WEEK 4: MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNITY

Defining Modernity
1. Rengger notices two senses of modernity: modernity as mood and modernity as socio-cultural form. The former, captured by a definition of William Connolly, has almost a personal character; the latter, referring to Anthony Giddens, is defined as “modes of social life or organization which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence. This associates modernity with a time period and with initial geographic location.” Only modernity as socio-cultural form interests this essaySee N. J. Rengger, Political Theory, Modernity and Postmodernity (Oxford, UK & Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1995), 39-41; and also Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 1.
2. A more detailed definition of the socio-cultural form of modernity is given by Smart when he defines modernity as “the consequence of a process of modernization, by which the social world comes under the domination of asceticism, secularization, the universalistic claim of instrumental rationality, the differentiation of various spheres of the lifeworld, the bureaucratization of the economics, political and military practices, and the growing of the monetary values. Modernity therefore arises with the spread of western imperialism in the sixteenth century…; the domination of capitalism in northern Europe…; the acceptance of scientific procedures…; and the pre-eminently with the institutionalization of Calvinist practices and beliefs in the dominant classes of northern Europe.” Quoted from Bryan S. Turner, “Periodization and Politics in the Postmodern,” in Bryan S. Turner ed., Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity, (London, Newburry Park, New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1990), 6. (Taken from Ridvan Peshkopia, “In Search of the Private, Public and Counterpublic: Modernity, Postmodernity, and Postsocialism,” New Political Science: a Journal of Politics and Culture 30: 1(March 2008), 23-47, note 1.);
3. According to Thiele, “Modernity arose out of Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution, events of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries that marked a radical transformation of the artistic and literary world, the religious world, and the world of inquiry and knowledge respectively. These three events intermingled to produce a widespread and thorough challenge to tradition and authority.

Etymology
1. Modernist: someone who shun tradition and focus on modern lifestyle and habits;
2. Modernism versus traditionalism;

History
1. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642); anti-Aristotle; anti-Ptolemy; 1632: pro-Copernicus (1473-15430; 1533: e pur si muove-science versus religion and experiment versus authority-the birth of the modern science; THE BOOK OF NATURE IS WRITEN IN THE LANGUAGE OG MATHEMATICS AND SCIENTISTS HAVE TAKEN OVER THE TASK OF READING IT;
2. Francis Bacon (1561-1626): British philosopher and politician; Novum Organum [New Logic] as opposing Organum of Aristotle and its deductive nature; anti-scholastic; the founder of the inductive notion of science: from the particular to the general; According to Voltaire (1694-1778) Bacon is “the father of experimental philosophy; mastering nature as a central goal for the modernists; according to Bacon, KNOWLEDGE ITSELF IS POWER;
3. By mathematically calculating the mathematics of planetary motion, Johanes Kepler (1571-1630) theoretically refined Copernicus’ theory of the heliocentric planetary system;
4. Isaac Newton (1642-1727) theorized the role of the universal force of gravity;
5. Réne Descartes (1596-1630): understanding the world according to mechanical laws of nature;
6. Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794): the tenth period of human development, the “indefinite” perfectibility of the human race, would become irreversible (notice a teleological view of human development);

Characteristics of Modernism
1. Scientism;
2. Humanism;Progressivism.

Individualism
1. Individualism is a legacy of modernism;
2. The individual is the key unit of analysis;
3. The individual both exercises and is object of power’s exercise;
4. The individual is a rational autonomous moral actor.

The individual understanding of power implies:
1. The nature and degree of power held by individuals;
2. The nature of political processes and institutions that distribute the power held by individuals;
3. The moral and rational standards that the individual ought to aply to the exercise of power or its resistance;
4. Hobbesian versus Lockean individualism (from John Locke 1632-1704);
5. Politics as (Harold Lasswell’s) Politics: Who gets What, When, and How;
6. The government regulation of social interaction is inevitable;
7. Politics precedes and exeeds the distribution of scarce resources and the pursuit of individual interests because it defines the way we define and understand our resources, our interests, our relationships, and ultimately ourselves as individuals;
8. The basic assumption of individualism: The individual is prepolitical;
9. Communitarians disagree: according to them, there are the communities who shape attitudes, values and behavior of their members;
10. Amitai Etzioni’s argument about the historical nature of the individual-community balance;
11. According to the communiarian, politics is also about identity;Alasdair MacIntyre: “What I ought to do?” is dependent upon “Who I am.”

STRUCTURALISM
1. Rather than the power of an individual, structuralism concerns the power exerted by the social environment itself―traditions, customs, practices, and institutions;
2. Methodological individualism: the whole is defined by adding up its parts; Structuralism: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; Émile Durkheim (1858-1917): the society has a life on its own and “although society may be nothing without individuals, each of them is much more a product of society than he is its maker;”
3. Pierre Bourdieu: individuals internalize as “mental dispositions” and “schemes of perceptions and thought” (habitus) the organization of their external reality; The word “field” stands to describe a network of social arrangements that embody and distribute positions and relations of power; habitus is an internalization of social fields;
4. Clause Lévi-Strauss: the myths that ground social life do not find their ultimate origins in the creative efforts of individual authors; they reflect the structure of the collective human mind; cultural institutions are the external projections and manifestations of universal structures, just as sentences are external manifestations of general grammatical rules (set in collective minds);
5. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): the human mind has innate faculties that organize its perceptions of the world according to certain “rational” constrains and categories―(innate mental categories);”
6. Differently, Louis Althusser: individuals are epistemologically and behaviorally molded according to deep patterns that transcend culture and time (concrete economic relations that undergo logical and predictable patterns of transformation); note a tendency to deny the importance of human individuality, volition and freedom;
7. Anthony Giddens: structuration suggests that social structures are both the “medium and result” of human practices;
8. Durkheim, Bourdieu, Lévi-Strauss, and Giddens: individuality and freedom arise only through human interaction, and the latter ever occurs within social structures that constrain, channel, and enable behavior;

POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND POSTMODERNISM
1. Poststructuralism: power is not always or even primarily a tool willfully employed by the individual actor in pursuit of freely chosen interests; (unlike structuralism) power is widely dispersed within the social whole and constantly in flux; no powerful institutions or traditions transform social life across time and space according to a singular, identifiable logic; investigates how particular forms of power achieve particular effects within particular historical periods, cultures, or texts; rejects the notion that there are ahistorical, cross-cultural categories of experience or structures of social experience;
2. Jacques Derrida: deconstruction―the linguistic turn in philosophy;
3. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913): meaning is not determined by a stable relation of words to concrete things or even to conceptual representations of these things; it is determined by the intricate relation of words to other words; deconstruction focuses on this unstable relativity of language; language constructs identity, and by doing so, to induce action and desire;
4. Postmodernism―a direct heir of poststructuralism: it refers to the widespread cultural sensibility, tendency, or mood that is loosely grounded in and serves as a grounding for poststructuralist theory;
5. Defining postmodernism: Like the case of modernity, there are several (sometimes competing) definitions of postmodernity. According to Eagleton: “Postmodernity is a style of thought which is suspicious of classical notions of truth, reason, identity and objectivity, of the idea of progress or emancipation, of single frameworks, grand narratives or ultimate grounds of explanations. Against these Enlightenment norms, it sees the world as contingent, undergrounded, diverse, unstable, indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations which breed a degree of skepticism about objectivity of truth, history and norms, the givenness of natures and the coherence of identities. This way of seeing, so some would claim, has real material conditions: it springs from an historic shift in the West to a new form of capitalism – to the ephemeral, decentralized world of technology, consumerism, and the culture industry, in which the service, finance and information industries triumph over traditional manufacture, and classical class politics yield ground to a diffuse range of ‘identity politics.’” See Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, (Malden, MA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), vii.
6. Postmodernism does not so much celebrate the power of human agency as worries about its fragility;
7. While acknowledging the power of institutions, postmodernists caution us not to conclude that these are the only institutions that shape our lives;
8. Our identities are the product of a panoply of protean social forces;
9. Discourses and other social forces can be only investigated piecemeal, from the ground up;
10. One must begin with individual practices, particular institutions and singular events that are themselves the products of the sorts of power being investigated;
11. One’s investigation must originate from one’s own particular standpoint, largely a product of social power―a perspectivist position;
12. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): objectivity as traditionally conceived is a nonsensical absurdity; note the ironic nature of postmodernism: one’s truth is depended upon one’s identity;
13. The three major features of modernism: 1) social construction of identity; 2) its perspectivist denial of epistemological or ethical foundations; 3) and its ironic demeanor;
14. There is no a single human nature; human identities are continually being constructed within protean social environments;
15. According to postmodern theorists, human identities are continually being constructed and contested within protean social environments owing to the interaction of specific forms of power;
16. Explicitly, even basic individual desire and will are less the trademark of individual autonomy that constructs of social environment;
17. Yet, implicitly, people can chose who they are or what they want to be;
18. Yet social constructivism is not a method employed only by postmodernist authors; IR and Comparative Politics social constructivism: the Copenhagen School and the securitization;
19. Gramsci: the dominant class uses political and cultural tools to manipulate the order strata of society into accepting, and even endorsing, unjust and exploitative social relations;
20. For modernist theorists, people process their experiences into opinions, attitudes, values and actions through predispositions that are products of socialization; for postmodernist theorists, the world itself is the product of symbols, gestures, discourses, and dramas of social life; reality itself is socially constructed;
21. Finally (for this part of the lecture) postmodernists suggest that there are no independent “facts” or “data” about the world at all; knowledge always comes prepackaged within its particular social context.

IDENTITY AND THE EXERCISE OF POWER
1. The power to create and shape identities in unevenly exercised in society because some entities possess greater power than others;
2. Today, the challenge rests with the surplus of information and difficulties for masses to select among it;
3. The elitist nature of power-Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941) and Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923): the circulation of elites according to meritocracy;
4. According to Giovanni Sartori, the threat to democracy are not elites but masses influenced by demagogues (a tinny example from the occurring campaign: “change” and “lifting embargo toward Cuba”);
5. C Wright Mills opposes any kind of oligarchy;
6. Postmodernist theorists have been criticized of missing the focus from the concrete forms of power exercise to some ambiguous ones; their perspectivist take makes difficult to come up with some objective categorization of “good” and “bad;” ironically, this attitude might keep postmodernist theorists from demanding social change;
7. Postmodernist (constructivist) undermining of environmental efforts;
8. Postmodernist (constructivist) undermining of political participation and endeavor (and of human efforts for betterment);
9. Who is able to contest identity? Affluent intellectuals and educated people who take advantage of their academic, political and civil freedoms, it follows; Thiele: Is modernism parasitic upon modernist values and victories that it simply rejects?
10. Foucault: power-a spider net without a spider: everyone is caught in its web; everyone is object and subject of power; the “capillary nature of power; power is exercised on us through our enmeshment in an ubiquitous network of relations; its influence is greater when it is exercised hidden from our view;
11. Note the similarity between Foucault’s view with Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1805-1859) “Democracy in America”: the tyranny of the majority;
12. There is a personalistic power; yet it is amalgamated in the spider web of social networks and becomes impersonalistic: the spider web gets a life on its own;
13. Then, if the power is exercised equally to each of us (which we know it is not true), the question “who benefits?” arises (Anatole France- 1844-1924: the example of the law against begging);
14. Hence, it is obvious that one’s identity is constructed by multiple relations of power (not just the influence of power holders)―hence by social environment where one lives: it’s power is not exercised according to a predefined design that overtly serve individual interests-it’s power has a more anonymous form;
15. The blurriness of the notion of human autonomy: Foucault for instance claims that how scientists come to view the world, their role in it, and themselves is largely a product of the dominant mores with their social and professional environment;
16. Hobbes hopes to escape the anarchic war of all against all: Leviathan would serve the purpose (note here that Hobbes assumes individuals as independent agents); Foucault attempts to demonstrate that our identities are largely formed by a social Leviathan (here, individuals are seen as entrapped in a web of social network: we need to encourage them to struggle for autonomy under such conditions; Hobbes sees power as an individual Leviathan; Foucault rejects the notion that power is limited to something wielded against individuals;
17. In the postmodern world, power is not only a repressive force that constrains us; it is a creative force that makes us who we are;

SOCIAL POWER AND INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM
1. Mores and norms form us but also restrict us (normalization, according to Foucault); Foucault: we should fight for our autonomy;
2. Habermas: why fighting for individual autonomy when we can never escape the social web?
3. Foucault: power itself is grounded on the freedom of the individual to respond in any number of ways: options are available;
4. Yet unmitigated autonomy remains impossible and it remains a nonsensical concept: to exercise individual autonomy one must first become an individual-yet one can only become an individual by normalization (hence loosing autonomy); as a conclusion, freedom is reached and expressed through our shifting positions within the social web of power;
5. The political problem is to balance the exercise of power with the exercise of freedom by resisting specific forms of power;
6. Jean Baudrillard melds postmodernism with an extreme form of structuralist determinism (neomarxism/Maoism): the total destruction of individuality in the modern world;
7. Power is not always bad; yet it is always dangerous;
8. Behaviorism: the investigation of the power of social environment to shape individual values and behavior; John Locke: individuals are born blank slates and are formed according to the worldly experiences acting upon them;
9. Accordingly, if we master these experiences, we can create the type of person(s) we want to;
10. Postmodernist reject this exercise by claiming that there exist no single human identity; moreover, any attempt to understand human behavior scientifically will lead to efforts to control human behavior scientifically; behaviorism might intensify efforts to suppress diversity;
11. B. F. Skinner: Walden Two: “operant conditioning” as a technique to technologically build a just society; yet it is a collectivist society: a society which functions for the good of all cannot tolerate the emergence of individual figures;
12. B. F. Skinner: Beyond Freedom and Dignity; in order to resolve the contemporary social problems, we need to abandon the prejudices about freedom and autonomy (hence abandon the latter) and abolish autonomous man;
13. Yet, according to behaviorists, we abandon our autonomy for the sake of understanding the environment that control us and change it;
14. Similarities between the postmodernists and behaviorists: the individual is wholly malleable, a function of its social environment; the webs of social power are inescapable; we are all necessarily caught in the game of mutual manipulation and control; power is the medium in which humans exist; power both shapes and sustains us; we cannot gain ultimate freedom; freedom is the experience of temporary getting a better grip on the reins of power;
15. Differences: Foucault―hyper- and pessimistic activism on the part of individuals who suffer the effects of power (opposing them); Skinner: hyper- and optimistic activism on the part of social engineers involved in constructing ever stronger and stickier webs of power (strengthening them).

A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW
1. Postmodernism rejects grand theories that seek to explain everything;
2. Jean-François Lyotard (1924-98): postmodernism is chiefly characterized by an incredulity toward metanarratives (contrary to behaviorists); they shun also they own grand story: the social construction of identity (note here the postmodernists’ ironic demeanor);
3. Skinnerian modernism celebrates only the scientific aspect of modernism; yet it shuns the individual/agent element of it; behaviorists and liberals both believe in progress but the former base it on the submission of the laws of society to science while the latter on human autonomy;
4. Postmodernists reject the scientific element of modernism: there cannot be there any objective knowledge―Newton physics versus quantum physics and chaos theory: Einstein theory of relativity;
5. Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: such things as time, space, matter, and causality are no longer understood as the unchanging foundations of a singular reality that is available for objective examination;
6. Postmodernists build on the assumption of the relativity and instability of nature (and knowledge);
7. Postmodernists reject the modernist faith in the autonomy and freedom of the individual;
8. Postmodernist spurn the modern faith in progress, whether scientifically or humanistically grounded; advances occur but at high expenses;
9. Differences between modern and postmodern political theory: the former are primarily interested in investigating the regulation of social interaction, while the latter are primarily interested in studying the social construction of identity;
10. However, as Thiele points out, political theory is about both the constitution and the connection of the selves;
11. Basically, both modern and postmodern political theorists are concerned with that realm of public affairs wherein various forms of power meet resistance and wrestle with freedom.The preservation of freedom is not to be gained in the futile attempt to escape politics. Politics is pervasive. Freedom is found only by self-consciously entering the political fray.