“the time of philosophers
theologians and poets
oscillates between
a fascination with a past
and a drive
toward a future salvation
it is time
of both decadence
and hope
the knight’s time
is characterized by speed
but it often turns in circles
confusing one point in time
to another
the peasant’s time
is marked by regularity
and patience
it is a past in which seeks
to maintain the present
the bourgeois’s time
as we might expect
continually sharpens
the distinction between
past, present and future
and is characterized
by the most insistent
orientation toward
the future”
Paul Imbs, Strasbourg 1965
Preface
Modernity here is not pursued in the realm of the built environment nor as a measure of aesthetic valve. It is the various ‘other’ strata that embodies modernity’s topography i.e. history, time, memory, culture, sociology, science, technology, mobility and [of course] even consumption. The sum of it or the lack of it or even if the riddance of all that constitutes to why there should even be such a classification called modernity is what’s being reflected upon here. Humanism is core to this pyramidal structure, with modernity rising argumentatively to its vanishing point [peak] as its final destiny [resting place].
Structure
This essay is structured differently in the sense that chapters are actually interpreted as ‘reflections’, which is why I have paired my sub-headings at the beginning of each chapter. In the pairing, there is a sensibility that speaks or challenges the dualities that co-exist as we explore and discover the diversity of the rhetorical questions that surface, creating tension (oppositions) and often no resolve but just a dialectic that is provocative and argumentative.
p.s. Personally, I will be in denial if I were to agree with what was just said about the failings to obtain a resolve. You will be pleased to know that for me this is an on-going investigative debate and I do intend to pursue this writing to the next level, even though my conclusion strongly suggests that I am convinced about where I stand with my findings to date.
When I speak of time, it is not yet
When I speak of a place, it has disappeared
When I speak of a man, he’s already dead
When I speak of time, it already is no more (3)
Modernity Then
Modernity Now
‘Modernity’ as a concept is so often associated with modernity (itself) that it comes as somewhat of a shock to find the word ‘modern’ in use as far back as the fifth century AD. (2) When used in 494/5 AD - Pope Gelasius I, simply distinguishes his contemporaries from the older period of the Church fathers, implying no further privilege for the present. From the Pope’s point of view [as the man of letters] it fundamentally signified a dividing line between the then classical culture and a present, making the present and the immediate past in this instance continuity. It is this break that is crucial in the endowment of the term ‘modern’ with the specific meaning it has continued to bear down to the present time. Of course, at this point Jameson begins to question the distinction between novus and modernus, between new and modern – as to whether everything modern is necessarily new, while everything new is not necessarily modern? His line of reason suggests that perhaps this is merely to differentiate between personal experiences versus a collective chronology of occurrences. (3)
Past Distinction
Present Distinction
Time is what sets apart the past from the present. Although the past/present distinction exists collectively in both historical consciousness and in historical knowledge, it is imperative that consideration be given to the perception and segmentation of time with regards to a before and an after. (4) Not limiting the opposition between the present and past whether it is a collective or a singular consciousness, we must add to it a third dimension: the future. St Augustine offers a formulation composed of three temporal viewpoints when he says that we live only in the present, but this present has several dimensions;
“the present of the past things,
the present of the present things,
and the present of the future things.”
In-lieu of this esoteric statement, Jacques draws emphasis to two other domains that constitutes this past/present distinction in the edifice of a collective memory: psychology and linguistics. In psychology, the distinction between the past and present [and future] often implies a subconscious engagement with the future while unconsciously acknowledging the familiarities established in the past while temporarily removing oneself from the present in order to constitute a collective memory extending beyond one’s individual memory. (5) Whereas in linguistics, Joseph Vendryes explains the inadequacies and the inconsistencies of grammatical ‘verb tenses’ used commonly in language, for example there is that tendency for language to use the present as a future [i.e. “I am going to Paris tomorrow.” “I leave next Tuesday.”].
The past can also be expressed by using the present [the so called ‘historical present’] and inversely, the past can often serve to indicate the present. The past/present/[future] distinction is a malleable one and subjects itself to numerous forms of manipulation. (6)
Forgetting Memory
Constructing Memory
In the dialectic of the past and the present, memory becomes the raw material of time. This ‘living source’ has been recorded verbally, written and mentally contemplated by historian’s centuries over. In a discipline that ruminates in the powers of the unconsciousness, history finds nourishment in memory. It is in this dangerously unconsciousness deliberation that individuals and societies experience the great dialectical process of ‘memory and forgetting’. The historian in turn must be there to render an account of these memories and of what is forgotten, to transform them into something that can be conceived, to make them comprehensible. To privilege memory excessively is to sink into the unconquerable flow of time. (7) Jean Piaget who pioneered several constructivist theories in child cognitive development once stated, “ to understand time is to liberate oneself from the present: not only to anticipate the future in relation to the regularities unconsciously established in the past, but to deploy a series of states, each of which is different from the others, and whose connection can be established only by gradual movement without fixation or a stopping point.” (8) Do we really know what a past is? In Jauss words, ‘there can in fact be no past without a powerful present, a present achieved by the disjunction [of our past] from ourselves.’ (9) Very simply said, if you are incapable of confronting your own past, then you have no past and/or perhaps you live in your own past eternally.
Melting Time
Melting Modernity
The basic material of history is time. Chronology was a vital social edifice in the way history was perceived and understood by society. It was represented in the form of a calendar as a visual apparatus to domesticate ‘natural time’. And expression of history was derived from this linear measure, forming a direct link to mythical and religious origins of humanity, to scientific and technological, to economic, social and cultural evolution. (10) That was then, today alongside with those known quantifiable measures of historical time, comes the concepts of duration (duree), of lived time (temps vecue), of multiple and relative times, and of subjective or symbolic times. Historical time is rediscovering at a new, very sophisticated level the old time of memory, which is broader than history and supplies it with material. (11)
To understand time “is essentially to demonstrate reversibility.” (12)
There has been nothing, more challenged and cryptic than the study of modernity. It has meant many things in different eras in all aspects of history. As Bauman puts it very convincingly, ‘modernity is the time when time has history’, because it has the capacity allow the continuous flow of events and incidents ‘to pass, cross, cover and even conquer’. (13) There have been many defining iterations in identifying how space and time can be represented, space can be acknowledged as what one passes through in a given time and arguably time is what it takes to pass space. And yet having said that, time is different from space because of its manipulative possibilities which largely becomes disruptive. Embracing a dynamic force such as the notion of speed to ‘occurrences’ raises a dialectic that manages a newfound relationship between time and space in a newly constructed passage that is fueled by velocity. This meltdown is how Bauman portrays modernity, as we know it to transform itself from a solid state to fluid modernity. Wetware versus hardware, the former being in the capacity of human and animal muscles made humans similar and the latter in the capacity of steam and internal combustion engines made them different. In Benjamin Franklin’s proclamation that time is money, he re-defined man as the ‘tool-making animal’ in the ongoing effort of overcoming resistance of space: shortening distances in realizing that if humans could travel faster, then they could claim more territory and in doing so, control it, map it and supervise it. The birth of colonization, and the conquest of space that was claimed beyond all known boundaries wherein, only space was at stake; space was value; time was tool. (14)
“Heavy modernity was the era of territorial conquest.” (15)
And during this era of hardware, of heavy modernity, which in Max Weber’s terms was also the era of instrumental rationality, where time needed to be managed judiciously so that the returns of value, which in this case is clearly space, stands to be maximized. Whereas in the realm of light modernity, the effectiveness of time as a means of a value-retaining asset tends to be everlasting. What Bauman tried to attain here was that in this time-space relationship, it meant that all parts of that space can be reached in the same time-span, which in this case was in ‘no-time’; hence no part of that space was privileged with any form of ‘special value’. If all parts of space can be reached at any moment, there is no reason to worry about securing the right of access to any. The instantaneous occurrence of software time merely acts as an indictor that space will become redundant. As Jacques Derrida, so clever-fully puts it, ‘Instantaneity’ is believed to signify a rapid motion in a very short time, i.e. a spilt-second but in this instance, it denotes the absence of time during a particular event and by the same token an element in determining its value. Have we moved so fast that time has banished itself and space was its only casualty? Is this the same as immediate ‘on-the-spot’ fulfilment and immediate exhaustion and the fading of interest? (16)
“I occupy space therefore I exist.” (17)
Uprooting Society
Uprooting Modernity
Is history capable of seeking answers about the beginning and the end of the history of the world for mankind? How would the discourse on origins and its irrelevance shape itself in the modern human conditions we live in now? Modernity has been triggered by horrifying signs and prospects of durable things falling apart, and of a whirlpool of transient ephemera filling the vacancy. (18) Unlike our ancestors, we do not have a clear notion of a ‘destination’ towards which we seem to be moving which tends to be a model of global society, a global economy, global politics, global jurisdiction (19) ……. etc. And while we continue to fumble through these challenges of ‘human togetherness’, we continue to remain modern - as our predecessors did. What is it then, to be modern? Is it to subject oneself to an insurmountable amount of change called modernization? Change that bred fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and forever ‘becoming’ - avoiding closure, and remaining obscure. Bauman refers to this phenomenon as ‘liquid modernity’, a growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. A century ago, ‘to be modern’ would have meant to excel to ‘the final stage of perfection.’ Today, it means infinity of improvements, with no ‘final stage’ in sight and none desired. (20)
Is history a science of the past, or is it true that “there is only contemporary history”? (21)
Bauman in his book, Liquid Modernity also compares this new liquid modern form of life as walking in an open minefield, not knowing when the next explosion is about to happen at any moment, at any place. He claims it will be an inevitable conditioning where everything will happen and nothing will be done in confidence nor with any certainty. Of course, with this prognosis he alerts us to another new rising force, the unstoppable insurgence of ‘uprooted’ people – migrants, refugees, exiles, asylum seeker: people on the move and without permanent residences. (22) These mass migrations feed on interruptions and incoherencies as though it is an ordinary state of being. These inconsistencies have become the ‘real needs’ for these transient populations who undergo this form of continuous change for renewing their stimulus on a daily basis. A state of transitioning that reprimands these immigrants with unfamiliarity and incompetence – while being inadequately powered to locate the source of this new form of ‘everyday fear’ driving uncertainty to an unprecedented global scale. Will this become another dialectic of ‘periodization’, as ‘history on the move’? Or will this be regarded as a break, a rupture that cannot be apprehended and corrected for what it is but potentially generate new categories with historiographical beginnings that cannot be justified by any known historical precedent except the construction of its own pre-history and generate its own causalities. (23) A formidable prognostication.
Strange times
Stranger spaces
If one lives only in the present, one risks disappearing altogether with the present. Here is a discourse about the new ‘cultural desert’ where intimacy and distance create a privileged situation and where both are necessary. (24)
‘A city is a human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet.’ (25)
Bauman clarifies this classic Sennett’s definition by reinstating that chance encounters occur between strangers where the endings are as abrupt as their beginnings – a mis-meeting. It is unlike the meeting of kins, friends, or acquaintances. The meeting of strangers is an event without a past, hence no shared recollections, nothing to fall back on and/or to go by in the course of the present encounter – conclusively an event without a future. In support of this form of urban living, Sennett introduces the need for a brand-new skillset under the caption titled, ‘civility’. He represents this as a form of a mask, one that permits ‘pure sociability’. (26) So rather than providing spaces for people to come share their amiable personalities or provide room to display their contentious side, he suggests ‘wearing a public mask’ as an act of engagement and participation rather than one of non-commitment, and withdrawal of the ‘true self’. (27) Domination is the ability or one’s capacity to escape, to disengage or ‘be elsewhere’ and at liberty to decide the pace at which all that is to be done – while coincidentally disabling the dominated of any capacity to restrict their moves or even slow them down. The contemporary battle of time and space is hinged between forces armed respectively with the weapons of acceleration and procrastination. In simple terms, people who move and act faster, are now the people who rule. And it is the people who cannot move as quickly, and cannot at will leave their place at all, who are ruled. (28) And as Bauman clearly puts it, velocity and acceleration mean domination and the ability to appropriate, utilize and populate territories will become the struggle for space, the new struggle for existence in our contemporary times. It should not be misunderstood that this game of domination in the era of liquid modernity is not played between the ‘bigger’ and the ‘smaller’, but between the ‘quicker’ and the ‘slower’. Those who are able to accelerate beyond the catching power of their opposition, rule. (29)
Light modernity lets one partner out of cage.
‘Solid’ modernity was an era of mutual agreement.
‘Fluid’ modernity is the epoch of disengagement, elusiveness, facile escape, and hopeless chase.
In liquid modernity, it is the most elusive, those free to move without notice, who rule. (30)
Consuming Modernity
Denying Modernity
Migration and mobility are one because ‘strangers’ make them possible. All foreigners are strangers in another land which is not their birthplace and vice-versa. This is an understandable behavioral standpoint for foreigners. But what’s in question here is when and why have the locals [city residents] transformed into strangers in their own familiar territories. Walk into any public space in any city and there is no interaction between the inhabitants who come to occupy that space. It is as though, sharing that space has derived them the ability to communicate on a one to one basis, - face to face. They are present but invisible to each other. With such close proximities, they possess no suggestions towards a dialogue or any form of meaningful encounter. This was Sennett’s main obsession about civility. Almost every modern city has sites demarked as ‘public spaces’. Bauman chose La Defense in Paris as a precedent that departs from the ideal model of Sennett’s ‘civil space’. A space very familiar to me but only as a visitor, I was awed at the hugeness, the vastness, the splendor and grandeur of its flamboyant architecture but overwhelmed by yet another most unexpected sensation. The need to leave even though it was consumed by many others just like me, little ant-like pedestrians emerging from the same Metro exit portal and randomly dispersing into this stone clad square with buildings to look at, not in. It was a public space masterfully designed and managed as an authoritarian and impermeable square for any form of inter-action. (31) As noted in my earlier reflections, I had expressed how time has banished itself in lieu of the current instantaneous occurrence of software time. I am confident that in the same instance, modernity [space-time] is setting itself up for exile, even extinction. I say this because in our present time and expanding on Sennett’s predictions, ‘public but not civil places’ possess one main feature – the redundancy of interaction. (32) His main point about civility was that it should be a place where strangers were given the chance to interact without any restrain nor to surrender their identity or commit to any ‘after the encounter’ responsibilities. They remained strangers as they were when they first met.
To this Bauman states a comparative hypothesis,
‘let strangers, like the children of the Victorian era, be seen but not heard or if hearing them cannot be escaped, then at least, not listened to.’
How do we condone modernity based on this hypothesis? But to deny it!
Wheels of Memory
Bytes of Memory
In an earlier observation, I commented briefly on memory and time with speed and duration giving memory an accelerated dimension. Here I wish to reflect on the paradigm that hinges between memory and printed matter including the representation of image to the present time. There was not much output in terms of manuscripts with the use of xylography since Antiquity [in the ninth century A.D.] but with the advent of printing in the eighteenth century onwards, it catapulted the Western collective memory ten-fold. The West more so than the East experienced an enormous acceleration in the spread of scientific and technical knowledge in numerous different languages. The ancient technics of memorization were rapidly replaced and memory and intelligence began to mutually reinforce each other. (33) Academic and cultural institutions made available an ever-increasing amount of rich scientific, technical and intellectual memory to the public. One could confidentially say that never was any other period in history for such expansion of collective memory. Both in the seventeenth and eighteenth, this social memory seemed to have a counter effect to the commemorative remembrance of the dead. Memory turned away death. (34) Michel Vovelle believed that in the age of the Enlightenment, people wanted to ‘eliminate dead.’ As the nineteenth century drew to close, another significant form
of cultural revolution began to emerge. A revolution was not centred to the attention of mind but to the matters of the heart. All throughout the continent in France, Germany, Italy and even England, there were nation-wide commemorative celebrations in the service of memory. Parallel to this commemorative mania, another phenomenon was rapidly developing which once again revolutionized memory. Photography brought about precision and truth that was never before attained in visual memory, alluring the preservation of time and of the chronological evolution. (35) Pierre Bourdieu democratizes the significance of the ‘family album’ by stating:
“To photograph one’s children is to make oneself the historiographer of their childhood, and to create for them, as a sort of inheritance, the image of what they have been……. The family album expresses the truth of social remembrance. The images of the past arranged in chronological order, “the natural order” of social memory, arouse and transmit the remembrance of events worthy of preservation because the group sees a unifying factor in the monuments of its past unity, because it derives from its past the confirmation of its present unity.”
The twentieth century saw radical developments in the field of ‘memory.’ The invention of the modern computer equipped with its electronic memory sent waves of unprecedented technical and scientific advancements since Pascal invented the arithmetical machine with its automatic memory in the seventeenth century. This stable and dependable artificial brain was no comparison to the unstable and malleable human memory and the truth be told that the very book I am making this references is two decades old since its last reprint. The information and memory capabilities of this very same technology at hand have advanced light years in just the past decade. Memory is now dominated not only by instantaneous retrieval capacities but also voice and image recognition software with instantaneous scan, store and send capabilities via wireless hand-held smartphones. The use of computers in the area of social sciences in which memory is both the material and the object and even as we contemplate the nature of this ‘beast’ right here and now, we are already out of date with its updated data. History is witnessing a historical technological assimilation in the realm of archival memory which has taken our present-day society and I must add onto an unprecedented scale that has reached the most remote regions of our planet with the advent of a new kind of memory: the iCloud. [which for simplest of minds, is a data memory bank in the sky]
It is then fair to say, “Memory has become a best-seller in our consumer society.” (36)
Conclusion
We had Modernity
We have Contemporaneity
In Chapter; History: History Today - in his book, History and Memory, Jacques wrote a sentence that appealed to my conclusion; “Perhaps it will even be something radically different from what we will call history.” (37)
If one is to ask, what is the most popular description of our current era that is often accepted socially? A clue to that is to look at the rapid growth of museums of contemporary art on a global scale. These contemporary museums host work from all cultures and the silver lining to all of that work is about the ‘here and now’.
“The Middle Ages were so interested in the eternity, the Renaissance were interested in the past, Modernity was interested in the future. Our epoch is interested primarily in itself.” (3)
Globalization and the information networks places us in the fastest mode of communication ever experienced historically. Synchronization of numerous ‘local histories’ that are happening simultaneously everywhere in real time is how we ‘collective remember’ as a society. And we are awed daily with what we achieve in our present time and [oddly enough], it is not the future that excites us but the here and now.
“This shared [uploaded] presence is what differentiates our contemporaneity from the period of modernity, where the present was experienced as a moment of transition from the familiar past to the unfamiliar future. And never before has humanity been so interested in its own contemporaneity.” (39)
Post-Conclusion
At this point, my readings have led me to beg to ask the question as to what will ‘global history’ be/become? I suspect no one truly knows. I also suspect that if I was pursuing this academic undertaking some twenty years ago [before the birth of the information technology], I would have embraced history differently. I would have definitely dismissed tackling history in a conservative manner but rather with a more empathetic and collective temperament. But the tide has turned and we are confronted with a new set of ideals for an enormous number of collective memories that have undergone enormous transformations within the constitution of the social sciences. In 1978, Pierre Nora commented, “we were passing from history to collective memory”, and what or how does one construe to that statement four decades later? I would say, it is anyone’s guess. I have questioned myself repeatedly, as to whether it is possible for an intellectual rejection of history? If that was to be the case, then one would have to also discard time and memory. But with a heavy heart, I should say that the ‘dilemma’ is already here amongst us, and it has no intention of leaving. Hence, moving forward I shall keep approaching history by borrowing from the basic ideas of the same philosopher as Jacques Le Goff did when he wrote his book, History and Memory in 1977.
“History is history only insofar as it has not attained either absolute discourse or absolute singularity, insofar as its meaning remains confused, mixed…. History is essentially equivocal, in the sense that is virtually concerned with events, and virtually structural. History is truly the realm of the inexact. This is not an empty discovery; it justifies the historian. It justifies him in relation to the difficulties that confronts him. The historical method can only be an inexact method…. History wants to objective, and it cannot be. It wants to resuscitate and it can only reconstruct. It wants to make things contemporary, but at the same time, it has to restore the distance and the depth of historical time that separates it from its object. Finally, this reflection tends to justify all the aporias of the historian’s craft, those that Marc Bloch pointed out in his defense of history and the historian’s craft. These difficulties do not rise from defects of method; they are well-founded ambiguities.” [Ricoeur, Paul 1961:226]
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Credits
- Quoted from Raymond Queneau’s poem ‘L’explication des metaphores’ Jean Baudrillard, Why hasn’t everything already disappeared? Seagull Books, 2016 pg.9
- Jauss, Hans-Robert, ‘Literarische Tradition und gegenwartiges Bewusstsein der Modernitat’, in Literaturgeschichte als Provokation, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. pp. 11-57
- Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity, Verso 2002. pg. 17-18
- Le Goff Jacques, History and Memory. Columbia University Press, 1992 pg. 2
- Ibid. Pg. 3
- Le Goff Jacques, History and Memory. Columbia University Press, 1992. Pg. 5
- Le Goff Jacques, History and Memory. Columbia University Press, 1992, from the preface/xi
- Piaget, J. Le development de la notion de temps chez I’enfant. Paris 1946. Pg. 274
- Cited in Jauss, Hans-Robert, ‘Literarische Tradition’, pp. 15-16
- Le Goff, Jacques. History and Memory. Columbia University Press, 1992. from the preface/xix
- Ibid., from the preface/xx
- Ibid., pg. 3
- Ibid., pg. 9
- Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, 2012 pg. 112/113
- Ibid., pg. 114
- Ibid., pg. 117-119
- Rob Shields, ‘Spatial stress and resistance: social meanings of spatialization’, in Space and Social Theory, ed. Benko and Strohmayer, pg.194
- Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, 2012. From the foreword/xii
- Ibid., From the foreword/vii
- Ibid., From the foreword/viii
- Le Goff Jacques, History and Memory. Columbia University Press, 1992. pg. 106
- Bauman Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, 2016. From the foreword/xiv-xv
- Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity, Verso 2002. pg. 23
- quote by Juan Goytisolo in Bauman Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, 2016. Pg. 205
- Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978, pp. 39ff
- Bauman Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, 2016. Pg. 95
- Ibid. pg. 96
- Bauman Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, 2016. Pg. 119-120
- Ibid., Pg. 188
- quote by Bauman Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, 2016. pg.120
- Bauman Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, 2016. Pg. 96-97
- Ibid., Pg. 105
- Le Goff Jacques, History and Memory. Columbia University Press, 1992. pg. 81
- Ibid., pg. 85
- Ibid., pg. 89
- Le Goff Jacques, History and Memory. Columbia University Press, 1992. pg. 95
- Le Goff Jacques, History and Memory. Columbia University Press, 1992, pg. 207
- Groys, Boris, In the Flow.Verso 2016. Pg. 137
- Groys, Boris, In the Flow.Verso 2016. Pg.137
Term One
9 January 2017