearly contemplated the challenges and conflicts that modernization contained and that he was skeptical and critical in this regard. 14 Let us remember that for Habermas, modernity referred to a set of conditions that were produced in Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and that implied, among other things, a vindication of subjectivity and the constant self-criticism of traditions that only occurred at that time and place and, because they represent the characteristics of that period, cannot be reproduced in other places. Modernization refers to the set of processes –urbanization, secularization, industrialization, etc.– that took place in those societies, but that have been reproduced in other latitudes. 15 They not only began to analyze the relationship between modernization and modernity, but also between both of these processes and democracy –as in the text by Jos¦ Nun– or among modernization, modernity, globalization, and democratic institutions (Cf. Waisman, 2002, 2005).

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On the other hand, in the same way that the available bibliography – which elucidates the specific forms through which the social imaginaries of modernity have influenced Latin America – is becoming increasingly abundant and helpful in reconstructing the history of social imaginaries and explaining the vicissitudes of modernization in the region. I believe that relying on empirical material – which Taylor does not do – is also very useful and relevant. These are resources that offer more colorful landscapes – if I may use that expression – full of subtleties, which can illustrate the conceptual and imaginative richness of the representations to a far greater extent than what purely theoretical texts could ever reflect. What materials could those interested in the construction of a research agenda centered on these topics use? They would include, for instance, National Values Surveys (regrettably, Mexico has stopped administering these; the last one was applied in 1995), the corresponding section in the World Values Survey, and the various Sectorial Surveys performed in each country. In Mexico, for example, there are the 2000 and 2005 National Youth Surveys, and the Political Culture and Constitutional Culture Surveys, among others.16 Why is it important to list and articulate bibliographic and periodical materials in explanations, together with the data obtained by field research, when such inquiries do not specifically refer to the theme of the imaginaries? Precisely because only then can we propose a deep vision of the components of social representations and the ideals and values that shape the social imaginaries in our societies, not only on the reflective intellectual plane, but also in the discourse and appreciation of the actors in comparison with the various practices in several fields and differentiated contexts.17 If we look again at some of the aspects proposed by Taylor – the economy, the constitution of the public sphere, and democratic life based on the idea of popular sovereignty and secularization – that are part of the self-perception of modernity in the West, and also contemplate the aspects that other authors have noted as components of typically modern social representations – such as responsible individualism, the construction of a private and intimate space for the 16 The bibliography of these materials is available at the end of this article. 17 As an illustration of how complex it is to identify the components of Social Imaginaries: in Mexico we have long been dragging along problems in the constitution of our identity. These are reflected, for example, in recent surveys. When people of different sectors were asked to mention the characteristics that define Mexicans, the wealthier sectors defined them as lazy, alcoholic, unwilling to work, tardy, inefficient (appealing to their prejudice –negative idealization– with respect to the popular classes to define Mexicans: Mexicans that are the other, unlike themselves); while the popular sectors said that Mexicans are hard workers, industrious, resilient and adaptable (a positive idealization with which they defined themselves).

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expansion of subjectivity, to name a few – then we find ourselves confronted with a very peculiar situation. The societal changes on all of these planes that affect the constitution of MSI have been carried out in an incomplete and fragmented manner or, at the very least, in a very different way in Mexico and Latin America compared to what is proposed as the “paradigm of original modernity”. The subordinate or economically-dependent situation of our economies has generated scenarios of an increase in productivity accompanied by the hypertrophied development of the marginal and informal sector. Our societies, Mexico in particular, are profoundly unequal. It is hardly likely that people’s perceptions would indicate increasing equality, and they are much less likely to subscribe to the belief that we have experienced an ascending trend in patrimonial security and prosperity when so many inhabitants have no patrimony and do not even know whether they will have food to eat tomorrow. Regarding the constitution of the public sphere, we must take into account that in order to produce such a thing and to ensure its efficient operation, it is necessary for the population to meet a minimum educational level. While the eradication of illiteracy has apparently already been achieved in most countries, we must factor in the functional illiteracy that exists in Mexico, clearly reflected in the most recent survey of reading habits taken among Mexicans. The majority of people in Mexico do not read unless obliged to do so because of school assignments, for instance. They will not do it for pleasure, as they have not developed a taste for it and do not regard culture as a priority. Under these conditions, how is it possible to think of a reflexive and autonomous public opinion whose arguments proceed beyond the extreme and stupefying content found in the media? When considering democratic life, we must take into account that it supposes the unrestricted validity of the principle of citizenship, beyond the much-repeated phrase “each citizen, one vote”, because it implies the progressive constitution of a democratic system – economically, socially and even in the realm of personal lives. The status of citizens in our countries is, in one sense, only formal; there is a struggle for recognition of the citizenship principle, which is not yet completely validated. There are first-, second-, and third-class citizens in the majority of countries. Often, a restricted or low-intensity citizenship is enforced. Modernization processes have taken place within a context that has not always been one of a pluralistic democracy but, rather, one that has unfolded within populist, authoritarian, or even dictatorial regimes (Cf. O’Donnell, 1999). How is it possible, then, to think that citizens – imaginary citizens, as referred to by Fernando Escalante (Cf. Escalante, 1992) – can envision themselves as part of a non-discriminating community, a republic of equals? With regard to the construction of a secularized imaginary, it is necessary to

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relativize the impact of rationalization, the disenchantment of the world, and the break with transcendent and/or superstitious models for explaining it. We live in societies in which religious syncretism is predominant. Not only are the popular imaginaries impregnated with magical elements, but even college-educated individuals partake of ritual behaviors such as the limpia (having a hex removed) and “propitiatory rituals” that, under the cover of the folkloric, tend to minimize the anguish of an uncertain present and a future that holds little promise (Cf. Girola, 1993). If we focus on the theme of responsible individualism, we can observe that – given our mainly anomic societies and people’s inability to change their unfavorable reality – individual responsibility and autonomy are, rather, ideals that can hardly be assumed as true identifications. In the realm of subjectivity we encounter conflicts among, on the one hand, ideals of the Self, expressed through conventional and conservative expectations and projects, if not locked around ethical, communal and sexual adscriptions and, on the other, the search for personal identity organized around autonomous realization, responsibility and creativity with respect to personal objectives and development. This conflict is not exclusive to Latin American societies, but if we rely on the results of the 2005 National Youth Survey (which shows that youth in Mexico are concerned, above all else, with materialistic values) then the least we can do is ask whether subjectivity is constructed in the imaginary as a space of emotional and spiritual realization, or whether it is simply viewed as the production of a Self that allows itself to scale up positions to reach satisfactory consumption levels at the level of social-orders (Cf. ENJ, 2007). A detailed study of all these questions would allow at least a sketch of some answers to the question of how transformations generated by modernization processes in Latin America have impacted the shaping of modern social imaginaries that exist and make it possible to propose a positive vision of what it is like to be and live in a modern society. It would also be important – venturing beyond asking only how we are perceived – to analyze the manner in which we see ourselves. And even further : Do we even exist as a we? The reality in Europe for the majority of Europeans – despite votes against a shared constitution, the implications of which are not addressed here – and the general perception among U.S. and European populations of the reality of the West is obvious, shared and accepted, and forms part of their imaginaries; is the Latin American reality equally accepted and recognized by Latin Americans? In countries such as Japan, the conflict between modernization and tradition occurred very early and resulted, after the disaster of World War II, in an accelerated, focused and efficient modernization – initially subordinated to U.S. pressure but increasingly anchored on a specific cultural matrix that values the

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peculiarity of its culture and localizes the products and processes of globalization in order to achieve a society that defends itself and values its specificities (Cf. Aoki, 2002). In contrast, in Latin America it is fairly common to find what in Mexico is referred to as malinchismo: the overvaluation of the foreign, the feeling of one’s own inferiority, and ambivalence with respect to the “other”, in combination with what I personally call the culture of the “as if”; that is, a double, triple (multiple) morality and an extension of the prevailing corruption (Cf. Alduncin, 1995; Girola, 2005, ch. 5). The themes that I would like to propose for discussion are associated with the idea that, while the expansive nature of modernization processes is undeniable, as is the fact that we live in a transnationalized culture and an increasingly globalized economy – controlled by the U.S. and transnational companies – our subordinated situation in all the stated dimensions of change has exerted a negative impact on the construction of our cultural identity and, thus, we have a conflicted relationship with – and conflicted referencing of – modern social imaginaries. On the other hand, to perceive our modernities as part of the socalled multiple modernities leads us to consider different perspectives with regard to the feasibility of current modernization projects and incorporation into the world market. The theory of multiple modernities maintains that the institutional guidelines and other distinctive features of Western societies are selected, reinterpreted and reformulated when attempts are made to insert them into societies distinct from the original ones, and that this results in heterogeneous configurations. One of the reasons for this is that the structures of recipient societies are based on diverse institutional, cultural, political, economic, and even religious, patterns. Therefore, if the points of departure are different, so then are the results (Cf. Eisenstadt, 2000; Wittrock, 2000; Waisman, 2005). The search for the specific characteristics of modernity is currently an important theoretical concern, mainly for those interested in studying the viability of certain basic institutions such as democracy, in our countries. However, it is important to note that there are factors – that could be termed geopolitical – of cultural hegemony, political domination and economic exploitation among nations that join other conflicts of all kinds that are occurring across the globalized world and that often are not taken sufficiently into account by theoreticians of multiple modernities. I think that one theme that must be included in the discussion agenda of the Latin American social scientist is precisely the relevance of the notion of “multiple modernities”, as well as other theoretical proposals, such as neoinstitutionalism (Cf. Waisman, 2005). Here, the intention would be to design heuristic tools that allow for the understanding and explanation of the specific forms assumed by modernity and its corresponding social imaginaries in the

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region, across diverse cultural, economic and social matrixes, and through the many processes of modernizing change that we have experienced.

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Notes on Contributors

Raewyn Connell is University Professor at the University of Sydney, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and one of Australia’s leading social scientists. Her most recent books are Confronting Equality (2011), about social science and politics, Gender : In World Perspective (2009), and Southern Theory (2007), about social thought beyond the global metropole. Her other books include Masculinities, Schools & Social Justice, Ruling Class Ruling Culture, Gender and Power, and Making the Difference. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages. She has taught at universities in Australia, Canada and the United States in departments of sociology, political science, and education. A long-term participant in the labor and peace movements, Raewyn has tried to make social science relevant to social justice. Details at website: www.raewynconnell.net. FranÅois Dubet is a Professor at the Universit¦ de Bordeaux and Directeur d’¦tudes at l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has worked on the topic of new social movements with Alain Touraine, as well as on problems concerning marginalized urban youth (La GalÀre, 1987). He has published widely on the educational system (Les Lyc¦ens, 1991, Le d¦clin de l’institution, 2002), and for various years has worked on the topic of social inequalities and sentiments of injustice (Injustices, 2006, Pourquoi moi?, 2013). From a theoretical perspective, Dr. Dubet is making an effort to construct a sociology of social experiences (Sociologie de l’exp¦rience, 1994). Lidia Girola studied sociology at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Universidad Nacional Autûnoma de M¦xico. She is currently a professor of sociology at the Universidad Autûnoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. Her research focuses on classical and contemporary sociological theory, the history of sociology in Mexico, conceptual changes, social imaginaries, and representations and problems of modernity. Among her recent publications are: Introducciûn a las Ciencias Sociales y Econûmicas (with Sandra Kuntz, Editorial

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Santillana, Mexico, 2013), “Individualismos contempor‚neos” in Gandarilla, Ramos and Valencia (coords.) Contemporaneidad(es) (Madrid, Editorial Sequitur, 2012), “Representaciones e imaginarios sociales” in De la Garza y Leyva (coords.) Tratado de metodolog†a de las Ciencias Sociales (Mexico, FCE/UAM Iztapalapa, 2012), “Teor†as de la evoluciûn social en Talcott Parsons” in Tejeiro (ed.) Actualidad de Talcott Parsons (Bogot‚, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2012), “La cultura de la transgresiûn. Anomias y cultura del ‘como si’ en la sociedad mexicana” (Revista Estudios Sociolûgicos, El Colegio de M¦xico, Vol. XXIX, no. 85, Mexico, Jan.-Apr. 2011), “Historicidad y temporalidad de los conceptos sociolûgicos” in Revista Sociolûgica (UAM Azcapotzalco, no. 73, MayAug. 2011). Carlos šmaz Gispert (Mexico City, 1959) is professor at the Facultad de Ciencias Pol†ticas y Sociales at the Universidad Nacional Autûnoma de M¦xico. He studied sociology at UNAM and received his Ph.D. in education from Stanford University. In his effort to rescue narratively, and from the perspective of the intimacy of the memory of the protagonists of various armed movements that strive for freedom, justice and dignity, he has published: Rompiendo el Silencio. Biograf†a de un insurgente del EZLN (Planeta, 2003), Tierna memoria. Voz de un niÇo tzeltal e insurgente (Random House-Mondadori, 2006), Tiempo imposible. Una historia de vida (Croquis, 2008), and Irredentos. Viaje en la memoria de un protagonista (Nuestra Am¦rica, 2010). Oliver Kozlarek teaches political and social philosophy as well as social theory at the Institute for Philosophical Research at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicol‚s de Hidalgo in Morelia, Mexico. He has been a visiting fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, at the New School for Social Research, at Stanford University and, currently, at the Institute for Latin American Studies at the Free University of Berlin. His recently edited and authored books include: De la Teor†a Cr†tica a una cr†tica plural de la modernidad (Biblos: 2007), Humanismo en la ¦poca de la globalizaciûn: Desaf†os y horizontes (Biblos: 2009, with Jörn Rüsen), Octavio Paz: Humanism and Critique (Transcript: 2009), Moderne als Weltbewusstsein. Ideen für eine humanistische Sozialtheorie in der globalen Moderne (Transcript: 2011), and Shaping a Humane World. Civilizations, Axial Times, Modernities, Humanisms (Transcript: 2012, co-edited with Jörn Rüsen and Ernst Wolff). Nicola Miller is Professor of Latin American History at University College London and was Head of UCL History Department from 2007 to 2012. Her research interests are in the international history and the intellectual history of the Americas. Her books include Soviet Relations with Latin America, 1959 –

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1987 (Cambridge University Press, 1989) and In the Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in Twentieth-Century Spanish America (Verso, 1999); and Reinventing Modernity: Latin American Intellectuals Imagine the Future, 1900 – 1930 (Palgrave, 2008). Her most recent work has been on a collaborative project: The American Way of Life: Images of the United States in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America, the findings of which will be published by Palgrave as America Imagined in September 2012. Anna Popovitch completed her Ph.D. in Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University in 2009. Her doctoral dissertation explores the reception of L. Althusser’s work by the Argentine New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. Dr. Popovitch’s research interests include cultural theory, intellectual history, feminism, and cultural policy studies. Between 2011 and 2013, Anna collaborated with Oliver Kozlarek in a CONACyT–sponsored research project ”Modernidad, Cr†tica y humanismo” at the Institute for Research in Philosophy at the State University of Michoac‚n (UMSNH). She is currently teaching at the Escuela Nacional de Estudios Superiores, Universidad Nacional Autûnoma de M¦xico (UNAM). Bidhan Roy has published articles and book chapters on Hanif Kureishi, Muslim identity and literature, Buddhism and Literature, Christopher Isherwood, literary representations of South Asian ethnicity, and the travel writings of V.S. Naipaul. His recently published monograph is entitled, A Passage to Globalism: Globalization and the Negotiation of Identities in South Asian Diasporic Fiction in Britain. Born in London, Bidhan currently lives in Los Angeles where he is Assistant Professor of Anglophone and Contemporary British Literature at California State University, Los Angeles. His current research interests center on the representation of Buddhism and Vedanta in twentieth-century English and American literature, as well as theories of the commons and their relevance to civically engaged pedagogies. Luis Villoro is an Emeritus Professor at the Universidad Nacional Autûnoma de M¦xico and a member of the Colegio Nacional de M¦xico. He has published widely on various topics in philosophy, ranging from analytical philosophy to political philosophy. He has been a member of a celebrated group of Mexican philosophers, El Hiperiûn, which placed the question of what it means to do philosophy in Mexico in the center of their interests. Among his classical and more recent publications on topics related to Mexico we find: Los grandes momentos del Indigenismo en M¦xico (Mexico, El Colegio de M¦xico, 1950), El proceso ideolûgico de la revoluciûn de independencia (Mexico, UNAM, 1953), En M¦xico entre libros: pensadores del siglo XX (Mexico, FCE, 1995), Estado plural,

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pluralidad de culturas (Mexico, Paidos-UNAM, 1998), De la libertad a la comunidad (Mexico, Ariel-ITESM, 2001), and Los retos de la sociedad por venir (Mexico, FCE, 2007).

Reflections on (In)Humanity Volume 2: Stefan Reichmuth, Jörn Rüsen, Aladdin Sarhan (Hg.) Humanism and Muslim Culture Historical Heritage and Contemporary Challenges ISBN 978-3-89971-937-6 Volume 3: Mihai Spariosu, Jörn Rüsen (Hg.) Exploring Humanity – Intercultural Perspectives on Humanism ISBN 978-3-8471-0016-4 Volume 4: Christoph Antweiler Inclusive Humanism Anthropological Basics for a Realistic Cosmopolitanism ISBN 978-3-8471-0022-5 Volume 5: Marius Turda (Hg.) Crafting Humans From Genesis to Eugenics and Beyond ISBN 978-3-8471-0059-1 Volume 6: Jörn Rüsen (Hg.) Approaching Humankind Towards an Intercultural Humanism ISBN 978-3-8471-0058-4

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