Project Of Modernity Research Articles

Borrowed legitimacy and beseeched resources: How competing professionals negotiate identities and forge symbiosis within Chinese community corrections

The recent formalization of Chinese community corrections (CCC), with its explicit emphasis on the professional provision of rehabilitative services to offenders, signals Chinese policymakers striving to create a penal modernist project. It also instigates antagonism between justice and service-oriented professionals, who seek to assert and carve out respective jurisdictions over rehabilitative work. There is a dearth of research touching on the ways in which potential tensions, or contractionary professional identities, are managed in practice. Drawing on a set of ethnographic and interview data gleaned from a large Chinese city, which pioneered and implemented the professional model of community corrections, this study examines the negotiation of professional power and interprofessional dynamics in rehabilitative work. The analysis suggests that during professional contestation, CCC actors deploy strategies to maintain identity boundaries, while making compromises and ceding jurisdictional authority to the opposing group. The negotiated order is accomplished in this hybridized institutional field, primarily through variegated demands of professionals involved for capacity enhancement, legitimacy reinforcement, or pragmatic survival. A symbiotic, but continually fractious, configuration is thus forged, blurring professional boundaries and breeding reciprocal benefits that sustain collaboration. Implications for ameliorating CCC's rehabilitative work are discussed.

Midwifing Modernity: Popularizing Modern Health Care for Women in Late Imperial Russia

AbstractThis article examines the discourse on Russian women’s health care in the late Imperial period within the context of modernization. One of the hallmarks of modernity, health care is also one of the most intimate areas of contact between the agents of modernity and the public at large. The discussion was starkly divided between those concerned with peasant women and those concerned with educated women, but both were firmly situated in the overarching project of healthification (ozdorovlenie). While the authors concerned with peasant women’s health sought to overcome traditional beliefs and practices and replace them with the findings of modern science, the literature directed at the educated public illustrates the anxiety that accompanied the modernity project. The authors writing to and about educated society were far more conflicted about the array of problems they observed developing as traditional beliefs and practices were challenged by changes in society. The article explores the development and role of women’s health care, the tensions between professional and popular health care practitioners, and their relationships with the population from cultural, political and gendered perspectives, and analyzes modernization as a site of contention over women’s agency as well as a social and cultural process.

Современность имени Иммануила Канта. К вопросу о теоретических и практических истоках проекта Модерна

The article discusses the question of the theoretical and practical origins of the project of Modernity in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The theory of reflexive modernity was emerging in the second half of the 20th century. Ac­cording to its positions, historical development and social transformations derive their energy from resolving emerging contradictions through an appeal to the pub­lic reason. Modernity turns out to be a fundamentally mobile and dialogical process, the maintenance of which requires a complex culture of thought and ac­tion. The author offers a critical view at the optimistic sentiments of the theorists of the end of the last century, who considered the emerging contradictions to be fundamentally solvable. The ambiguous consequences of the end of globaliza­tion, the environmental crisis and the digitalization of everyday life turned out to be among the main reasons for rethinking the general framework of theorizing about modernity as a project that must be consistently implemented. The claim to build a general theory of modernity has given way to alarmist and situational discourses, although the influence of the Western rationalist attitude remains. The article hypothesizes that one of the reasons for the crisis of the philosophical narrative about modernity was the ideologization of Enlightenment thought. Thus, the ideas of I. Kant turned into ideologemes justifying the existing world order, the beneficiaries of which are a minority. The author shows that de­spite the existing grounds for this, we are talking about a private interpretation of the principles of practical philosophy of the German philosopher. Actual modernity can rightfully bear the name of Immanuel Kant, but it is the critical analysis of its most widespread interpretation that can be productive for solving the key problems of the modern world

Religion after Critique

Abstract In the last few decades, religion and its terms have shown to be implicated in projects of colonial modernity. While this critique of religion is now generally accepted, the term continues to be used in the field with little regard to its history and its colonial construction. This essay aims to bring greater attention to the continuing relevance of religion in contemporary society as articulated in postcolonial scholarship. It proposes closer attention to the critique of religion in the work of David Chidester, Talal Asad and Charles Long. Two distinct dimensions of religion are identified in their work. The first is a construction of religion in colonial modernity, while the second suggests ways of studying religions in light of this construction. I show in this essay that their work points to multiple complementary ways of studying religions in the contemporary. Their work suggests that the field of religious studies cannot ignore its discursive history and construction.

Ambivalent heritage: tourism, weddings and pilgrimage in Hisor, Tajikistan

ABSTRACT This article considers the social and symbolic work of Hisor as a site of Tajikistan’s cultural heritage. Hisor carries with it an array of meanings and represents a convergence of multiple spheres of social life: leisure, education, life-cycle rites and religiosity. Hisor’s flexibility allows it to materialize Tajikistan’s governing ideology as one local project of modernity. This article discusses three contexts in which visitors experience Hisor as heritage: tourist visits to the ‘Old Madrassa’ museum, wedding photographs in front of the fortress walls and pilgrimages to the shrine of Makhdumi Azam. The heritage practices and discourses associated with Hisor offer a complex case study of how the temporal ambivalence of heritage operates on the ground in Central Asia and suggest some of heritage’s utility as a social practice for instantiating cultural memory.

The good intentions of federalism

The article is devoted to substantiating the controversial thesis that federalism is not an autonomous type of political structure. Federations are interpreted as a set of specific failures of different origins in the course of following the basic modern scenario of the formation of a unitary nation-state with a consolidated (civil) political identity. The article has for theoretical basis the actor approach, which interprets the political form of the federation as a derivative result of a conflict pact between the central and peripheral elites. In this methodological perspective, the history of the concept of federalism is examined and a comparative historical analysis of the world federal experience is carried out. As a result, a number of interrelated author's conclusions were formulated. First, it is shown that the original Kantian project of a world federation of states has little in common with federalism, which refers to the description of the internal structure of individual societies. Secondly, the conclusion is substantiated by the fact that in the modern theory of federalism a harmful mainstream tradition has developed, which scales as a normative successful experience the centralizing federalism in the United States. Thirdly, the cultural and historical features of the formation of two families of federations are highlighted and analyzed, one of which is associated with the acquisition of independence by offshoots of the West, and the other was formed by the later processes of the collapse of the colonial empires of the West and the liberation of colonies in Africa and Eurasia. Fourthly, it is argued that the federal political structure at the theoretical level was intended to reconcile, at the basis of the political project of Modernity, the liberal utopia of a universal and culturally homogeneous civil nation and the actual cultural diversity of any modern states, which is a permanent source of erosion of its political sovereignty and differentiation of collective identities. Fifthly, it is proved that all derived political, legal, economic and other signs of federalism are due to one initial problem - the legitimation and subsequent institutionalization of the conflict between the central elite and regional elites, challenging the indivisibility of political sovereignty and demanding political autonomy. Sixth, federalism as a changeable pact of elites in specific historical societies does not provide convincing grounds for its qualification as an autonomous political form compared to a unitary nation-state. The final conclusion is that the political format of federalism in most states is a long-term way of formalizing the political divorce of cultural communities that could not create a common political nation.

POLITICAL CRITICISM OF SECULARISM AS THE MAIN LINE OF WESTERN MODERNITY IN THE JOURNALISM OF A.I. SOLZHENITSYN

This article raises questions related to the political interpretation of A.I. Solzhenitsyn. It is demonstrated that Solzhenitsyn’s work in this aspect can be described as a political and philosophical legitimation of the project of “conservative modernity”. The main plot dominant in Solzhenitsyn’s reflections is the political and philosophical criticism of Western secularism and its political consequences. Secularism is described by Solzhenitsyn as a “perversion” of the Christian idea, in this respect Bolshevism and Western liberalism are equated with each other, embodying the radical features of the Western modernist project. The main question that worries Solzhenitsyn: how is modernity possible, in which the basic Christian principles and rules are preserved and developed? The solution to this issue is connected with the political implementation of this project - the construction of a conservative version of democracy, in which the observance of human rights and the construction of a rule of law state is based on Christian, not secular values.

“Nothing Left for Women but Voting”: Suffrage, Empire, and Race in Carrie Chapman Catt’s Early Twentieth-Century Philippine Travel Narratives

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on the sojourn of suffragist leader Carrie Chapman Catt to the Philippines in 1912. Catt travelled to various parts of this Southeast Asian country to investigate conditions shaping local women's lives and help form their own suffrage organisations. Personal accounts of her travels provide a crucial look into Catt’s observations, representations, and perceptions of aspects such as American imperial institutions, including public schools, hospitals, and prisons, and the social and economic standing of Filipino women. Throughout her travels in the Philippines, Catt witnessed the development of the American colonial state’s project of modernity and hegemony as an imperial citizen who also fought for the expansion of democratic rights. Enmeshed in the conflicting processes of complicity and resistance, she engaged in complicated meanings of expansionism, political empowerment, and social hierarchies. I argue that while travelling afforded Catt an opportunity to transgress prescribed political and social spheres, it also served to consolidate her place on the world stage as she promoted a new brand of citizenship that marshalled difference within the framework of white supremacy.

Religion in modern projects: between alarmism, political expediency and utopia

The permanent shift of modernity, the epistemological crisis, and the politicization of all social spheres determine an atmosphere of global political anxiety. The ever-expanding security deficit becomes an attribute of modernity, as a fragmentation as a response to globality and the emergence of alternative ways of political genesis reflects new socio-cultural semantic nodes. Existential threats raise a persistent appeal to religion. The loss of epistemological certainty in political constructions contributes to the theoretical confusion about the future. The diffusion of political and value contexts forces people to turn to religion while developing projects and setting the goals of modernity. This creates cognitive and political- instrumental difficulties in using legitimizing and, at the same time, mutually exclusive religious meanings. The simultaneous truth in different types of discourses and in theory makes it impossible to find a common denominator. We argue that the projects and goal settings of modernity, claiming to be universal, but not achieving it, are structured primarily based on the logic of alarmism and eschatology. A positive project, trying to overcome the limitations of politicization, moves to the value plane. We consider three perspectives of the teleology of modernity, including religious meanings: theoretical, metaphysical, and instrumental. The research methodology is based on the problems of political goal setting in the logic of, traditional/ modern, explaining the religious coloring of political strategies and the splitting of future visions. The othering based on religious differences as a tool of political goal setting, the political instrumentalization of religious identities, simultaneously with religious creation of the world, puts two possible projects of modernity at opposite poles - the World of Religions and the World of Faith. Among the possible projects arising at the intersection of religion and politics, the author suggests three large clusters: alarmism, political expediency, and utopia.

Lessons from the modernist project for the Amazon

In 1972, the Brazilian government implemented a colonisation scheme and a series of new towns along the Transamazonian Highway, then under construction. The state-driven project aimed for regional development, economic growth, and national integration, which legitimised the military regime. Despite robust funding, it was abandoned as a failure a couple of years later. Since then, deforestation and a low Human Development Index have marked the region. This paper analyses the governmental colonisation project and its manifestation through historical interpretative method and urban morphology, based on original documents, a site visit, and economic, political, social, environmental, and agricultural studies. The paper introduces the notion of national development and modernisation, closely related to the physical transformation of the natural environment. It then examines the colonisation scheme and the new town layouts. It also compares them with a successful precedent, the private colonisation enterprise in northern Paraná state. Finally, the paper points out some of the constraints of the Amazonia project and sheds light on this town and country planning fiasco. The general argument is that architectural and urban design was treated as a sign of modernity insofar as it implied a radically different outcome from both the contested urban reality and the natural environment to be subjugated. Modernist thought and functionalist layouts materialised the aspiration to completely transform the habitat instead of adapting to it.

“¡Abajo los médanos!”: Orígenes del conflicto entre dunas costeras y humanos en la ciudad de Veracruz (siglos XVI-XIX)

The aim of this article is to analyze, from the perspective of environmental history and of history of science, the relationship between médanos (coastal dunes) and humans in the city and port of Veracruz based on the sand removal project of 1880 and through following the conflict between both actors from the 16th to 19th centuries. This conflict had its origin in the construction of a negative vision of thecoastal dunes of Veracruz by colonizers, physicians and naturalists, which implied that this coastal ecosystem had to be destroyed due to being infertile, unhealthy (mainly associated with yellow fever) and hindering modernity. Thus, the configuration of the colonialist, Eurocentric and anthropocentric project of modernity is on the basis of the said negative vision. Through a methodology that combines following and the Actor-Network Theory, besides the use of various sources (press, correspondence, historical maps, a relación geográfica, medical treatises and studies and urbanistic and naturalist works), the collective of human and non-human actors involved in the mentioned conflict is recreated.

Editorial

Enter any contemporary art museum, gallery, or biennale in 2024 and chances are that the live arts will be center “stage.” While theater, dance, music, and performance art were historically presented in visual arts contexts as fringe or one-off events, since the turn of the twenty-first century—and gaining momentum over the past decade—there has been a growing tendency to “exhibit” live art. As choreographers, directors, and composers who have built their careers in the visual art world—which is significantly more monied than the performing arts world—take home major prizes and awards, leading museums are inaugurating spaces designed exclusively to house installation and performance. But architectural spaces are also ideological spaces with tacit value systems that influence conventions of performance and spectatorship, as well as perceptual experience. What happens when live arts are transplanted into the modernist project of the white cube, characterized as it is by its putative neutrality, objectivity, universality, disembodiment, and erasure of context (see O'Doherty [1976] 1999)? Today's eventized museum showcases works of art characterized by durationality (they are circumscribed by time), corporeality (they feature live, gesturing bodies), and relationality (they foreground the intersubjective exchange) that engender new modes of what Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) called “relational aesthetics.” In so doing, these works challenge traditional definitions of the “collection,” the “archive,” the “museum,” and even “contemporary art.”

‘A paradise among leprosariums’: Hansen’s disease and affective containment in the Panama Canal Zone

ABSTRACT The Panama Canal Zone’s American administration established Palo Seco Leper Colony in 1907 in order to contain individuals with Hansen’s disease. Yet containment was never a simple strategy. This article argues that American observers used rhetoric to transmute their fear of Hansen’s disease into pity, imagining isolation as a form of care and buttressing the United States’ claim that the curative violence of incarceration was part of a beneficent global project of humanitarianism, civilization, and modernity. At the same time, residents at Palo Seco often reworked or simply rejected these affective claims, and close attention to the archival record finds examples of their anger, love, and hope, as well as pain, stigma, and loneliness. Residents were labelled and consigned, ostensibly made static and ordered through diagnosis, but the site hosted a dynamism and disorder—in both senses of the word—that American imperialism professed to control, but never could. Palo Seco was a kind of emotional contact zone where managers, commentators, and residents negotiated the affective scripts and sentiments of their imperial encounter. Attention to these subjectivities testifies to the humanness, the ragged edges, and the profound affect of the imperial enterprise and its ableist institutions.

Politics and Truth in Hölderlin: Hyperion and the Choreographic Project of Modernity by Anthony Curtis Adler (review)

Politics and Truth in Hölderlin: Hyperion and the Choreographic Project of Modernity by Anthony Curtis Adler (review)

The Oil Amazon Subregion: Colonization, Conflicts, Extraction and Local Identities

The northern region of the Amazon of Ecuador is known as the oil subregion, an ecological space that represents the main development and modernity project executed by the State. Strategy that integrated vast areas of humid forests into a model of progress, modernity and global markets. This way of imagining the jungle and its inhabitants legitimized abusive intervention practices, forms of exploitation of nature and a chaotic territorial occupation, however, it determined a particular identity of the Amazonian settler-peasant. Competition for resources and territories has generated multiple social and environmental conflicts and violent encounters with native populations.

A method of her own: tracing memory in Marion Milner's The Hands of the Living God

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the growing critical literature that situates the British Psychoanalyst and pioneer of life writing Marion Milner within the modernist tradition, not only as a Freudian but as someone who extends the modernist project through her studies of technique and method. Focusing on the practice of drawing in two key Milner texts – On Not Being Able to Paint (1950) and The Hands of the Living God (1969) – I explore Milner’s clinical and aesthetic preoccupation with space and spacing. By way of Milner’s somewhat distanced dialogue with Freud and much more intimate dialogue with Winnicott, as well as via a consideration of material from the Marion Miner archives, I demonstrate how Milner’s technical and clinical praxis offers an alternative articulation to the model of deep memory. Specifically, through her development of a spatial idiom, I propose that Milner’s dedication to working at the surface – including tracing and copying her patient’s drawings – permits mimicry to stand in for memory so that the lost background of her patient Susan can be re-drawn.

Invasion Blowback and Other Tales of the Anthropocene: An Afterword

How shall we tell stories of the nonhuman living beings that join us humans in making the Anthropocene? Such beings are not just tools of human manipulation; they make their own histories. In this discussion of the articles of this Special Issue, Recalling Species Invasion, the features that make good Anthropocene storytelling come into view. The protagonists are humble, inconspicuous being, but each is reachable through vernacular human observation. They each get caught up in modernist projects of landscape transformation - but, rather than being pawns, they change the world in unexpected ways. They are exemplary subjects for parables of the more-than-human condition. 

Fanon's revolutionary murmurs: Toward a critical phenomenology of listening

AbstractDecolonial, postcolonial, and postmodern criticism is indebted to Frantz Fanon for revealing the hegemony of vision and visual language in Western imperial discourse. Yet, the import of Fanon's critique of coloniality reaches beyond a focus on vision into the sonorous. Attending to the often overlooked auditory dimension of Fanon's work, I argue, brings attention to the role of listening as a condition of possibility of a revolutionary consciousness. Listening to Fanon's careful descriptions of the experience of many Algerians of listening to the National Liberation Front's radio broadcast, The Voice of Free and Fighting Algeria in “This is the Voice of Algeria,” I propose that what makes possible the institution of a revolutionary consciousness is listening to murmurs. Listening to the materiality of voice and sound rather than the propositional content of speech is revolutionary because it challenges core values central to the project of colonial modernity: metaphysical logocentrism and the fungibility to which colonial modernity strives to reduce colonized subjects.

Modern design: a historical choice in favor of globalization

The object of this research is design as a cultural phenomenon and its historical formation. The subject of the study is the modernist design episteme, which began its formation in the paradigm of modernity. The purpose of the study is to show that in the modernist project, the development of design as a cultural phenomenon was not rigidly determined, and could have taken a different path. However, the historical choice was made in favor of American functionalism and European international design. International design creates a subject and information environment that is suitable for any country, regardless of the cultural context. This design meets the goals of globalization. At the same time, the essence of design also allows for such applications as the aestheticization of reality and the preservation of cultural identity. The main conclusion of the study is that the historical development of the design phenomenon could have taken a different path. The current state of design is determined by the vector of globalization, which was set during the transition from to modernism. This vector is the result of a choice in favor of functionalism, a style that meets the ideology of globalization, the transformation of society into a homogeneous consumer environment. It was during the Art Nouveau period that the genesis of design could have taken a different path, since Art Nouveau was originally a project of aestheticization and spiritualization of the subject environment, however, history has developed so that design has chosen a vector of development associated with functionalism. The scientific novelty of the study is connected with this conclusion, since so far the history of design has been interpreted unambiguously, from the standpoint of the advantages of international style and functionalism. While the phenomenon of design is broader, and may include the possibility of preserving cultural identity, which was discussed in the modern era.

Making Beethoven Black: The New Negro Movement, Black Internationalism, and the Rewriting of Music History

AbstractWhile the idea that Beethoven had African ancestry became popular in the 1960s during the Civil Rights struggle in the United States, its conception arose during an earlier moment: the global New Negro movement of the 1920s. Appearing in newspaper columns, music journals, and essays, Black American writings on Beethoven challenged white musicians’ claims to the canon of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. This article argues that the project of making Beethoven Black belonged to a greater and more ambitious endeavour to rewrite Western music history. Black musicologists sought to globalize the Western canon, and in so doing, critique its grand narratives. Locating Black musical idioms in eighteenth-century piano sonatas or conducting archival research on Black European figures such as George Bridgetower, their music histories challenged readers to re-examine just who, exactly, had contributed to the project of cultural modernity and on what grounds.