Multiple Modernities Research Articles

Between the Religious and the Secular: Latin American Neo-Pentecostalism in a Context of Multiple Modernities

This article seeks to understand neo-Pentecostalism in Latin America as a religious and political movement within the framework of multiple modernities, based on an ethnographic study in evangelical churches in Chile and Mexico. The study focuses on two main axes: the discourse of the “Kingdom of God” and the experience of the Holy Spirit. The former explores the conception of public space, while the latter examines the experiential dimensions, both individual and collective, that confer meaning and legitimacy to this religious movement. Neo-Pentecostalism emerges as a complex phenomenon where religion and politics intertwine in novel ways, responding to the intricacies of the region. Contrary to the notion of a monolithic and reactionary movement, this article demonstrates how neo-Pentecostalism is a movement that navigates the interstices between the religious and the secular.

The third integrative wave in sociology’s development. Part II. Theories and methods for an augmented social reality

The article is analyzing positive prospects of the sociology’s development in the context of today’s fragmentation of scientific discipline under conditions of metaparadigm crisis and post-globalization. Current disintegration in sociology is provoked by the rising postcolonial discourse, by attempts to stigmatize western classics and to create theoretical alternatives to the ‘global North’ domination in knowledge production as well as by spread of conceptions opposing social reality of networks and flows to classical sociality of structures and agency (M. Castells, B. Latour, J. Urry, K. Knorr Cetina). The third in the modern sociology’s history integrative wave is expected to come in the 2020s displacing tendencies of disintegration, discrimination, growing gaps and rising barriers. Now theories are relevant as they create a coherent configuration of four types of structures: institutions, interactions, networks, and flows. The new subject matter for theorizing is constituted by their interconnections in forms of fields of structurations, scapes of assemblages, communications, platforms, projects, and events. After the ideas of the end of Modernity and multiple Modernities, the idea of augmented Modernity emarges overcoming constitutive distinctions of the last century’s sociology: local vs. global, system vs. lifeworld, material vs. symbolic, private vs. public, real vs. virtual, physical vs. digital, et ctr. Mutual penetration of different social structures stimulates elaboration and implementation of innovative hybrid methods directed towards an augmented data collecting and analysis.

Religious and Spiritual Diversity in Multiple Modernities: A Decolonial Perspective Focusing on Peripheral Religious Expressions

Religious and Spiritual Diversity in Multiple Modernities: A Decolonial Perspective Focusing on Peripheral Religious Expressions

Thinking Planetary About Global Futures: Posthuman Cosmopolitanism

Abstract The link between the global condition and planetary thinking is a crucial one when thinking about the future. Positing itself in the context of future-oriented history and posthumanist and planetary thinking, the essay reflects on a central concept of global thought such as cosmopolitanism, theorizing the possibility of a posthuman cosmopolitanism. Built on concepts such as multiple modernities and secularities, philosophical posthumanism, and non-anthropocentric history, posthuman cosmopolitanism is primarily future-focused, globally rooted, and planetary oriented. Specifically, by proposing as a case study of a sort a posthumanist approach to a rethinking of cosmopolitanism, the essay emphasizes how thinking planetary and in a posthumanist and post-anthropocentric way does not entail, as it may be assumed, a relativization and loss of relevance of “the human” per se, but a more complex web of intra-active relations. By building on the work of authors such as Braidotti, Domanska, Chakrabarty, Simon, and Latour, the essay proposes an original reflection, engaging with a crucial issue such as how to think about a global future that focuses on globality as the product of interconnected, multiple processes and constantly shifting interrelations between human and non-human forces.

Российская модернизация в контексте социокультурного дискурса

Solving the problems of modernization of Russia includes not only the transformation of basic economic, social, and political institutions, but also profound changes in the socio-cultural sphere of society, the formation of a value-normative complex adequate to modernity. This section of the modernization theme is the subject of socio-cultural discourse, the analysis of the methodological specifics of which is devoted to this article. The author focuses on the differences between the versions of socio-cultural modernization of Russia in comparison with the concept of "multiple modernity", showing its methodological potential in solving the problems of modernization of non-Western societies.

Multiple Modernities in Civilizational Perspective: An Assessment of the Global Civilization(s) Initiative

Abstract This paper starts from the supposition that civilization is an important concept for thinking about world order, and one that is increasingly coming back into play in world politics. It opens with a close look at the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI): what does it say, what does it imply, about what is it silent, and what are its policy contexts? It offers the theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) as a way of looking at multiple modernities in terms of civilizational pluralism. This is followed by a historical unfolding of UCD since the early 19th century, showing how it has generated both single and multiple modernities cast in civilizational terms. The penultimate section focuses on the risks and opportunities that a world order of civilizational pluralism would create specifically for China. The conclusions summarize the main points of argument, and set out a more detailed global vision of what the GCI might aim to achieve if played well.

A cleavage-based conceptualisation of politicised global integration

ABSTRACT How can we conceptualise politicised integration at the global level? Functionalism and neo-functionalism are de-politicised, technocratic theories of integration dispensing with ideology and contestation, while post-functionalist approaches address politicisation but not supra-national integration. Drawing on comparative macro-historical theories, this article suggests a conceptualisation of politicised integration that extends exit–voice and political structuring models used at national and European levels to global integration. The replacement of territorial divisions with cleavages cutting across world regions – core–periphery and North–South divisions, civilisations and ‘multiple modernities’ – creates the conditions for cross-territorial dimensions of contestation, along which cross-regional membership groups link, coordinate and form bonds of solidarity. The de-territorialisation of global cleavages and the regional convergence it brings about, provide the social bases for mass politics rather than elitist policy integration. The conceptualisation of integration is political rather than technocratic, and one in which collective decision making is a matter of pluralist contestation rather than problem-solving expertise.

An Analytic Account of The Phenomenon of Modernity with Specific Reference To The Way in Which The Acknowledgement of Multiple or Alternative Modernities Impacts The Comprehension of The Phenomenon

The term modernity refers generally to an amalgamation of historically unprecedented practices and institutional forms, organizational and knowledge advances, breaking away from one’s obsolescent predecessors, simultaneously. The European traditions such as Renaissance and Enlightenment are referred to specifically as this breaking point. Some basic features of modernity can be described as- a general stress on the application of rational scientific approach to problems and the pursuit of material and economic well being. Accompanied by the values like, instrumental rationality, objectivity, liberty and equality. The theories of modernity have generally been classified into two broad categories, cultural and acultural. Among these two views of modernity, the acultural view is dominant. This acultural theory and its dominance is the point of contention here, as it views modernity to be a culture neutral phenomenon, which has the same trajectory everywhere. This, the essay shows, is a distorted understanding of the phenomenon of modernity and has quite problematic implications, as the belief that modernity comes from one single universally applicable operation served as the basis and justification for the western colonizers’ practices of domination and cultural homogenization. This essay argues that a) modernity is not something that only the west has been blessed with, rather there are multiple modernities. b) It highlights how an exclusive reliance on the acultural theory deprives us of and unfits for understanding and identifying alternative modernities that are different from and that challenge the dominant western conception of modernity.

The myth of being modern: Digital machines and the loss of discovery

Abstract‘Digitization’ is a logical operation that deconstructs information and transforms it into digits, rendering it a logical construct. Digital operations are fast, infinitely replicable, objective, and absolute. But digitization is not without costs: the result of operationalizing information is that it becomes abstract—disconnected from its referent, and subject to processes that alter its representation without detection. Visions of modernity that draw on the potential for digital technology to invariably raise standards of living fail to consider the intrinsic properties of the digital that tend toward replicability, speed, and scalability, which favor globalization. This article argues how, through reductive processes, the discrete, mathematical nature of the digital provides a framework for rationality and order that is fundamentally incompatible with multiple modernities. Moreover, the history of digital machines is intricately linked to education and epistemology across North America and South Africa. The mechanization of learning illustrates the promise, power, and potential consequence of digital operations; by limiting our horizons, the Modern and now the Digital, limits our ability to think, thereby concealing the destruction of society, nature, and us as a species.

New Originalisms, Multiple Modernities

New Originalisms, Multiple Modernities

Understanding the multiple architectural modernities in colonial and postindependence Nigeria

AbstractThis paper investigates the multiple architectural modernities in colonial and postindependence Nigeria. After examining the theoretical basis for multiple modernities and the use of architecture as a vehicle to study modernity, it identifies the colonial, tropical, and postcolonial modern as multiple architectural modernities that existed in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. The criteria with which the multiple modernities were delineated were historical settings, key participants, distinguishing features, and meanings. This provides a plausible framework to understand modernities in other contexts beyond architecture and opens the possibility of elucidating various modernities and enriching the repository of modern heritage. Devising such broad definitions of modern heritage responds to the call of the Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage for expanded definitions of what constitutes the modern, while enabling the accounting for and stratification of multiple memories and narratives, and the inclusion of many types of modern architecture in conservation conversations.

Materialised power and transitioning modernity: the architecture of Beijing Hotel, 1917–1974

Located at the heart of China’s capital, Beijing Hotel comprises three adjacent buildings exhibiting distinctly different architectural languages from each other. Constructed respectively in the 1910s, 50s, and 70s, the three buildings witnessed the hotel’s drastic transformation from a French-owned commercial hotel to a national diplomatic facility under the changing political and cultural contexts of the country in the twentieth century. This article argues that the architectural design and construction of Beijing Hotel represents the interrelation and interaction of power, architecture, and modernity in modern China. Political environment and ideological concerns were largely materialised in the three buildings of the hotel from colonialism until the Cold War while, in turn, the hotel’s design process and built form also challenged and modified existing political agenda. Direct participation of national leaders in the design and construction process also largely influenced the final built form of the hotel. Meanwhile, the three buildings of the hotel represented the shifting approaches towards modernity throughout the architectural history of modern China. They shed light on what Shmuel Eisenstadt describes as ‘multiple modernities’ as China struggled to establish itself on the world stage as a modern nation-state.

Rethinking Pluriversal Theory in Globalization Research: Bringing Ontology In

Globalization is full of disjunctures and contradictions. Paradoxically, it is, on the one hand, a generalizing process and, on the other hand, associated with encounters and conflicts that accentuate, and even generate, multiplicities of difference. This article tracks developments in a broad set of approaches that have over the last few decades sought to deepen our understanding of these encounters and differences. These approaches can be collated under the notion of “pluriversal theory.” The first broad expression of this theoretical-activist movement, “pluriversal theory 1.0,” includes orientalism studies, southern theory, and the multiple modernities approach. This group of interventions suggests rightly that our gaze needs to shift from a singular Eurocentric viewpoint, but it is unable to account for the epistemological and ontological contestations that both ground the encounters and provide a means of acting otherwise. Pluriversal theory 2.0 moves to decenter both Europe and the global modernization process, while treating the disjunctures of global history as involving epistemological ruptures. Modern forms of knowing are treated as themselves colonizing. The Global South is described as not just a geographical or imperially generated place of difference but as region of diverse “ways of knowing.” Here, the nature of knowledge becomes analytically important, as does using comparative analysis of ways of knowing. This article builds upon the strengths of these earlier contributions to argue for what might be called pluriversal theory 3.0. This entails recognizing that “knowing” is only one of the many categories of being, and that disjunctures of ontological difference—“ways of being” or ontological formations in tension—are central to understanding processes of power and domination in our globalizing world.

THE DYNAMIC CONCEPTION OF THE SOCIAL IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF CORNELIUS CASTORIADIS

The article presents a reconstruction of the dynamic conception of the social in the philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis. A meticulous study of the philosopher’s most important works reveals, on the basis of various ideas about society and politics, the original version of his integral conception of the social. The reconstruction of this conception required a four-step study: (1) an analysis of his critique of “naïve realism” in the perception of social life; (2) an analysis of the method of revealing a symbolic component of social “things” in the interpretation of social institutions as functional-symbolic networks; (3) a study of the thematization of the virtual dimension of social life (Castoriadis’s construction of the metaphoric ontology of the “magma” of social imaginary significations, his perception of society as a dynamic (“social-historic”) formation, an elucidation of the duality of establishing and established); (4) an analysis of the way of a justification of a political project of autonomy. Our reconstruction demonstrates that the idea of autonomy is not a consequence but a cause of Castoriadis’s dynamic conception of the social. Nevertheless, in the context of the notion of “multiple modernities”, the idea of autonomy, being a key characteristic of “modernity”, can be understood not as universal content but as a universal form. The regulatory horizon of “politics” (of the project of autonomy) is determined from the reverse — depending on what is identified as heteronomy in a given set of concrete circumstances. The interpretation we propose will allow us to proceed more consistently from the principle of the diversity of “modernities”. It seems, also, that Castoriadis’s position itself is characterized by two “defects”: first, his conception of the social-historical world is based on the metaphoric ontology of the “magma”, and, second, the “philosophy of autonomy” is dualistic.

Revitalizing the Political Avant-garde of the “Absurd” in Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and Harold Pinter’s The Room

ABSTRACT This article considers the political possibilities of the avant-garde in the experimental “absurd” plays of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and Harold Pinter’s The Room that endeavor to depict the senselessness of life, reducing plot and characters to a bare minimum. While the popular interpretation of the plays has been made against the ideological exhaustion of post–World War Europe and America and hence with the philosophy of existentialism, this article analyzes the two plays in terms of the tension with contemporary ideologies that continue to inform our present lives. One prominent mode of creating this tension is minimization of the communication between the actors, director, and the audience in order to create a misinterpretation of the purpose of communication. The article argues that the element of the avant-garde is revitalized in such studies dealing with existential angst, Marxist orientation of Ionesco or Pinter’s commentary on racism, and can be properly interpreted by an appreciation of the multiple modernities that the plays inhabit.

The Shackles of Universal History and the Road Not Taken: ‘Ambivalent Possibilities’ in Maruyama Masao's Thought

It seems to be a challenging task for those non-Western scholars who are deeply immersed in European intellectual resources to theorise multiple forms of modernity and deparochialise political theory. What difficulty awaits us in non-Western contexts, when we attempt to throw off these shackles and to open up alternative views of modernity? To address this question, this article attempts to critically examine Maruyama Masao (丸山眞男, 1914–1996), an influential scholar on the history of Japanese political thought, with respect to his view of Japanese modernity, thereby exploring what obstacles await him in pursuing the multiplicity view of modernity and how he actually or potentially overcomes them. In doing so, I develop two arguments. First, Maruyama's move towards multiple modernities remains incomplete because he fails to throw off the shackles of universal history. Second, however, we can identify an alternative way in his own thought that, though not taken by himself, potentially goes beyond universal history towards multiple modernities.

Anthony Giddens and civilizational analysis: modernity between reflexivity and culture

Based on the critical reconstruction of the diagnosis of modernity by A. Giddens, the article traces the logic of the transition from the institutional to the civilizational approach in the sociological discourse of “modernity”. The analysis focuses on the problem of the relationship between culture and reflexivity. In Giddens’ theory of radical modernity, reflexivity is opposed to culture, which is identified with tradition. According to the theory of multiple modernities that are genetically related to the sociological paradigm of civilizational analysis, tradition and reflexivity are correlated as two aspects of culture characterized by aspirations, on the one hand, to the reproduction of interpretive foundations that set a general context of meaning, and, on the other, to trans-contextual breakthroughs that open up new horizons of meaning. Both tendencies are in irreparable tension between themselves and are mediated in the capacity of culture to rationalization, during which the self-articulation of culture turns into its self-problematization. The combination of rationality with reflexivity leads to cultural innovation and interpretative shifts and, at least, potentially to new cultural crystallizations, allowing higher levels of self-problematization (J. P. Arnason). In different cultural and historical patterns, the ability to rationalize receives an uneven and specific development. Modernity is a “distinct civilization” (S. N. Eisenstadt), in which the tendencies of culture towards self-articulation in conflicting directions and towards self-problematization reach a level unprecedented in human history, giving rise to multiple configurations of social life intertwined with relatively autonomous dynamics of power and wealth. Although Giddens did not make a “civilizational turn” in his work, his institutional analysis of modernity closed with his formulating the problem of conjugation of culture and power, which is key for the civilizational approach in sociology. However, the same problematic also marked the limit of understanding modernity in Giddens’ theory; he recognized the incomprehensibility of the social world in which reflexivity was institutionalized. His further path was a one of utopian modeling and political implementation of the future post-modern world, rather than a one of scientific analysis of modernity.

Socio-philosophical Analysis of Communicative Transformations From the Perspective of the Realities of the 21st century

Introduction. The 21st century, rightly called the era of global digital capture of mankind on a global scale, is characterized by significant transformations in the field of communication. The problem of communicative transformations inevitably causes the formation of a fundamentally different reality, representing the fundamental nature of the digital society, the widest scope of which is projected both on an individual and on the whole society. The leading role in the everyday life of the information technology society is occupied by the multifaceted implementation of the communicative relations “individual – collective”, suggesting the intention of the subject in polar terms “own or alien”. A special meaning in the deployment of a new type of communication is seen in the movement from understanding a separate subject (as part) of a new objective world to understanding the world as a whole. The purpose of the article is to comprehend communication and its priority aspects from a philosophical angle of interpretation of the complex realities of modernity, which change the idea of the world and the place of a person in it. Materials and Methods. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study is the sociocultural approach, the implementation of which, in combination with the dialectical method, contributes to the objective substantiation of the key meanings of communicative transformations. An important position of the methodological basis of the study is the theory of “multiple modernity” (Sh. Eisenstadt, V. G. Fedotova), which has a variety of ways to express today’s civilization. Results. The tendencies of media implementations of the newest time are revealed and interpreted, which, although they encourage a person to understand the world around him as a combination of the real and the unreal at every single moment of the historical turn, but still not fully understood. Modern realities do not just accelerate the transformation of the communicative space flowing from the visible world to the invisible world, from the real to the virtual, but to a large extent assign the important task of interaction between them to the subject of ongoing metamorphoses – the collective subject of Generation Z. It has been established that the communicative transformations of sociocultural practices are distinguished by the refraction of values, the variability of which generates a plurality of ways to enter the progressive model of the development of society. Discussion and Conclusions. The super-density of today’s communicative streams has transformed habitual communication into a hybrid form, mixing languages of various kinds, where visual images of physical reality are difficult to separate from virtual images. The embeddedness of digitalization in all spheres of human life gave rise not only to another round of the information mode of the existence of the world, but also immediately revealed the inconsistency of the new communicative activity. First of all, we are talking about the opposition of the traditional and the new, which gives the opposition “visible – invisible” a bright axiological sound, stimulates a rethinking of the boundaries between the subject, machine and society. The conclusion is made about the split between digital culture and the subjects of its reproduction, which can lead to the destruction of society.

MULTIPLE MODERNITIES IN UKRAINE

When moving the Docomomo Headquarters to Delft in January 2022, it announced a new cycle of the Docomomo journal by turning the journal fully open access and by introducing a peer-review process. This allows for further scientific indexation of the journal and attracting a wider range of authors. In September 2022 the Docomomo Journal was indexed by Scopus and the issues 1-65 from 1990-2021 are available online in our Docomomo journal Archive. Since then, the Docomomo Journal 66 on Modern Plastic Heritage was published and with this Docomomo Journal 67 we are approaching the country that has dominated our political and cultural discussions in 2022: Ukraine. In January 2022 it was not predictable that national autonomy, human lives and cultural heritage are threatened and destroyed by Russian aggression that started on 24th February 2022. In March of this year, Docomomo International published the Solidarity Statement on Ukraine and has since then been working on this special issue on the Multiple Modernities in Ukraine.

Bringing History back into Media Systems Theory. Multiple Modernities and Institutional Legacies in Latin America

Since Hallin and Mancini's (2004) seminal work, many scholars from around the world have proposed different models of media systems for countries and regions outside the Western world. Particular challenges have arisen when conceptualizing the systems in Latin America, where shifting liberal and polarized pluralist models have been proposed, and where media traits like clientelism and collusion remain in spite of political, economic and social changes. We contend that one obstacle to the characterization of the resilience of certain structures and practices in this region is the lack of a historical perspective to account for specific processes of media modernization. Drawing on the multiple modernization paradigm, as well as on post-colonial theories, system differentiation theories of the Global South, and theories of uneven regional development, we understand Latin American modernization processes as the appropriation, adaptation, or rejection of certain elements of Western institutions, ideals and values. In media systems, this might produce: (a) centralization of power, (b) a struggle between elites, (c) state-driven differentiation, and (d) regional or local subsystems. Our historical perspective aims to explain the prevalence of several media structures, and show how institutional legacies yield core media traits, in order to pave the way for further model inference.