Project Of Modernity Research Articles

Cura, the Curatorial and Paradoxes of Care

Drawing on the classical myth of the goddess Cura, I show that care is concerned with the temporality of Being, a feeling for time in tension between the desire for a world that endures despite our mortality whilst also constantly open to our innate capacity for originality. I elaborate this proposition through its intimate and ambivalent relationship with its counterpart, security, and especially through the topos of the curator. The latter’s deployment and simplifications through time, implicitly tasked with removing worries and cares, disavow the paradoxes that comprise its morphology. From its emergence with the Roman Empire, I attend to its resonances within the curacy of the Catholic Church, its transformation with the Reformation and the natural theology of early modern science, its transference to the museum as one responsible for preserving and generating historical understanding, and its more recent re-fashioning as a technique for producing and performing self-identity through selection. The current ubiquity of curation beyond the museum and gallery can be understood, I suggest, not as an aberration but perhaps as a symptom of our temporal malaise, the pathology and felt exhaustion of a stalled project of modernity for which we have been repeatedly told ‘there is no alternative’. I conclude by briefly considering some of the implications of accepting the complexities of care and curation for affecting temporal experience without reproducing the logic that sustains our current impasse.

The Faure report, Sylvia Wynter and the undoing of the Man of lifelong learning.

It is rare in contemporary times to encounter international education policy reports that inspire hope and excitement for the future, such as we are offered in the 1972 report of the International Commission on the Development of Education set up by UNESCO in 1971 and chaired by Edgar Faure. Learning to be: The world of education today and tomorrow, also known as the Faure report, is both philosophical and"of a practical nature", aiming "to lead to action". Faure and his collaborators offered governments, scholars and educational actors evocative concepts for a society-to-come, such as lifelong education (and later, lifelong learning), the learning society, international solidarity and personalised learning. Animating the report and its imaginary of lifelong learning is "the ideal of the complete man", a modernist project to realise Man's destiny at thecentre of the universe. The Faure report and the ideal of lifelong learning continue to inspire education policy today. But in the context of climate crisis and deeper global inequality, what kind of enabling future is possible under the guidance of the exclusionary story of Man-as-human? To what extent can the Faure report continue to inspire? This article brings the Faure report's utopia of Man into conversation with Black feminist theorist Sylvia Wynter, exploring the idea central to Wynter's work that if learning is the way out of perpetual crises, of socio-biological collapse, a force for equity, democracy and justice that the authors of the Faure report envisioned it to be, then it must be de-coupled from the overrepresented, biocentric, 'referent-we' of Man-as-human. Wynter proposes a different future for humanness. The article concludes by speculating what this future might suggest for the material grounding of scholarly practices in adult education and beyond.

Women’s Everyday Lives in War and Peace in the South Caucasus, edited by Ulrike Ziemer. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. X, 281 pp. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25517-6_8

This edited volume provides a comparative analysis of the everyday problems of women in the South Caucasus. The authors of this collection pay special attention to the geopolitical analysis in the region in the context of social changes and civilizational challenges of women. The authors discuss the everyday problems of women during periods of transformation of political systems, regimes and conflicts, thereby explaining the various dimensions of these transits of power and institutions of public authority.
 The role of women in the South Caucasus is steadily growing even in conditions of instability, neither war nor peace. Women are actively employed in almost all spheres of life: in the economy, politics, culture, public life. However, in the South Caucasus, although the idea of protecting women's rights and gender equality has been enshrined at the constitutional level, the problem of how the actual status of women in society complies with constitutional provisions still persists.
 The democratization of the life of the South Caucasian society, the expansion of the information space and the variety of types of communications led to the involvement of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in global processes, in particular, in the implementation of the modernist project to protect the rights and freedoms of women.

Rivers between nature, infrastructure, and religion

ABSTRACT Focusing on the domestication and undomestication of nature around the River Vere in Tbilisi, Georgia, this article analyses how modernization projects seemingly overcoming nature simultaneously reinforced the complex entanglement between nature and infrastructure, the material and immaterial, the human and non-human. The article centres around a flooding event in 2015, shedding light on the entanglement of different approaches and temporalities. The river and its infrastructure are caught up with ideas, beliefs and materialities. The paper analyses how the crisis gave rise to questions about ‘morality’ of materiality, ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ handling of nature. Based on ethnography and archival work, it shows how the infrastructural developments conceived as projects of Soviet atheist modernity emerged as sites where nature, technologies and religion meet. Rather than looking at Soviet and post-Soviet as two different modernities, the article shows them as continuities.

Rebirth of the Classical Scholarship: A Political Imagination, or a Historical Critique?

Classics has a long tradition whether in China or in the West. This article tries to analyze its history, its nature, and the ideological struggle within classics from the following three aspects: (1) classics is not necessarily conservative, and in essence it is the project of modernity; (2) the tradition of classics is permeated by a cultural imagination of the past, presuming some particular political lifestyle of the ancients with a kind of metaphysical and transcendental correctness; (3) German classics is a distinctive dual combination of historicism and romanticism, which produces profound influence on the humanities and academics in modern China. In the end, this article tries to argue that classics is a historical science and its methodology should be of historical critique.

Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse

Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse

Indigenous Philosophy and Multiple Modernities

The inception of the project of modernity resides in the projection of a self-fulfilling subjective rationality that leads both to better self-understanding as well as a control of the environment. Still, failing to serve a truly universal human agenda, modernity narrowly propagated the values of Western culture. Part of justifying such an ideological status quo is made possible by the colonial sciences that ascribed reason, logic and objectivity to Westerners and emotion, affection and oneness to the “other”. Operating within a binary framework of tradition and modernity and emotion and rationality, the colonial sciences like anthropology and ethnology created the notion of an indigenous culture and knowledge that is strictly traditional, static, oral and non-progressive. As such, rather than studying others in their entire milieu, the colonial sciences propounded an antithesis between traditional indigenous culture which is a seat of mythology, and scientific modernity that is empirical and technical. Such a quest systematically degrades indigenous knowledge, culture and philosophy for the paradigm of scientific and technological rationality. This paper argues that the solution to such Westernization of all human knowledge resides in the concept of multiple modernities which situates alternative movements in the world of globalization as attempts to contextualize modernity in different sites of knowledge and also allows for different cognitive dimensions that are mutually incommensurable. This allows for the contestation of indigenous, scientific, secular and other modes of knowledge.

Invented Modernisms: Getting to Grips with Modernity in Three African State Buildings.

This article examines recent attempts to create specifically African forms of modernist political architecture that draw on ‘traditional’ or ‘pre‐colonial’ aesthetic forms and ideas. Taking examples of three prestigious structures – the presidential palace in Ghana, the parliament in Malawi and the Northern Cape regional parliament in South Africa – the article shows how vernacular ideas have been incorporated into state‐of‐the‐art political architecture, producing new or explicitly ‘African’ forms of modernism. It explores how such buildings, which draw on ‘invented traditions’, are used alongside conventional, monolithic representations of the state to produce ‘invented modernisms’ that both uphold and question the African state as a project of modernity.

Counter‐mapping Heritage: Memory and Significance in Places of Racialised Land Dispossession: The Case of Lower Claremont, Cape Town

AbstractIn this study I investigate the use of counter‐mapping methodologies to identify memories and significance in landscapes of racialised dispossession in the city of Cape Town. I use oral history, a go‐along or walking interview and focus group workshop to test the counter‐mapping process. In doing so I trace the historical process of land and housing loss under apartheid as an extension of colonialism and its modernist project of racial separation, and the effects and affects on those dispossessed into the post‐apartheid period. I critically assess the official frameworks of heritage resource management, especially in the post‐apartheid period, which have continued to focus on the built environment and aesthetics, despite official attempts to incorporate consultation of communities, stakeholders and their values. I do so in order to highlight the need for transformation and inclusion in current heritage practice in order to address disparities in the practice. Counter‐mapping methodologies are presented in the research as potential tools to address these contentious practices. These contentions intersect strongly in areas included in the Heritage Protection Overlay Zoning (HPOZ) in the City of Cape Town.1 The research shows that the HPOZ is geared towards managing the built environment and give attention to contextual development issues. It is however, not able to deal with memories and intangible values of the dispossessed in places where it intersects with land dispossession. The study also presents how research participants understand their heritage, which at times strengthens the official framework, and at other times stands in opposition to and in contrast to the official framework. These significances are mapped using counter‐mapping methodologies. The study concludes that counter‐mapping methodologies are able to represent memory and intangible significance in places of racialised land dispossession, and that the methodologies have multiple uses for varying settings and purposes, which speak to a modernist vision in post‐apartheid's constitutional democracy that fulfills the promise of fairness and justice.

Alternative Lyric Modernity?


 
 
 Zhou Zuoren, a pioneer of the New Culture Movement, became a collaborator and classicist poet during the Second Sino-Japanese War. This article attempts to bridge the gap between two periods of Zhou’s life: his later return to Chinese lyric classicism and his earlier career as a pioneer of vernacular poetry, translator of Japanese haiku, and literary critic championing a “Short Verse Movement.” I argue that Zhou’s wartime doggerels consisted of a modernist project in classicist guise, a continuation of his endeavor to lend expression to the immediacy and the transience of the moment through a native linguistic medium. Reflecting the urgency of self-expression under the Japanese occupation, Zhou’s esoteric doggerels represent a lyric subjectivity in crisis vis-à-vis the epic of history. By participating in a global moment of literary modernity, they also represent an “alternative lyric modernity” for China.
 
 

Subject and History: Thinking Modernity with Castoriadis in Polemical Context (Heidegger, Ricoeur, Habermas)

The paper considers the specific lines of the ontology of Cornelius Castoriadis in a triple context of his thought: polemics with Heidegger and Ricoeur, but also the reception of Castoriadis' project of modernity by Habermas. The author aims to elucidate historical-philosophical meaning of these debates and receptions through the special problems of the philosophy of history: teleology, succession, determination, creation, innovation, re-production, memory and imagination. The author used hermeneutical and intertextual analyse as methods. The results of authors' work are as follows: 1) author showed that Castoriadis polemized with some cases of reception of Heidegger's thought, especially in regard of Ancient Greek civilization, 2) author showed the limits of Castoriadis' thought: his radical atheism, social monadism, refusal to think communication, 3) author showed also the advantages of Castoriadis' thought of history: his multiculturalism, his claim to restaure genuine philosophy and democracy, critics of determinism, scientism, cultural egoism.

Review: Avant-Garde in the Cornfields: Architecture, Landscape, and Preservation in New Harmony

Review: <i>Avant-Garde in the Cornfields: Architecture, Landscape, and Preservation in New Harmony</i>

The Heresy of Didactic Art

The Heresy of Didactic Art

Review: Balkrishna Doshi: Writings on Architecture and Identity and One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash

Review: <i>Balkrishna Doshi: Writings on Architecture and Identity</i> and <i>One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash</i>

Review: Knowledge, Ideology, and Civilization: An Attempt at Understanding History (Arabic Edition), by Ali Jarbawi

Review: <i>Knowledge, Ideology, and Civilization: An Attempt at Understanding History (Arabic Edition)</i>, by Ali Jarbawi

Losing Freud

Losing Freud

Governing the silence: the institutionalisation of evidence-based policing in modern Britain

This paper examines the rise of Evidence-Based Policing (EBP) in Britain. EBP is a ‘what works’ initiative, claiming to offer benefits to ‘improve’ policing policy and practice based on scientific research graded as ‘evidence’. EBP valorises a narrow ‘experimental criminological’ understanding of knowledge and is being institutionalised into policing and academia with very limited challenge. This is despite concerns about ‘evidence-based policy’ in other fields and wide-ranging criminological perspectives on ‘crime’, ‘justice’ and policing that challenge the ‘experimental’ school. By 2022 EBP exerts significant influence on how policing insiders, academics, policymakers and politicians think, speak and act about British policing. Drawing on Foucault and Hajer, this paper reports institutional changes produced by EBP’s advancement revealed through discourse analytical research into EBP’s ‘archive’ of academic, operational and political ‘texts’. These changes are represented as new ‘governance techniques’ that collectively guard the boundaries of the EBP project, ‘authorising’ the knowledge it generates as ‘true’, propelling EBP towards a hegemonic position in British policing. EBP is repositioned as doing political work, sharing genealogical heritage with other political projects of late modernity, particularly managerialism and neoliberalism. Appropriately historicised, EBP can also be conceptualised as a new nadir in the problematic relationship between the production of criminological knowledge and the British state: reinforcing state definitions of ‘crime’ and cementing conservative ‘asks’ of policing. Simultaneously, the institutionalisation of EBP’s governance techniques is likely to further silence critical voices, excluding them from knowledge production, policy consideration, and neutralising their more radical calls for progressive policing.

Putting Neoliberalism in a Place: A Memory Site, Urban Restructuring, and Property’s Entanglements in Chile

AbstractThis paper analyzes a housing project in Santiago, Chile that now lies in ruins and has become a contested memory site. The project was once an ambitious, modernist project that housed former squatters during Salvador Allende’s socialist presidency (1970–1973) and its demise has subsequently become emblematic of the violent processes of neoliberal urban restructuring that marked the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). Yet efforts to memorialize the site also contain within them certain silences and elisions, gaps which can help to reveal the complex, embedded nature of liberal property relations in Chile. These relations underscore certain dynamics through which squatters have historically been able to gain housing rights and a foothold in the city. They also provide a key location through which to better understand the specific contours of neoliberalism’s trajectory, including its haunted forms of ruination, its points of tension, its limits, and the making of its counterpublics.

Designing for Plurality in Democracy by Building Reflexivity

Designing for Plurality in Democracy by Building Reflexivity

Review: Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas, by Jennifer Jolly

Review: <i>Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas</i>, by Jennifer Jolly