‘Modernity’ and the claims of untimeliness

摘要

It will be my purpose to show that the examples of alternative modernities we have before us today ultimately remained captive to the cycle of representation and to a logic of the same, despite their heroic efforts to break with both. Where all these alternative and multiple modernities—from the pre-war Japanese effort to ‘overcome the modern’ to more recent attempts to imagine a post-colonial condition—fail to offer a genuinely different conception free from the imposed constraints of a Western model founded on progressive development and achievement is in a reliance on timeless cultural residues. Thus, according to some, they are cultural, not structural, formations, which seek to differentiate received values, timeless and unchanging, from broader social, political and economic systems, which have substituted memory and nostalgia for the historical present. Because they are reflections of national cultures—fixed for all times, invariably derived from irreducible origins—they constitute styles of life identified with the nation-form that can have no universal applicability. In any case, this transmutation of qualitative into quantitative time as the privileged component in a comparative method permits the comprehensive ‘treatment of human culture in all times and places’. More importantly, this conviction in a natural, evolutionary time enabled classifying past cultures and living societies in a continuing stream of homogenous time, some already upstream, others downstream struggling against the currents of their pasts to move upward. The purpose of this scheme was to situate all societies in a trajectory according to their relative distance from the modern present. In it, some societies had not yet reached the present and were still living in an earlier time. This did not mean they were living in an entirely different temporality, but only in the past to the modern present. Social scientific discourse during the Cold War, in the form of modernization and convergence theory, promoted a developmentalism that promised societies not yet in the capitalist present the promise of catching up without recourse to revolutionary transformation. The prospect of catching up implied the status of temporal latecomer and a distance that still had to be covered between a lived past and the present, which was its future. This duration was called a ‘time-lag’. As a result, the perception of the time-lag derives from a reversed culturally disposed optical doubling—seeing one image as two yet assuming at the same time that they are the same, rather than actually perceiving two distinctly different images. This optical doubling was further reinforced by a conception of dematerialized singular time aimed at removing both the scandal of co-existing and multiple temporalities grounded in different experiences and places, and the possibility of seeing them as forms of time capable of behaving as active agents in any present. The aim of such a strategy was to eliminate the possibility of unscheduled and untimely appearances in the present—what historians have dismissed as anachronisms.View full textDownload full textRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2010.518348