Modernity: A Myth That Manufactures Consent

Mehmet Ergun

doi:10.3390/h3040606

Abstract

This paper argues that “modernity”, as a process, a temporality, a category, and so on, is akin to Orientalism in that those who speak of it produce it as their ideology, their stereotyping of themselves and their others. The first section, on time, employs Kristeva’s work in “Women’s Time” in regards to the gendered politics of chaos and ordering. The second section, on alterity, pulls from various “times” and “spaces”, where multiple authors from, at times, conflicting backgrounds converge on the politics of othering. The third section, on consent, is on structuring the limits of imaginable alternatives of discourse. The final section draws from the previous three in order to deconstruct “modernity” as a mythology of temporal, spacial and societal orderliness, producing forms of alterity to manufacture the consent of whomever speaks of modernity towards creating a convenient history and setting a hegemony-laden agenda. As such, modernity takes the place of “the real” to consolidate and augment hegemony by way of self-naturalization. It is a manufactured consent, of those who speak of, to and about it, to colonial aggression and arrogance by evacuating colonial relations of power from the limits of the debate.

Highlights

Zygmunt Bauman, one of the most adamant critiques of modernity, argues in his Modernity and the Holocaust [1] that the project of modernity, this civilizing process that enabled the very possibility of the Holocaust, is a process of distancing violence from morality in order to devise violence more efficiently: Humanities 2014, 3 without the interference of ethical considerations
Looking at various authors’ deployment of this highly ambiguous term, I will claim that modernity is not an actual condition of societies, but is a manufactured consent to colonial aggression and arrogance and define it as the belief in the inherent superiority of the colonizer over its others and, thereby, its right to colonize
In the above discussions of how a society is marked by modernity and what the implications are for such societies and their “other”s, I claimed that the speech of modernity “realized” itself as a mark of a subject

Summary

Introduction

Zygmunt Bauman, one of the most adamant critiques of modernity, argues in his Modernity and the Holocaust [1] that the project of modernity, this civilizing process that enabled the very possibility of the Holocaust, is a process of distancing violence from morality in order to devise violence more efficiently: Humanities 2014, 3 without the interference of ethical considerations In this context, the modern entity is defined as rational, planned, scientifically informed, expert, efficiently managed, and coordinated Such a discussion will allow me to look at how various bodies, desires and imaginations are repressed and constricted by ethnic, gendered, sexual and colonial processes of boundary-drawing and othering This discussion will culminate in the idea that the “other” and its markers are intertwining discursive tools to produce and maintain hegemonic boundaries. Looking at various authors’ deployment of this highly ambiguous term (ambiguous not because of its morality, but because it does not have a set and fixed meaning), I will claim that modernity is not an actual condition of societies, but is a manufactured consent to colonial aggression and arrogance and define it as the belief in the inherent superiority of the colonizer over its others and, thereby, its right to colonize

On Time and Meaning

On the Other and Violence

On Manufacturing Consent

Manufacturing Modernity

Conclusions