Course Of Modernity Research Articles

Racial Rage, Racial Guilt: The Uses of Anger in Asian America

ABSTRACT Asian Americans are conventionally described as “middle-man minorities,” outside of dominant racial paradigms of White and Black, adjunct to White privilege and exempt from the brunt of systemic violence directed against Black people. Historical accounts of the in-betweenness of Asian Americans trace their origins to how Asian coolie labor has served to triangulate White capital and African slavery over the course of European modernity. If this is the material history of in-betweenness, what is the psychic corollary of the middle-man thesis? Through an analysis of the Netflix dark comedy series Beef, as well as case histories of Asian American patients and students, we argue that the psychic effects of occupying a racially intermediate position implicate an unexplored terrain of racial rage and racial guilt that Asian Americans are insistently socialized to hold on behalf of others.

Être libre et sans roi ? Nationalisme et antimonarchisme au Québec et en Écosse

Independence, as a political quest for nationhood, does not sit well with the existence of a monarch in whom such sovereignty resides. The Scottish reality, however, is more nuanced in this respect. This article analyses anti-monarchist arguments in the Quebec (1980 and 1995) and Scottish (2014) referendum campaigns, through the prism of the functions associated with the monarchy as a symbol of unity, as the embodiment of a national history, as the guardian of liberal democracy and a certain notion of equality, of a moral and religious order redefined as a collective ethos to better suit the course of modernity. The analysis shows every function of the monarchy is targeted by nationalists. This is true of its symbolic dimension, seen as a mere accessory, but also of its position in the institutional architecture, where its role as guardian of social unity in the face of the division inherent in democracy is turned against it. It is then described as fundamentally inegalitarian and responsible for the injustices perpetrated against Francophones in Canada. However, the monarchy is treated very differently in the two territories, ranging from indifference and disdain in Quebec to an intimate relationship that is difficult to question in Scotland.

Être libre et sans roi ? Nationalisme et antimonarchisme au Québec et en Écosse

Independence, as a political quest for nationhood, does not sit well with the existence of a monarch in whom such sovereignty resides. The Scottish reality, however, is more nuanced in this respect. This article analyses anti-monarchist arguments in the Quebec (1980 and 1995) and Scottish (2014) referendum campaigns, through the prism of the functions associated with the monarchy as a symbol of unity, as the embodiment of a national history, as the guardian of liberal democracy and a certain notion of equality, of a moral and religious order redefined as a collective ethos to better suit the course of modernity. The analysis shows every function of the monarchy is targeted by nationalists. This is true of its symbolic dimension, seen as a mere accessory, but also of its position in the institutional architecture, where its role as guardian of social unity in the face of the division inherent in democracy is turned against it. It is then described as fundamentally inegalitarian and responsible for the injustices perpetrated against Francophones in Canada. However, the monarchy is treated very differently in the two territories, ranging from indifference and disdain in Quebec to an intimate relationship that is difficult to question in Scotland.

Islam als Problem: Celal Nuri und Ahmed Hilmis (Filibeli) spätosmanischer Materialismusstreit

Abstract The so-called Materialismusstreit evolved in the second half of the 19th century as a new genre of popular literature and was carried out as a public debate mainly by German popularisers. In the Ottoman context, however, the reception of the Materialismusstreit demonstrates how a universalised perception of the West had already become the main frame of reference among secularly educated Ottoman intelligentsia in the course of late Ottoman modernity. This fact not only constitutively shaped their modern discourse on Islam. Moreover, it brought about at the same time fundamental semantic shifts in concepts holding a prominent role within the Islamicate epistemological tradition. Consequently, the entanglement between this abovementioned frame of reference and concepts inherited from a traditional knowledge order resulted in a conceptual rupture with the traditional epistemologies. In an attempt to exemplify the argument, this paper builds on a less-known dispute on materialism between Celal Nuri and Ahmed Hilmi (Filibeli), and shows the transformation in their usage of epistemic concepts such as ʿilm, fenn, and dīn, as well as their reception of the Orientalist Islam discourse. Prior to the analysis of two core primary sources, the first part of this paper elaborates on the theoretical and methodological modalities of making fruitful the intellectual output of late Ottoman modernity for a globally entangled intellectual history.

Max Weber: From Modernity to Globality – a Personal Memoir

Lighting upon Weber as a history student in the late 1950s led to all round engagement with his work to the present day, beginning with rationality and bureaucracy, passing through appreciation of his synoptic vision of modernity, and arguing for the continuing relevance of his rationalization thesis. This emphasis on Weber’s contribution to understanding the course of modernity led in the 1990s to pointing out that his approach to epochal shift provides the basis for understanding the global age. The ever-developing nature of his thought can be further illustrated in his studies of China.

Aesthetics of Art and Life Sciences: Collaborations and Resistance

In this paper, the author pays attention to the actual phenomenon of art and life science collaborative projects. She discusses the orientation of this project towards the world. In the course of modernity, the fields of art and science have been established as relatively autonomous fields with canonized methods and objectives. The author will compare scientific and artistic activities and address the question of their objectives. If art and science strive for different objectives, are these art and science projects about harmonizing them, or what is the objective that art follows and perhaps differs much from science? The author emphasizes a certain role of art, which art inherited from Romanticism. Comprehension of art as an avant-garde was extremely important for 19th-century art, particularly in France, where artists considered themselves the avant-garde of the society and also used militant rhetoric. Mallarmé, for instance, said that the modern poet is “at strike against the society”. This romantic attitude of the artists that position themselves rebelliously against the norms and cannons of the majority of population, insisted in the art throughout modernism and expressed particularly strongly in the historical avant-gardes. The author claims that exactly this heritage is crucial for the art that enters the field of science and is engaged with its socially-relevant aspects. The contemporary art projects entering the field of life sciences inherit the tradition of the avant-garde. The modes of collaborations and resistance will be addressed in the paper. Particular relevance will be given to the orientation of art towards the future. That is the comprehension of art as a political agent. Article received: June 12, 2019; Article accepted: July 6, 2019; Published online: October 15, 2019; Review article

Zodiaco (o bestiario?) del Terzo millennio. Crepuscolo del moderno – aurora del neoterico

Image of the human – so as defined by Humanism – is been represented in several ways during all the course of Modernity. Those representations relate to evolving vision, both exterior and interior, of human, previously inspired to Marco Vitruvio Pollione, then passing by the works by Leonardo da Vinci, Diego Velazquez, at last by the XX century arts and media, reaching a threshold that – temporarily – we name “posthuman”. The current trend gives a largely progressive connotation to idea of posthuman. I think, instead, that posthuman may be the extreme reinforcement of that the same humanistic ethics considers as the worse elements of humanistic individualization, like egotism and self-referentiality, that are related to a “centripetal” self, a sort of “black hole” that swallows and annihilates any form of empathy, solidarity, sympathy. I think we are in front of a new historic phase, the age – with a neologism – of Neoteric : the historic phase of the absolute exasperation of individualism.

The changing ethos and personae of shop-window mannequins within consumer culture: Expressions of gendered embodiment

In this article, the invention of new forms of desire that target the gendered body in consumer culture is examined through the lens of the visual rhetoric of shop-window mannequins. The article is a result of cross-disciplinary research combining rhetorical and sociological theories and methods. Inspired by nonverbal methods and theories of embodiment, successive modernities and gender, the changing ethos and personae of mannequins from the 1930s until today are decoded. The shop window could be seen as a microcosm of consumer culture and is, therefore, interesting to study over time to unveil its shifting ideals. The empirical data consist of over 1000 pictures of window displays. Questions that are asked in analysing the empirical material are the following: (1) What ethos and personae do the shop-window mannequins nonverbally express? (2) How do the ethos and personae they nonverbally express change during the transformation of modernity? and (3) Are there any differences between the ethos and personae nonverbally expressed by the male and female mannequins, as well as within each gender? In the two first sections, a theoretical understanding of the concepts of ethos and persona as forms of embodiment that emerge through the interaction between the shop-window mannequins and the consumer is developed. In the third section, the empirical technique that has been used to capture the ethos and personae expressed by the shop-window mannequins is treated. In the fourth section, the notion of successive modernities is introduced, as the study aims to observe the transformation of the ethos and personae of male and female shop-window mannequins during the course of modernity. Also a gender perspective is added as the observation shows differences between and within each gender category. In the fifth section, the result of the analysis of the empirical materials is presented.

Reckoning with One’s Life: Numeracy, Life Course, and Signs of Modernity among the Conversos of Early Modern Castile

This article adds another dimension to the debate whether Jewish modernity originated with the Haskalah in eighteenth-century Germany or among the Sephardic Jews living in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Noting that one element of modernity was rationalism, the author uses two commonly employed indices of rationalism (literacy and numeracy) to find that the most literate and numerate of Castile’s various socio-economic or ethnic groups were the Luso-conversos who settled in Castile in the seventeenth century—members of the Nação, the group at the center of the debate over Amsterdam’s contribution to Jewish modernity. Another aspect of modernity involves an awareness of chronological time. In this respect as well members of the Nação viewed their lives somewhat differently than did others. These traits, coupled with the well-documented skepticism and secularism of the group, point to marked quantifiable differences between the Sephardim and their Castilian and Portuguese contemporaries.

Introduction: What is a Thing

As the modern world has seemed an increasingly material one, and so increasingly thingly, the very reality of things has often--and from many different perspectives--seemed to elude us. Questions about what things are, and how they mean, questions about how things are to be circumscribed (for example) in epistemological, ethical, aesthetic, and political terms, have arguably become--across the course of modernity (and beyond)--both increasingly pressing and increasingly vexed. -- In this extremely broad context, the contributions to the current Special Issue examine specific approaches to things from the later nineteenth century to today within the literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytic discourses. The foci range from the descriptive representationalism of nineteenth century German poetic realism to the monumentalization of everyday objects in postcolonial fiction; from the poetics of the Dinggedicht in Rilkean modernism to the Anglo-American imagist doctrine of "no ideas but in things" and the disruptions of this doctrine in contemporary German and American poetry; from Husserl's call "to the things themselves" to the Derridian displacements of the Heideggerian "thing" and on to the most recent developments in "object-oriented metaphysics"; from the Freudian notion of the unconscious as comprising "representations-of-things" to the Lacanian rereading of the lost object as das Ding.

Twentieth-Century Greek Cypriot Art: An “Other” Modernism on the Periphery

Twentieth-century Cypriot art, from its emergence within the conditions of colonialism to its flowering in the post-independence era, constitutes a case of an “other” modernism on the periphery. It was a “site-specific” modernism that responded to particularities of Cyprus’s experience of modernity. With regard to Greek Cypriot artists in particular, these responses included a varied negotiation of tradition as well as of modern art as part of both the need to define a collective identity for the colonial moment and the process of achieving a post-colonial present and future. The works of Adamantios Diamantis, Georghios Pol. Georghiou, and Christoforos Savva—three of the most prominent modern Cypriot artists—constitute important episodes in the course of Cypriot modernity, especially in the middle decades of the century. Taken together, their artistic oeuvres chart the trajectory of Greek Cypriot modernism in the pre-1974 era, the mapping of which contributes to the discourse of “alternative” instances in the history of modern art.

Modes of naturalization

Strategies of naturalization have pervaded throughout the course of modernity. In order to understand both the stability and the discontinuities of modes of naturalization that refer to the knowledge of the life sciences, it is worth going back to the time when biology and related forms of naturalizing sex and race first emerged. The article explores philosophical articulations of biological knowledge at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel not only conceptualize ‘sex’ and ‘race’ in different ways but they also attribute a different status to biological knowledge. In order to understand how ‘naturalization’ works, I argue, the modes of making references to ‘biological’ knowledge and their underlying assumptions about science and philosophy must be scrutinized.

Protagonismos instáveis dos princípios de regulação e interfaces público/privado em educação

Ao longo da modernidade capitalista, no espaço de crescente afirmação de fronteiras nacionais, construindo e afirmando posições e relações desiguais, o Estado, o mercado e a comunidade foram os principais actores da regulação social. O protagonismo de um deles, geralmente o Estado, tendia a ser acompanhado pela retracção, cerceamento ou subordinação de cada um dos outros, ou dos dois em simultâneo, em graus muito distintos consoante as conjunturas históricas, as mudanças sociais, culturais, económicas e político-ideológicas. Esses protagonismos instáveis dos (velhos) princípios de regulação social têm sido confrontados com as profundas mudanças e transições das últimas décadas, sucedendo-se as interpenetrações, os hibridismos e ambivalências, em contextos agora marcados (também) por protagonismos emergentes de outros modos de regulação social, a nível nacional, internacional e transnacional. As interfaces público/privado, e a pluralidade de expressões de mercado e quase-mercado em educação, podem ser lidas tendo em mente esse pano de fundo.

'Buddhist Activism and Chinese Modernity'

The history of modern Chinese Buddhism has begun to attract attention in recent years. Some scholars have done inspiring research as they unravel the integration of Buddhism into the highly secularized process of Chinese modernity by drawing on the repository of knowledge on modern China. While this special issue joins this exciting endeavor, it also uses Buddhism as a window to reflect on scholarship on Chinese modernity. Conceptually, this special issue presses scholars in the field of modern China to rethink the place of tradition in the course of modernity. Thematically we show the expansionist impulse of Chinese Buddhism: In addition to envisioning the geographical expansion of their religion, Chinese Buddhists have endeavored to enhance the significance of Buddhism in various dimensions of Chinese society in particular and human life in general.

Militarized modernity and gendered citizenship in South Korea

This pathbreaking study presents a feminist analysis of the politics of membership in the South Korean nation over the past four decades. Seungsook Moon examines the ambitious effort by which South Korea transformed itself into a modern industrial and militarized nation. She demonstrates that the pursuit of modernity in South Korea involved the construction of the anticommunist national identity and a massive effort to mold the populace into useful, docile members of the state. This process, which she terms “militarized modernity,” treated men and women differently. Men were mobilized for mandatory military service and then, as conscripts, utilized as workers and researchers in the industrializing economy. Women were consigned to lesser factory jobs, and their roles as members of the modern nation were defined largely in terms of biological reproduction and household management. Moon situates militarized modernity in the historical context of colonialism and nationalism in the twentieth century. She follows the course of militarized modernity in South Korea from its development in the early 1960s through its peak in the 1970s and its decline after rule by military dictatorship ceased in 1987. She highlights the crucial role of the Cold War in South Korea’s militarization and the continuities in the disciplinary tactics used by the Japanese colonial rulers and the postcolonial military regimes. Moon reveals how, in the years since 1987, various social movements—particularly the women’s and labor movements—began the still-ongoing process of revitalizing South Korean civil society and forging citizenship as a new form of membership in the democratizing nation.

Experience as horizon: Koselleck, expectation and historical time

This article explores and develops the concept of the horizon as a figurative and analytical device used to negotiate the relations between experience, everyday life and historical time. Its central focus is Reinhart Koselleck’s application of the concept, though it also draws on the work of Karl Mannheim (through his distinction between conjunctive and communicative experience) and Raymond Williams (through his concept of structure of feeling) in order to add to and refine Koselleck’s use of the term in examining the temporal structures of experience and expectation. Our sense of historical time is generated through the tensions between experience and expectation, everyday life and social process. These are, of course, historically variable and contingent. During the course of modernity and late modernity, experience and expectation have become increasingly divergent. Their separation has profoundly affected how we think about historical time in relation to everyday life and the span of a generation and a lifetime. It also turns the conception of history as historia magistra vitae on its head, with modernity increasingly forced to fund itself ethically out of its own transient present. The article discusses the main aspects of these changes and how they have altered the balance between the space and horizon of experience and expectation. It attends both to the need to examine historical concepts in terms of their various meanings and implications, and to the ways in which the particular concept of the horizon can help illuminate the consequences of accelerating time in the conditions of modernity and late modernity. The diminution of historical understanding in relation to everyday life is seen as among the most serious of these consequences.

Tradition, Crisis, and the Work of Art in Benjamin and Heidegger

Tradition, in the popular imaginary, refers to the cultural practices, rituals, artifacts, symbols, emblems, narratives, etc., that individuals both instantiate and appropriate within their own experience, through which they become insinuated within an historical community, and through which historical communities as a whole come to define and maintain a sense of something like their identity. In this sense then, tradition is something like the locus of interaction between individuals and their historical communities; the point of contact between individual experience and socio-historical continuity. Tradition is also an event of repetition; it is that which is repeated and reaffirmed across socio-historical communities. Tradition thus implies a fundamental spatio-temporal continuity, with the obvious caveat that traditions in their various elements and practices do become altered and transformed, side by side with the alterations and transformations that take place within historical communities themselves.1 For both Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, tradition, far from being a simple medium of social and historical continuity and point of contact between individual and community, is a process fraught with peril, and the course of industrial modernity had only magnified its problematic nature. Both accept the most fundamental element of tradition to be transmission; a handing over of the past to the present through something like an event-engaging in a cultural practice, experiencing an historical artifact, etc.2 However, hand in hand with their dual criticisms of the notions of linear, homogeneous, empty time, and of narrative, progressive history, both Heidegger and Benjamin emphasized elements of discontinuity and fragmentation as central to the process of traditional transmission, exposing the notion of a relatively seamless continuity as the product of imaginary and calcified representations of past, present, and future that are drawn within tradition-tradition itself tends to paint a patina of continuity over the ruptures and ruinations that constitute the process of transmitting the past to the present.3 I argue that for both Heidegger and Benjamin, peeling back this patina shows us two things. First, following Howard Caygill, that even the seemingly uncomplicated event of traditional repetition is, in a sense, a destructive process, insofar as in being repetitively handed over to the present, the past must be destroyed. It must be made the past; the no longer, the dead and gone, fixed and calcified into a representation. Second, the event of traditional transmission involves, crucially, a point of potential crisis for individuals and communities, within which something like their identity and destiny become questions-more or less urgent, according to the spirit of the times-questions that provoke a decision concerning the ground and destiny of a community.5 If this point of crisis within the process goes unnoticed, then tradition truly suffers the fate of being swallowed by a conformism that is always about to overpower it-to borrow a phrase from Benjamin that Heidegger could not have agreed with more. During the course of industrial modernity, the potential crisis at the core of traditionthe question tradition constantly opens up, and the decision it provokes-has had its urgency stifled and muted, to greater or lesser extents for Benjamin and Heidegger: the crisis has become ignored in yawning indifference, or rendered illegible; the question forgotten; the decision deferred in various ways. The manner in which the two analyze both this process of the stifling of the crisis of tradition within modernity, and, most significantly, the possibility for reinvigorating our sense of crisis presented by the work of art, offers instructive points of contrast for understanding Heidegger's and Benjamin's more general projects of reconfiguring our notions of history, memory, and time. Developing an analysis of the particular relationships between the two thinkers' readings of tradition and the latter general projects, will be beyond the scope of this brief essay. …

Technology, modernity and the restructuring of the present in historical geographies

The following essay attempts to illuminate the production of “presences” in the course of European modernity. It argues that the disintegration of a stable and local presence is one of the defining, albeit largely ignored, characteristics of modernity. The consequences of what could rightly be called an “exploded” presence are then examined with the help of particularly illustrative innovations which originated within European modernity: paper money, iron and glass architecture and photography. In conclusion, the essays attempts an outline for a new geography of technology.

The course of literary modernity in Brazil

The course of literary modernity in Brazil

Modernism, administration, and the post-progressive era

Beginning in the 1920s a group of theorists made a significant departure from Progressive administrative theory. These Post-Progressives argued that organizations must be more than efficient producers; they must be institutions within which individuals can develop their creative potential. Toward this end, they emphasized a unified science of organizations and leadership. In so doing, the Post-Progressives believed that they were extending the course of modernity itself. The abandonment of the Post-Progressive synthesis between efficiency and human oriented organizations risks not only the viability of modern organizations but the course of modernity as well.