Contradictions Of Modernity Research Articles

At the Intersection of Home and Work: Domesticity, Labor, and the Contradictions of Modernity in Ecuador, 1890–1950

At the Intersection of Home and Work: <i>Domesticity, Labor, and the Contradictions of Modernity in Ecuador, 1890–1950</i>

Love and duty (1931): Chinese melodrama and the “contradictions of modernity”

In 1930s Shanghai Love and Duty (Bu Wancang, Lianhua Co., 1931) resonated with Chinese viewers, launching the career of actress Ruan Lingyu. Today, in contemporary film venue screenings, this epic continues to move international viewers. Here I ask how this silent picture has effected its profound affective alignments as it crosses cultures and periods of time. Approaching Love and Duty as moving picture melodrama engages the critical tradition of film melodrama theory such as to see formal convention melded with the affective charge of Chinese society in tumultuous transition. Melodrama, with its revolutionary associations, meets the historical conditions of Chinese society undergoing massive upheaval at the time of the film’s release, coincident with the New Culture Movement in the years following the 1911 Republican Revolution. The politics informing the Neo-Marxist European tradition of mass culture analysis meets the leftist political legacy associated with Shanghai’s emergent film industry.

Review: Chinatown Film Culture: The Appearance of Cinema in San Francisco’s Chinese Neighborhood, by Kim K. Fahlstedt

Review: <i>Chinatown Film Culture: The Appearance of Cinema in San Francisco’s Chinese Neighborhood</i>, by Kim K. Fahlstedt

THE ISSUE OF GRANTING AUTOCEPHALY AS A CHALLENGE TO ORTHODOXY'S UNITY

The article discusses the issue of granting autocephaly in the context of historical and modern contradictions in the interOrthodox dialogue. The thesis is revealed about the existence of two models of obtaining autocephalous status for one or another local church – Greek and Moskow, which inevitably involves the emergence of various kinds of contradictions and conflicts outside the boundaries of this issue, namely – the right to serve one's flock in the diaspora, which means creating in it own organizational structures – parishes, dioceses, metropolitans, exarchates, independent decision-making on granting autocephaly to their part, and therefore none of the other churches has the right to interfere in the internal affairs of another autocephalous church. It is substantiated that the contradictions surrounding this issue are conditioned both historically and in the context of church law. If we talk about the first, during the centuries of existence of the Orthodox Church, a kind of"international" church law was not developed regarding the generally accepted mechanism of granting autocephaly through the concept of the Pentarchy, which emphasized the exclusive closure of the ancient Patriarchate. As for church law, in this context, two scenarios are distinguished: the victory of one sovereign over another (when one side, that is, one or another local church significantly prevails over the other). In this case, one of the parties loses its sovereignty and recognizes the supreme authority of the other party. The second is reaching a compromise, which is expressed in the conclusion of an agreement between the parties. However, the second option does not mean that this agreement cannot be violated, since there is no body that monitors the implementation of agreements. Therefore, it is proven that the space of relations between autocephalous Churches is the space of clash of sovereign wills, and therefore the problem arises in the development of a new ecclesiological concept that will make contradictions within Orthodoxy impossible.

Modern Contradictions and Prospects for the Development of Non-Urban (Rural) Territories

The article is devoted to the problems of the current state and prospects for the development of rural areas of the Russian Federation. The issues of the integrated development of rural areas are currently acquiring special relevance. The main factors in the development of non-urban areas are associated with the political, economic and social development strategy of the country. Considering the dynamics of changes in the number of municipalities, we observe a decrease in the number of rural settlements. The main reasons of this situation are considered: a decrease in the rural population, a decrease in the number of births in the countryside, an annual decline in natural population growth, an increase in deaths in rural areas. The existence of many problems of life in villages and villages is confirmed by a sociological survey of rural residents. The existing system for managing the development of rural areas definitely has positive results, but mainly where production has been preserved and operates. Enterprises that perform production activities in the countryside are most often city-forming. They help the municipality to solve economic and social problems. These organizations participate in program projects for the development of the territory with their own share of co-financing. They are primarily interested in creating decent living conditions in the countryside, an influx of population into rural areas, an increase in the number of ablebodied people and jobs. We have identified the main contradictions that hinder the integrated development of non-urban areas, contribute to the outflow of rural residents and the extinction of villages. But it is the “Population” indicator that is one of the determining ones when calculating subsidies in the territory for equalizing the budget, for solving issues of local importance related to the construction and repair of schools, maintenance of roads, maintenance of housing and communal services, provision of drinking water, etc. The article identifies the main directions for the further development of rural areas in order to enhance the socio - economic situation in the countryside.

Teoría crítica como crítica a la InSustentabilidad: ‘la vida dañada‘ en el Antropoceno

Este artículo intenta situar la noción de sustentabilidad dentro del marco de la teoría crítica. En él se muestra que la sustentabilidad tiene importancia normativa para la sociedad contemporánea y que, al contrario de muchas concepciones y prácticas sustentables, ella cuenta con un potencial latente y crítico. Propongo la noción de sustentabilidad crítica como un modelo cultural poscorporativo que actúe como alternativa frente a la concepción de sustentabilidad neoliberal, así como también frente a definiciones que solo la consideran en términos de racionalidad técnica. La sustentabilidad crítica es un desafío a aquello que Adorno llamó ‘pensamiento deludido’; es una alternativa a la ‘vida dañada’ que viene aparejada a las sociedades insustentables de la modernidad. Hoy se vuelve cada vez más evidente que una de las muchas contradicciones de la modernidad es aquella de la creencia en la infinitud del crecimiento versus la finitud de los recursos de la tierra para sostenerlo. Así, una crítica inmanente de la modernidad desde la perspectiva de la teoría crítica busca develar el antagonismo y la contradicción de una sociedad basada en el crecimiento infinito, la prosperidad y el progreso, pero con recursos finitos.

The Other Side of Play: Fear and Frustration in the Design, Consumption and Use of Construction Sets

Abstract Play is typically considered to be a highly pleasurable and stress-free activity; nevertheless, there is a strong but neglected connection between toy design and the fear of a technological future. The production and promotion of technology-inspired toys for middle-class children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected both the great fascination of adults with new technology and their anxiety about its impact. Different types of technical toys were meant not only as playthings, but also as tools for coming to terms with a changing social and technological milieu. For children themselves, playing with construction sets could be a source not only of pleasure, but also of frustration. This essay discusses a range of negative emotions related to construction toys and offers insights into this hitherto under-researched aspect of play. We argue that toys of a technical nature offered a small-scale and safe environment for testing out practices and mentalities related to the tensions and contradictions of modernity.

La relación entre las técnicas de representación arquitectónica y la especulación y vanguardia en el Siglo XX

&lt;p&gt;A través de un repaso histórico de la crítica y las vanguardias arquitectónicas del siglo xx, con énfasis en los métodos de representación propios de cada etapa, se aborda la trayectoria de Rem Koolhaas, uno de los arquitectos más relevantes de los últimos años. Entender el bagaje que alimenta su primera postura ante la arquitectura, expresada en su tesis &lt;em&gt;Exodus, or the voluntary prisioners of architecture, &lt;/em&gt;como una respuesta a las contradicciones de la modernidad y al fetiche posmoderno nos permite proponer una lectura para su segunda etapa ejemplificada por el proyecto de oma para cctv.&lt;/p&gt;

Philosophical reflection of childhood as projecting the “adult” world

In the article the author presents the analysis of philosophical reflection of the phenomenon of childhood from antiquity to the present day. In connection with the “adult-child” reveals the theme of identity culture, the true person, the person as much in one. The study of the history of philosophical understanding of childhood revealed contradictions in the description of the essence of the dialogue between the adult and child Self, the problems of educational projects. The author explains how the dialogue is the formulation of the adult personality as a “teacher” (“educator”) – the carrier of cultural norms and values and the design of the future personality in the child. The specificity of algorithms, methods of construction and representation of the Self always depends on the specifics of the history of culture. The author offers a way to solve the modern contradictions of “education” through the construction of the actual cultural dynamics of the communicative model “adult – child”. This new model of dialogue should take into account psychophysiological aspects, historical and cultural, and non-historical, transcendental concepts when creating projects of the Mature Self in the child (with appropriate role behavior).

Bernard Faÿ, Antoine Compagnon: the modern/anti-modern, or the delicate balance of the ‘Entre-Deux’

ABSTRACTThis article examines Antoine Compagnon’s Le cas Bernard Faÿ: du Collège de France à l’indignité nationale in the light of Compagnon’s intellectual trajectory and in connection with his conception of modernity, in particular French modernity. A sum of contradictions, at once modern and anti-modern, modernity is for Compagnon essentially ambivalent. Its emblem is Baudelaire, whose aesthetic predilection for the modern beauty of the present was paradoxically entwined with his hatred for modernization. Compagnon sets Baudelaire’s intensely nostalgic and somehow already postmodern modernity against the effusive ideology of ‘modernism,’ identified with the cult of progress, the equation between aesthetics and politics, and the lyric militancy of the avant-garde. Through the Janus-like figure of Bernard Faÿ, a modernist aesthete who was Gertrude Stein’s best friend and who turned into a collaborator and a persecutor of Freemasons during the Second World War, Compagnon excavates, at the crossway between aesthetics and politics, at the intersection of modernism and fascism, the contradictions of modernity and the paradoxes of the history of twentieth-century France. In the meantime, going against the linear grain of the great modernist narrative, Compagnon defines the tasks of the new literary history of modernity.

The Erotics of Urban Female Work in Anarchist Kiosk Literature and the Contradictions of Modernity

This essay explores an aspect of a narrative genre, kiosk literature, which has received very little critical attention in Spanish cultural studies, even though it was an extremely popular form of expression. The dimension of this genre (or sub-genre) that I propose to study is anarchist mass-produced fiction as a manifestation of the discourses of modernity in Silver Age Spain. Considering the notion that modernity is characterized by its manifold and contradictory responses to social change, my essay investigates the ways in which mass-produced anarchist short novels both subverted and perpetuated the economic, political, and gender hierarchies of their day. Specifically, I examine the narrative tensions and contradictions arising in the representation of the urban working woman in La aventurera (1935) by Federico Urales and Una mujer y dos hombres (1932) by Federica Montseny. My analysis reveals that, while these short narratives propose the sexually liberated female professional as a model of social modernity and progress, this representation also perpetuates the very gender and class prejudices that these freethinkers purported to overcome.

Radio’s Vernacular Modernism: The Schedule as Modernist Text

This article explores the modernism of pre-war radio in terms of the framing device of the schedule, rather than exceptional texts or ‘features’. It suggests the flow of broadcasting could be experienced as a montage of remediations that invited reflexive engagement with the conditions and contradictions of modernity. The schedule thus appears not only as a site for the mediation of modern experience and a new sensorium, but as a modernist text in its own right that produced, and was expressive of, a pervasive and insistent vernacular modernism.

Oscar Bony's La Familia Obrera: The Labor and the Work

This article analyzes Oscar Bony's work La Familia Obrera (1968), in which a working class family sat on view in the gallery of the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires. What might be read from the transformation of a working class family into a work of art? How was Bony's own artistic labor reconfigured in the process? How did Bony's display of a working class family engage with both the context of the Instituto Di Tella—an extension of Argentina's most prominent industrial company—and the demands for productivity made by the developmentalist dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía? In other words, how was this work entangled in the contradictions of modernization and, more specifically, the transnational corporations with which the Di Tella family's operations were collaborating? By May of 1968, the Instituto Di Tella had become notorious not purely for its often outrageous experiments with media and performance art but also for its funding sources, namely the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. Amidst the mobilization of the Left, many artists in Argentina that year would reject cultural institutions in favor of quasi-activist projects in the public realm, so as to imagine themselves as cultural workers. With La Familia Obrera, Bony, by contrast, produced an institutionally- reflexive gesture, negotiated from within. But much as artists and intellectuals began to understand the Di Tella as a Trojan Horse of transnational capital, so too was Bony's work not exactly what it appeared, manipulating its public through processes of surrogation.

Apostate of the Natural School: Dostoevsky’s Narrative of Cognitive ‘Truth’ in The Double

This paper address controversies related to the reception of Dostoevsky’s second short novel The Double (1846) with respect to stylistic features and thematic concerns that challenged prevailing currents in the emerging poetics of social realism. Dostoevsky’s subversion of Natural School aims, in particular, is discussed in the light of selected texts by Vladimir Dal and Vladimir Sollogub, which serve as exemplars of the chinovnik genre, and must be seen as literary antecedents to The Double. The latter is examined within the context of a national literature in flux as a work that brings the chinovnik into engagement with the contradictions of modernity in ways that predecessors had not. Dostoevsky foregrounds the protagonist’s self-awareness and cognitive dissonance in such a way that could not be adequately broached using naturalistic conventions of mimesis. The author maintains that recent criticism pairing cognitive science and literature provides an avenue for examining Dostoevsky’s reinterpretation of Natural School standards and practices. Ultimately, The Double is seen as reframing the issues, combining romance idealism with psychological realism, and challenging the school’s voices of authority. As the Natural School aimed, ultimately, to reflect the truth about its service class heroes and their social reality, Dostoevsky creates, with the inventive portrait of Mr. Golyadkin and his double, a new sort of cognitive narrative which holds an authority of its own.

Apariencia y juego. La teoría de la imitación de Walter Benjamin

The following paper focuses on the theory of imitation developed by Walter Benjamin in the famous work of art essay. The essay is approached as a new sample of the “research on the origin” already used in his previous works, which will allow us to highlight the key role assigned to “mimesis” as the “origin” which discloses the unitary law of the whole age. The essay, therefore, overcomes the limited scope of aesthetics in which traditionally has been framed and aims to a wider reflection on the inner contradictions of modernity, regarding which mimesis indicates both the problem and a possible way out.

A Professional Body

Physical fitness demands repetition. Achieving a bodily ideal compels the subject to return day after day to the same designated place and repeat the same set of movements. For this reason, the practice of fitness, especially in regards to the participation of male-identifying subjects, has often been read as a form of discipline, surveillance, and ideological interpellation. In this article, I offer an alternative understanding of this repetition by reading fitness as a deeply performative practice. My focus is physical culture, a movement that emerged at a crucial transitional moment of Western modernity and which systematized men's fitness as we know it today through a popular media apparatus of magazines, postcards, books, film, and theatre where the male body could be viewed, examined, and. Exposing the entwined histories of fitness and theatre in the ‘body of work’ of the Edwardian strongman, wrestler, and physical culturist George Hackenschmidt, I argue that the performative repetitions of physical culture actually reveal the incomplete inscription of ideology upon the site of the body by demonstrating how a certain masculine norm must be continually re-cited. The performance of the built up and stripped down male body is thus an anxious performance of masculinity during a period of great industrial transformation. Hackenschmidt's body of work, both as a performer of built masculinity on the vaudeville stage and the wrestling ring, and as an author of numerous books, suggests that when men today re-enact the moves and lifts of physical culture in their fitness practices, they are (to adapt Freud's phrase) remembering, repeating, and working out, though perhaps not working through, the contradictions of modernity.

Образование в условиях глобальных противоречий современности: новый концептуальный подход

Образование в условиях глобальных противоречий современности: новый концептуальный подход

Worshiping the Black Sun

Worshiping the Black Sun

Vernacular Modernism as Child's Play

This essay considers the meaning and value of Miriam Hansen's notion of vernacular modernism through an examination of films starring the Dead End Kids. It argues that the contradictions of modernity are played out through the figure of the child in these films by balancing a kind of social miserablism with a sense of mobility, spatial freedom, and play.

РИСКИ И ПРОТИВОРЕЧИЯ МОДЕРНИЗАЦИИ В СОВРЕМЕННОЙ ЭКОНОМИКЕ РОССИИ

РИСКИ И ПРОТИВОРЕЧИЯ МОДЕРНИЗАЦИИ В СОВРЕМЕННОЙ ЭКОНОМИКЕ РОССИИ