On Alternative Modernities

Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar

T
T o think in terms of “alternative modernities” is to admit that modernity is
inescapable and to desist from speculations about the end of modernity. Born
in and of the West some centuries ago under relatively specific sociohistorical
conditions, modernity is now everywhere. It has arrived not suddenly but slowly,
bit by bit, over the longue durée— awakened by contact; transported through
commerce; administered by empires, bearing colonial inscriptions; propelled by
nationalism; and now increasingly steered by global media, migration, and capi-
tal. And it continues to “arrive and emerge,” as always in opportunistic fragments
accompanied by utopic rhetorics, but no longer from the West alone, although the
West remains the major clearinghouse of global modernity.
To think in terms of alternative modernities is to recognize the need to revise
the distinction between societal modernization and cultural modernity. That dis-
tinction is implicated in the irresistible but somewhat misleading narrative about
the two types of modernities, the good and the bad, a judgment that is reversible
depending on one’s stance and sensibility.

Some of the essays in this volume were initially presented at two conferences on Alternative
Modernities that I organized at Northwestern University (April 1996) and the India International Cen-
ter, New Delhi (December 1997); my thanks to the School of Speech at Northwestern University, the
India International Center, and the Center for Transcultural Studies for funding those two conferences.
My thanks to Rajeev Bhargava, who was coorganizer for the New Delhi conference, and Pratiba

Public Culture 11(1): 1–18

Copyright © 1999 by Duke University Press

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/11/1/1/452760/ddpcult_11_1_1.pdf

by guest
on 01 April 2018
 Public Culture The Dilemmas of Western Modernity

For some, which would include contemporary neoconservatives like Daniel

Bell, societal modernization which involves a set of cognitive and social trans-
formations is both good and inevitable.1 On this account, the cognitive trans-
formations include or imply the growth of scientific consciousness, the develop-
ment of a secular outlook, the doctrine of progress, the primacy of instrumental
rationality, the fact-value split, individualistic understandings of the self, con-
tractualist understandings of society, and so on; the social transformations refer
to the emergence and institutionalization of market-driven industrial economies,
bureaucratically administered states, modes of popular government, rule of law,
mass-media, and increased mobility, literacy, and urbanization. These two sets of
transformations are seen as constituting a relatively harmonious and healthy
package. This is the idealized self-understanding of bourgeois modernity histori-
cally associated with the development of capitalism in the West that called into
existence not only a distinctive mode of production but also a new type of subject
— an agent who was set free from constraints imposed by tradition to pursue its
own private ends and whose actions were at once motivated by acquisitiveness
and regulated by “(this) worldly asceticism.”
Against this bourgeois order and orderliness, the other modernity — the cul-
tural modernity—rose in opposition. It first appeared in the aesthetic realm led by
different, sometimes competing, groups of avant-garde writers and artists starting
with the Romantics in the late eighteenth century and was gradually absorbed
and carried forward (with its critical edge dulled) by the popular medias of news,
entertainment, and commercial arts and advertising. Thus cultural modernity
came to permeate everyday life. By and large, the proponents of cultural moder-
nity were repelled by the middle-class ethos — by its stifling conformities and
banalities; by its discounting of enthusiasm, imagination, and moral passion in
favor of pragmatic calculation and the soulless pursuit of money; and, more than
anything else, by its pretensions, complacencies, and hypocrisies as represented
by the figure of the philistine.

Gaonkar, who was my coordinator. My thanks also to Carol A. Breckenridge for inviting me to edit this
special issue and to the rest of the Public Culture editorial committee, especially Elizabeth Povinelli,
for reading and commenting on manuscripts at very short notice during this issue’s assembly. For con-
versations and comments that were useful in writing this introductory essay, I am grateful to Arjun
Appadurai, Lauren Berlant, Carol A. Breckenridge, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sally Ewing, Benjamin Lee,
Claudio Lomnitz, Robert McCarthy, Thomas McCarthy, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Charles Taylor.
1. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976).

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/11/1/1/452760/ddpcult_11_1_1.pdf

by guest
on 01 April 2018
 By contrast, cultural modernity, especially its aesthetic wing in the middle of On Alternative
the nineteenth century, turned its attention to the cultivation and care of the self. Modernities
Self-exploration and self-realization were its primary concern. In this quest for
the self, a high premium was placed on spontaneous expression, authentic expe-
rience, and unfettered gratification of one’s creative and carnal urges. Imagination
was an ally, and reason was an obstacle. There were no aesthetic limits that could
not be transgressed, no moral norms that could not be subverted. One must
explore and experience anything — including the demonic, the artificial, and the
fugitive — that would spur the imagination, quicken sensibilities, and deepen
feelings. Only those who would thus venture, such being the heroism of modern
life, could expect glimpses of beauty, premonitions of happiness, and a modicum
of wisdom.
This aesthetics of the self did not emerge and flourish in a social vacuum. It
came to pass ironically in a world created by the bourgeois, a world of incessant
change and deadening routine. Every authoritative vision of modernity in the West
—from Marx to Baudelaire, from Nietzsche to Weber, from Simmel to Musil to
Benjamin — is obliged to dwell and grapple with that twin matrix of change and
routine in which the modern self is made and unmade. Those unforgettable fig-
ures of modernity — Marx’s “revolutionary,” Baudelaire’s “dandy,” Nietzsche’s
“superman,” Weber’s “social scientist,” Simmel’s “stranger,” Musil’s “man with-
out qualities,” and Benjamin’s “flaneur”—each is caught and carried in the intox-
icating rush of an epochal change and yet finds himself fixed and formulated by a
disciplinary system of social roles and functions. The accumulated tension and
pathos of that condition so alluringly drawn in the psychological profile of those
canonical “literary” figures—who are at once disengaged and embroiled, reflex-
ive and blind, spectators and participants in every scene of life — finds its con-
temporary articulation, no longer confined to the West (nor confined to literature),
in the idea/experience of “double consciousness,” the poisoned gift (of modernity)
for all who would be modern.
Marx unambiguously names the bourgeois as the authors of those revolution-
ary changes that ushered in the modern age. “The bourgeois,” writes Marx, “dur-
ing the rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more
colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.” What
intrigues Marx is not so much technological and industrial achievement but the
manner in which the bourgeois has harnessed the productive powers that lay hith-
erto dormant in “the lap of social labor.” They have instituted a mode of produc-
tion that feeds on an unending cycle of competition, innovation, and destructive/
creative change. There is no stability; “innovative self-destruction” is the order

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/11/1/1/452760/ddpcult_11_1_1.pdf

by guest
on 01 April 2018
 Public Culture of the day.2 For Marx, what distinguishes the bourgeois epoch from all earlier
times is that “constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of
all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation” which sweeps away “all
fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions.”3
What endures is the vortex of everyday life. With received traditions of reli-
gion, philosophy, myth, and art in disarray, the “life-world” emerges from the
shadow of those symbolic structures and begins to command attention as an
autonomous domain of cultural practice. Charles Baudelaire, more than anyone
else in the middle of the nineteenth century, self-consciously sought to make the
character and contents of everyday life the privileged object of aesthetic contem-
plation and cultural critique. But everyday life, as Baudelaire recognized, is an
elusive object: It is concrete, but fragmentary; it is immediately present, but in
flux. That recognition led him to search for modernity at the crossing where the
fugitive materiality of the life-world impinges on a sharpened consciousness of
the present. Nowhere is that crossing more vivid and dramatic than in the life and
work of a modern city, such as Baudelaire’s Paris. Here, in scenes of both “high”
and “low” life, he finds the heroism of modern life and thus puts an end to what
had by then become a tiresome querelle des anciens et des modernes:
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent, it is one half of art,
the other being the eternal and the immovable. . . . You have no right to
despise this transitory fleeting element, the metaphorphoses of which are
so frequent, nor to dispense with it. If you do, you inevitably fall into the
emptiness of an abstract and undefinable beauty. . . . Woe betide the man
who goes to antiquity for the study of anything other than ideal art, logic,
and general method! By immersing himself too deeply in it, he will no
longer have the present in his mind’s eye; he throws away the value and
privileges afforded by circumstance; for nearly all our originality comes
from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.4
Baudelaire is not content to treat modernity as a mere descriptive (and periodiz-
ing) term. Before specifying “the epic quality of modern life” and showing how
“our age is no less rich than ancient times in sublime themes,” which he does elo-
quently in his haunting sketches of Parisian life, Baudelaire insists in a distinctly

2. For an insightful reading of Marx and modernity, see Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts
into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 87–130.
3. All the quotes from Marx and Engels in this paragraph are from Manifesto of the Communist
Party in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 338 – 39.
4. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, in Selected Writings on Art and Literature,
trans. P. E. Charvet (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 403–5.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/11/1/1/452760/ddpcult_11_1_1.pdf

by guest
on 01 April 2018
 historicist manner that “since every age and every people have had their own On Alternative
form of beauty, we inevitably have ours.” That historicist dictum sets the stage Modernities
for what Baudelaire considers “the main and essential question, which is to
examine whether we have a specific kind of beauty, inherent in new forms of
passion.”
In exploring those “new forms of passion,” Baudelaire calls into question the
continuing relevance of yet another venerable opposition between the vita con-
templativa and the vita activa. Neither pole of the opposition, from Aristotle to
Renaissance Humanism, had paid much attention to the struggles and pleasures
of everyday life, which were relegated to the interiors of the household. Living in
the midst of “everlasting uncertainty and agitation,” Baudelaire does not anti-
cipate “new forms of passion” to flow out of a pursuit of contemplative life. As
for the French Republican ideal of active civic life, Baudelaire admits mock-
ingly that we do have “our victories and our political heroism,” but the artists
who dwell on those “public and official subjects” do so reluctantly “with an ill
grace because they are at the beck and call of the government that pays them.”
The heroism and beauty of modern life resides elsewhere—in private subjects or,
more precisely, in civil society. New forms of passion are adrift here; they are not
to be found around state-sponsored memories and monuments. Baudelaire was
the first to offer a poetics of civil society: “Scenes of high life and of the thou-
sands of uprooted lives that haunt the underworld of a great city, criminals and
prostitutes, the Gazette des Tribunaux and the Moniteur are there to show us that
we have only to open our eyes to see and know the heroism of our day. . . . The
marvelous envelops and saturates us like the atmosphere; but we fail to
see it.”5
Baudelaire’s summons to “open our eyes” entails more than learning to read
and appreciate the scattered fragments of beauty and heroism amidst the barrage
of ideas and images, moods and experiences, desires and fantasies routinely con-
jured up by the metropolitan culture for its inhabitants. Baudelaire also wants us
to awaken to the intimations of “the eternal and the immovable” in the new and
as yet unnamed, ill-understood passions that begot those fragments, and to grasp
therein that (form?) which confers the status of the “classic” on what is tempo-
rally bound. Here modernity becomes normative. Prior to Baudelaire, and despite
contextual variations, the term modern generally designates the consciousness of

5. All the quotes by Baudelaire in this paragraph are from “Of the Heroism of Modern Life,” in
Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet (New York: Penguin Books, 1972),
104 –7.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/11/1/1/452760/ddpcult_11_1_1.pdf

by guest
on 01 April 2018
 Public Culture an age that imagines itself as having made the transition from the old to the new.
This consciousness takes two different forms. In one version, the old representing
venerable antiquity haunts and instructs the new. The old, as the custodian of the
classical, sets the measures and models of human excellence that each new age
must seek to emulate under altered conditions without ever hoping to surpass it.
In the other version, which came into prominence with the Enlightenment, the
modern is associated with the scientific superiority of the present over antiquity.
With visions of the infinite progress of knowledge and continuous improvement
in moral and material life, the “modern” at last frees itself from the spell of
antiquity.
Against these two historically specific versions of modernity, Baudelaire, draw-
ing on the Romantic theories of temporality, posits an abstract opposition between
tradition and the present. By equating modernity with the present, Baudelaire
opens “the paradoxical possibility of going beyond the flow of history through
the consciousness of historicity in its most concrete immediacy, in its present-
ness.”6 “Presentness,” in turn, is defined and marked by “the new,” which is always
in a state of disappearance, destined to be overcome and made obsolete through
the novelty of the next fashion. One might interrupt the dialectic of novelty and
disappearance by separating the “modern” from the fashionable: While the for-
mer endures the ravages of time, the latter erodes. Ironically, here one reverts to
the notion of the classical — that is, that which endures in time — to recuperate
the modern. But there is a crucial difference, as Jürgen Habermas notes: “The
emphatically modern document no longer borrows this power of being a classic
from the authority of a past epoch; instead, a modern work becomes a classic
because it has once been authentically modern.”7 This is a double-edged gesture:
Having deprived the tradition of its mediating function, the modern renounces its
claim to instruct the future. Everything turns to the present, and that present, hav-
ing broken out of the continuum of history, is caught in an unceasing process of
internal ruptures and fragmentation. The modernist present, so conceived, is either
ripe with danger and revelation, as with Walter Benjamin’s notion of Jetztzeit, or
devoid of hope and redemption, as with T.S. Eliot: “If all time is eternally present,
All Time is unredeemable.”8
What is “authentically” modern? Could the idea (or is it the rhetoric) of the

6. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987), 50.
7. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity — An Incomplete Project,” trans. Seyla Benhabib in The Anti-
aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 4.
8. T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets,” in The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950 (New York: Har-
court, Brace and World, 1971), 117.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/11/1/1/452760/ddpcult_11_1_1.pdf

by guest
on 01 April 2018
 authentic rescue and secure the modern from a situation so poignant and divided? On Alternative
Clearly, one cannot find the modern by stepping outside the stream of the stylish Modernities
and the fashionable. It is not an atemporal transcendental entity. To find “the eter-
nal and the immutable” half of the modern, one must go by way of “the transient,
the fleeting, the contingent”; to find the modern, one must go by the way of the
fashionable. But fashion is not innocent of history; it continually scavenges the
past for props, masks, and costumes. Perhaps one could make history lurk back
through fashion, as Benjamin suggests that the (Robbespierre-imagined) French
Revolutionaries sought to do: “The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome
incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past.
Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long
ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena
where the ruling class gives the commands. The same leap in the open air of his-
tory is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.”9 Per-
haps that is how we should understand modernity: a leap in the open air of the
present as . . . history.
For those who would leap in the open air of the present, there is the sobering
prospect of having to land in a Weberian “iron cage,” a disenchanted world of
shrinking freedom bereft of meaning.10 The other side of flux and novelty is the
routinization and standardization of vast sectors of people’s lives, which follow
societal modernization and which give rise to a pervasive sense of alienation
and despair. Max Weber’s dark vision of societal modernity, which undercuts the
Enlightenment project from within, is as compelling and influential as Baude-
laire’s vision of aesthetic modernity.
The eighteenth-century philosophers of the Enlightenment had limitless faith
in the emancipatory potential of human reason. They believed that when reason
is properly deployed, as exemplified in scientific inquiry, it will lead to steady
progress in both the material and the moral condition of mankind. The former
will be enriched through an explosive increase in productive powers that will
accrue with the technological mastery of nature and with an efficient and planned
administration of collective existence. As for the latter, the Enlightenment phi-
losophers believed that the rationalization of cultural and social life resulting
from the spread of scientific knowledge and attitude would lead, among other
things, to the progressive eradication of traditional superstitions, prejudices, and

9. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn,
ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 261.
10. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New
York: Scribner’s, 1958).

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/11/1/1/452760/ddpcult_11_1_1.pdf

by guest
on 01 April 2018
 Public Culture errors and to the gradual establishment of a republican form of government. This
government would guarantee civil rights and promote political will formation
through open and free debate, while a free and equitable economy ensured gen-
eral prosperity and growth by allowing individuals to energetically pursue their
own interests as long as they do not impede the like pursuit of others.
Those anticipations and projections have been partially fulfilled, albeit in an
uneven and distorted manner. But, more critically, the long march of reason has
disclosed its essential character and its inherent limitations. According to Weber,
the rationality that sustains and defines modernity is a purposive or means/ends
rationality. Being value-neutral, purposive rationality is incapable of conferring
meaning on the world it ushers into existence. At the same time, it works steadily
to discredit and dissolve the traditional religious worldviews that, despite their
errancy, give meaning and unity to life. As Habermas notes: “With cultural ratio-
nalization of this sort, the threat increases that the life-world, whose traditional
substance has been already devalued, will become more and more impover-
ished.”11 Thus, in Weber’s account, the triumph of reason culminates not in the
establishment of a rational utopia imagined by the Enlightenment philosophers
but in the forging of an “iron cage” of economic compulsion and bureaucratic
control.
Such, briefly, is the tale of two intersecting visions of modernity in the West:
the Weberian societal/cultural modernity and the Baudelairian cultural/aesthetic
modernity. Culture is the capacious and contested middle term. In the Weberian
vision, societal modernization fragments cultural meaning and unity. The Baude-
lairian vision, which is equally alert to the effects of modernization, seeks to
redeem modern culture by aestheticizing it. Each has a bright side and a dark side.
The bright side of societal modernization anticipated by Enlightenment philoso-
phers and analyzed by Weber refers to the palpable improvement in the material
conditions of life as evident in economic prosperity, political emancipation, tech-
nological mastery, and the general growth of specialist knowledge. The dark
side refers to the existential experience of alienation and despair associated with
living in a disenchanted world of deadening and meaningless routine. This is the
Sisyphean world of repetition devoid of a subjectively meaningful telos. The
bright side of the Baudelairian vision draws on a different aspect of the experi-
ence of modernity. It focuses affectively on the cultural patina of modernity as a
spectacle of speed, novelty, and effervescence. It finds aesthetic pleasure and cre-
ative excitement in treading the surface and is unencumbered by the hermeneutic

11. Habermas, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” 9.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/11/1/1/452760/ddpcult_11_1_1.pdf

by guest
on 01 April 2018
 temptation of having to find meaning and unity hidden beneath surface experi- On Alternative
ences. The dark side suggests the absence of moral constraints in a world of Modernities
appearances where the aesthetic pursuit can deteriorate from a disciplined Nietz-
schean self-assertion against a seemingly meaningless and absurd world into nar-
cissistic self-absorption and hedonism.

Two Responses to the Dilemmas of Modernity

My account of the divided, Janus-like character of both visions of modernity is

only one among many narratives about its career in the West. However, despite
the variations in the choice of key figures, seminal texts, and defining themes and
concepts, virtually every scholar on modernity and its future feels compelled to
address the dilemmas posed by its dual character. They also share an urge to imag-
ine and propose a scenario that would attenuate and control the dark side while
sustaining and enhancing the bright side. But that obvious goal requires one to
specify how the two sides are conceived and connected, which, in turn, leads one
into making rather murky distinctions between what is necessary/unavoidable
and what is optional/avoidable within the project of modernity. Here the responses
to the dilemmas of modernity vary greatly. Consider, for instance, the strikingly
different positions taken by two major thinkers on modernity: Jürgen Habermas
and Michel Foucault.
For Habermas, modernity is an “incomplete” but redeemable project. In his
numerous writings on the subject, Habermas pays particular attention to the
Weberian argument about the disillusionment with the Enlightenment project of
modernity and the resultant loss of faith in reason to direct our lives.12 He does
not question Weber’s claim that modern society has witnessed a progressive ero-
sion of meaning and freedom, and he concedes that some of this is the result of
sociocultural rationalization. But Habermas firmly rejects the Weberian equation
of reason with Zweckrationalität (purposive, instrumental rationality), along with
the deeply pessimistic vein in which that equation is interpreted and elaborated
by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment.13 For
Habermas, to construe sociocultural rationalization primarily in terms of reifica-

12. See Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press,
1975); Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse on Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987); Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1985).
13. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming
(New York: Seabury Press, 1972).

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/11/1/1/452760/ddpcult_11_1_1.pdf

by guest
on 01 April 2018
 Public Culture tion (as in Georg Lukács) and techniques of administrative power and control (as
in Foucault) is mistaken because it confuses the selective deployment of reason
under capitalist modernization with the nature and telos of reason itself. More-
over, Habermas argues that reason is reduced to an instrumental mode only within
the confines of subject-centered reason associated with the philosophy of con-
sciousness. He believes that an alternative paradigm of reason such as the one
enunciated in his Theory of Communicative Action would facilitate a balanced
development of different dimensions of rationality necessary for understanding
and living in a modern world.14 While the details of Habermas’s theory of com-
municative action are not germane here, it should be noted that he is committed
to rehabilitating the project of modernity by revivifying reason as an agency
with many forms and voices.
In contrast, Foucault’s riveting accounts of how disciplinary society emerged
from within the folds of the Enlightenment project of modernity holds out little
hope for rehabilitation.15 In his genealogical critique of reason, Foucault shows
how reason is not only embedded in sociocultural contexts and mediated by nat-
ural languages but also implicated in a complex network of power/knowledge—
or what he calls each society’s “regime of truth.” Foucault’s account of the
“regime of truth” constitutive of Western modernity chronicles the inexorable
march of reason, aided and abetted by the newly emergent human sciences, in
setting up a social order geared to extend our mastery over both nature and cul-
ture. In that quest for mastery, reason is distilled as it becomes free of humanist
trappings and reveals itself as an instrument of technical analysis, strategic cal-
culation, and administrative control. Unlike Habermas, Foucault does not regard
instrumental rationality as a disfiguration of reason that occurs under the com-
pulsions of capitalist modernization or on account of being subject-centered. For
Foucault, reason, knowledge, and truth can never escape from relations and
effects of power because they are constitutive of each other. As Foucault notes:
“Truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude. . . . Truth
is the thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of con-
straint. And it induces regular effects of power.”16 Thus enmeshed with power,
reason cannot disavow its strategic and instrumental character.

14. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vols. 1–2, trans. Thomas McCarthy
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).
15. See especially Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pan-
theon Books, 1977).
16. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, trans. Colin Gordon and others, ed. Colin Gordon (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 131.

10

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/11/1/1/452760/ddpcult_11_1_1.pdf

by guest
on 01 April 2018
 Even in his later writings, when he shifts the focus of his investigations from On Alternative
“coercive practices” and the technologies of subjectification associated with mod- Modernities
ern institutions to “practices of freedom” and the arts of self-formation in every-
day life, Foucault continues to think of reason in terms of power and strategy. In
those later writings, especially while discussing Kant’s essay “What Is Enlight-
enment?” Foucault gives a positive reading of modernity — as “an attitude . . . a
mode of relating to contemporary reality”—which is distinctively Baudelairian.17
To add to the alchemy, the crossing of Kant and Baudelaire is mediated by the
Greek notion of ethos, and one of the conceptual strands of ethos valorizes the
practice of “asceticism”: A practice that once forged the “iron cage” now
instructs us how to resist, if not dismantle, it.
A central concern of these later writings on the “care of the self” is to explore
strategies (both conceptual and practical) for keeping power relations mobile
and symmetrical and preventing them from ossifying into states of domination.
Here Foucault turns to the Greek asceticism. For Greeks, in Foucault’s account,
the care of the self is the ethical horizon within which one engages in “proper”
practices of freedom. That care requires one to master one’s desires and appe-
tites and refuse to be a slave to popular opinions and passions. Ethos is the con-
crete form of “being and behavior” in which one’s free self-possession is made
visible to others: “A person’s ethos was evident in clothing, appearance, gait, in
the calm with which he responded to every event, and so on. For the Greeks, this
was the concrete form of freedom. . . . A man possessed of a splendid ethos, who
could be admired and put forward as an example, was someone who practiced
freedom in a certain way.”18 The care of the self as the practice of freedom also
involves complex relationships with others. Abuse of power is characteristic of
one who is not in possession of himself. One who masters himself through self-
knowledge is capable of properly exercising power over others and thus taking
his rightful place in the city or the household or any other congregation.
A key move in Foucault’s synthesis involves linking the Greek notion of ethos
as “the concrete form of freedom” with Baudelaire’s conception of modernity and
Kant’s answer to the question “What Is Enlightenment?,”which inaugurates the
philosophical discourse of modernity. What bridges the two concepts of mod-

17. See Foucault’s two essays on Kant: “What Is Enlightenment?” in Ethics: Subjectivity and
Truth, vol. 1 of Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press,
1997), 303 – 20, and “The Art of Telling the Truth,” in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/
Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 139–48.
18. Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom” in Ethics: Subjectiv-
ity and Truth, 286.

11

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/11/1/1/452760/ddpcult_11_1_1.pdf

by guest
on 01 April 2018
 Public Culture ernity is the questioning of the present: “What is my present? What is the mean-
ing of this present? And what am I doing when I speak of this present?”19
As for Baudelaire, Foucault argues that modernity entails both a form of rela-
tionship to the present and to oneself. This gives the task of discovering “the
eternal and the immovable” in the midst of temporal flux a new inflection: “The
deliberate attitude of modernity is tied to an indispensable asceticism. To be
modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; but
it is to take oneself as the object of a complex and difficult elaboration: what
Baudelaire in the vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme.”20 There is a striking
similarity between the Greek view of the care of the self as summed up in the con-
cept of ethos and “the asceticism of the dandy who makes his body, his behavior,
his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art.”21 This is a crucial
move because it undercuts the conservative critique of cultural modernity as a
temperament that by privileging individual self-realization and by promoting
adversary culture unleashes hedonistic impulses irreconcilable with the require-
ments of a well-ordered society. By foregrounding practices of freedom and the
regimen of asceticism, Foucault gives the quest for and of the self an ethical
dimension.
Similarly, Foucault finds in Kant’s text “a new way of posing the question of
modernity, not in the longitudinal relation to the Ancients, but in what might be
called a ‘sagital’ relation to one’s own present.”22 Kant, like Baudelaire, views
modernity not as an epoch but as an attitude: “a mode of relating to contemporary
reality.” Moreover, that attitude or ethos of modernity finds its reflexive articula-
tion in a distinctive “type of philosophical interrogation — one that simultane-
ously problematizes man’s relations to the present, man’s historical mode of
being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject” whose roots can
be traced back to the Enlightenment. For Foucault’s Kant, what is of enduring
interest and what connects us to the Enlightenment is not its doctrinal substance,
which is at any rate antiquated and fragmented, but rather its spirit of critique.
The significance of the Enlightenment today, as always, is its call to those who
would hear it to assume an attitude or to subscribe to “a philosophical ethos that
could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era.”23

19. Foucault, “The Art of Telling the Truth,” 141.

20. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 311.
21. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 312.
22. Foucault, “The Art of Telling the Truth,” 141.
23. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 312.

12

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/11/1/1/452760/ddpcult_11_1_1.pdf

by guest
on 01 April 2018
 Alternative Modernities On Alternative
Modernities
Assuming that modernity is best understood as an attitude of questioning the
present, we might begin our explorations of alternative modernities, to which this
volume of essays is committed, by asking, What is the status of that attitude
today? It seems to me that the attitude of questioning the present is both perva-
sive and embattled: It is pervasive because modernity has gone global, and it is
embattled because it faces seemingly irresolvable dilemmas. In fact, the very
idea of alternative modernities has its origin in the persistent and sometimes vio-
lent questioning of the present precisely because the present announces itself
as the modern at every national and cultural site today.
That questioning sometimes, especially in the West, takes the form of pro-
claiming the end of modernity. One might be justified in pronouncing the end of
modernity in a narrow and special sense, as Jean-François Lyotard does.24 But to
announce the general end of modernity even as an epoch, much less as an atti-
tude or an ethos, seems premature, if not patently enthnocentric, at a time when
non-Western people everywhere begin to engage critically their own hybrid mod-
ernities. To be sure, there is a widespread feeling (intensified by the approaching
end of a millennium) that we are at some sort of a turning point in the trajectory
of modernity. That sense of being at the crossroads might have less to do with the
ending of an era than with the fact that modernity today is global and multiple
and no longer has a governing center and master-narratives to accompany it.
Besides, even if modernity were ending, its end, as in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame,25
will turn out to be an eternal duration, an endlessly fading twilight. In the mean-
time, we have to continue to think through the dilemmas of modernity, as the
essays in this volume do, from a transnational and transcultural perspective.
However, to think in terms of alternative modernities does not mean one
blithely abandons the Western discourse on modernity. That is virtually impossi-
ble. Modernity has traveled from the West to the rest of the world not only in
terms of cultural forms, social practices, and institutional arrangements but also
as a form of discourse that interrogates the present. That questioning of the pres-
ent, whether in vernacular or in cosmopolitan idioms, which is taking place at
every national and cultural site today cannot escape the legacy of Western dis-
course on modernity. Whoever elects to think in terms of alternative moderni-
ties (irrespective of one’s location) must think with and also think against the tra-

24. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
25. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958).

13

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/11/1/1/452760/ddpcult_11_1_1.pdf

by guest
on 01 April 2018
 Public Culture dition of reflection that stretches from Marx and Weber through Baudelaire
and Benjamin to Habermas, Foucault, and many other Western (born or trained)
thinkers. This is evident, for instance, in the writings of Arjun Appadurai and
Paul Gilroy, two scholars who have contributed significantly toward developing
an “alternative modernities” perspective.26 One can provincialize Western mod-
ernity only by thinking through and thinking against its self-understandings,
which are frequently cast in universalist idioms. To think through and to think
against mean to think with a difference—a difference that would destabilize the
universalist idioms, historicize the contexts, and pluralize the experiences of
modernity. But what is that difference? It is difficult to pin down.
To begin with, Western discourse on modernity is a shifting and hybrid config-
uration consisting of different, often conflicting, theories, norms, historical expe-
riences, utopic fantasies, and ideological commitments. My portrait in the previ-
ous section is but one among many possible narratives of Western modernity, its
dilemmas, and its future. Virtually every scholar on the subject has his or her own
version of that narrative, and each version casts a different light on modernity.
When viewed from different perspectives, modernity appears to have an almost
iridescent quality; its contours shift depending on the angle of interrogation.
To think in terms of alternative modernities is to privilege a particular angle of
interrogation. The obvious and common feature of the essays in this volume
(except for those by Charles Taylor and Thomas McCarthy) is that they examine
the career and dilemmas of modernity from a specific national/cultural site. What
difference, if any, does a site-based reading of modernities make in our under-
standing and questioning of the present?
Certainly, a culture-specific and site-based reading complicates our under-
standing of the relationship between the two strands of modernity—societal mod-
ernization and cultural modernity. The tale of two modernities, however com-
pelling it is for mapping the Western experience of modernity and its dilemmas,
cannot be extended, without important modifications, to cover other theaters of
modernity. While it is not a portable tale, neither is it wholly irrelevant because
the key elements in the narrative are present and active in a variety of combina-
tions at different national and cultural sites. What a site-based reading decisively
discredits is the inexorable logic that is assigned to each of the two strands of
modernity. The proposition that societal modernization, once activated, moves

26. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Con-
sciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

14

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/11/1/1/452760/ddpcult_11_1_1.pdf

by guest
on 01 April 2018
 inexorably toward establishing a certain type of mental outlook (scientific ratio- On Alternative
nalism, pragmatic instrumentalism, secularism) and a certain type of institutional Modernities
order (popular government, bureaucratic administration, market-driven industrial
economy) irrespective of the culture and politics of a given place is simply not
true. Nor does cultural modernity invariably take the form of an adversary cul-
ture that privileges the individual’s need for self-expression and self-realization
over the claims of the community. Still, many of the aforementioned cultural
forms, social practices, and institutional arrangements do surface in most places
in the wake of modernity. But at each national and cultural site, those elements
are put together (reticulated) in a unique and contingent formation in response to
local culture and politics.
Therefore, a minimal requirement for thinking in terms of alternative moder-
nities is to opt for what Taylor in the essay included in this volume characterizes
as a “cultural” as opposed to an “acultural” theory of modernity. An acultural the-
ory describes the transition to modernity in terms of a set of culture-neutral oper-
ations, which are viewed as “input” that can transform any traditional society:
“On this view, modernity is not specifically Western, even though it may have
started in the West. Instead it is that form of life toward which all cultures con-
verge, as they go through, one after another, substantially the same changes”
(169). There are two basic errors in this theory. First, it fails to see that Western
modernity itself is a “culture” with a distinctive moral and scientific outlook con-
sisting of a constellation of understandings of person, nature, society, reason, and
the good that is different from both its predecessor cultures and non-Western cul-
tures. Second, it imposes a false uniformity on the diverse and multiple encounters
of non-Western cultures with the allegedly culture-neutral forms and processes
(science and technology, industrialization, secularization, bureaucratization, and
so on) characteristic of societal modernization. In short, an acultural theory is a
theory of convergence: The inexorable march of modernity will end up making
all cultures look alike.
A cultural theory, in contrast, holds that modernity always unfolds within a
specific cultural or civilizational context and that different starting points for the
transition to modernity lead to different outcomes. Under the impact of moder-
nity, all societies will undergo certain changes in both outlook and institutional
arrangements. Some of those changes may be similar, but that does not amount
to convergence. Different starting points ensure that new differences will emerge
in response to relatively similar changes. A cultural theory directs one to exam-
ine how “the pull of sameness and the forces making for difference” interact in
specific ways under the exigencies of history and politics to produce alternative

15

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/11/1/1/452760/ddpcult_11_1_1.pdf

by guest
on 01 April 2018
 Public Culture modernities at different national and cultural sites. In short, modernity is not one,
but many.
What Taylor proposes is not entirely new. It is implicit in a great number of site-
specific studies of modernities, including those in this volume. To think produc-
tively along the lines suggested by the idea of alternative modernities, we have to
recognize and problematize the unavoidable dialectic of convergence and diver-
gence. It is customary to think about convergence in terms of institutional arrange-
ments, such as a market economy, a bureaucratic state, modes of popular rule, and
so on. Similarly, one thinks of divergence primarily in terms of lived experience
and cultural expressions of modernity that are shaped by what is variously termed
the “habitus,” “background,” or “social imaginary” of a given people. An alterna-
tive modernities perspective complicates this neat dichotomy by foregrounding
that narrow but critical band of variations consisting of site-specific “creative
adaptations” on the axis of convergence (or societal modernization).
This idea of creative adaptation requires further elaboration. It does not mean
that one can freely choose whatever one likes from the offerings of modernity. It
is delusional to think, as the neoconservatives in the West and the cultural
nationalists in the non-West seem to do, that one can take the good things (i.e.,
technology) and avoid the bad (i.e., excessive individualism). To be sure, one
can question (as McCarthy does in this volume) the scope and viability of cre-
ative adaptation in certain critical areas such as modern law where form and
function (and the reflexive discourse about form and function) are tightly inte-
grated. While coming up with indigenous and culturally informed “functional
equivalents” to meet the imperatives of modernization is an important task of cre-
ative adaptation, that sort of institutional innovation does not exhaust its scope or
reveal its true spirit. Creative adaptation (as the essays in this volume show) is not
simply a matter of adjusting the form or recoding the practice to soften the impact
of modernity; rather, it points to the manifold ways in which a people question the
present. It is the site where a people “make” themselves modern, as opposed to
being “made” modern by alien and impersonal forces, and where they give them-
selves an identity and a destiny.
The phrase “creative adaptation” has a positive ring to it. But it does not always
succeed; sometimes it is doomed to fail because one is looking for the impossible,
as Elizabeth A. Povinelli shows (in this volume) in the case of the Australian
quest to find that lost object called “native tradition” that would enable a modern
“settler” nation to fulfill its moral and legal obligation to its indigenous popula-
tion. The attempt at creative adaptation that one finds in that fantastic saga is not
so much an instance of institutional innovation, although there is plenty of that,

16

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/11/1/1/452760/ddpcult_11_1_1.pdf

by guest
on 01 April 2018
 but one of a people struggling to find their moral footing. Here, as in every other On Alternative
site-based essay in this volume, we catch glimpses of a larger conception of creat- Modernities
ive adaptation as an interminable process of questioning the present, which is the
attitude of modernity. Precisely in this sense, modernity is an incomplete project
and necessarily so.
Creative adaptation is not necessarily an inward movement of mobilizing the
resources of one’s culture to cope with the seemingly irresistible cognitive and
social changes that accompany modernity. Such a construction is too passive
and suggests a mood of embattled resignation. Modernity is more often per-
ceived as lure than as threat, and people (not just the elite) everywhere, at every
national or cultural site, rise to meet it, negotiate it, and appropriate it in their own
fashion. Pick any non-Western metropolis early in this century, such as Leo
Ou-fan Lee’s Shanghai in the 1930s (this volume) or Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Cal-
cutta in the 1940s (this volume), and you see the rage for modernity. Everything
in sight is named modern: “modern coffee house,” “modern talkies,” “modern
bicycle shop,” “modern tailor,” “modern beauty salon,” “modern bakery,” a news-
paper called Modern Age, a magazine for the “modern woman,” an advertisement
for the “modern kitchen,” a call for “modern education,” an agitation for “modern
hygiene,” and so on. Those who submit to that rage for modernity are not naive;
they are not unaware of its Western origins, its colonial designs, its capitalist
logic, and its global reach. In haphazardly naming everything modern, they are
exercising one of the few privileges that accrue to the latecomer: license to play
with form and refigure function according to the exigencies of the situation.
Thus, in the face of modernity one does not turn inward, one does not retreat; one
moves sideways, one moves forward. All of this is creative adaptation. Non-
Western people, the latecomers to modernity, have been engaged in these maneu-
vers now for nearly a century. Everywhere, at every national or cultural site, the
struggle with modernity is old and familiar. In some places, as in Beatriz Jagua-
ribe’s Rio de Janeiro (this volume), modernity is already in ruins. That is why the
language and lessons of Western modernity and a comparative study of its global
receptions are an integral part of any reflexive theory and practice of creative
adaptation.
An alternative modernities perspective is equally vigilant in exploring the elu-
sive and fragmentary band of similarities that surface unexpectedly on the axis of
divergence. It is generally assumed that the lived experience and the embodied
character of modernity vary vastly from site to site. This is not entirely correct.
Though cultural modernity is conventionally seen as both the machinery and the
optic for the limitless production of differences, such difference always functions

17

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/11/1/1/452760/ddpcult_11_1_1.pdf

by guest
on 01 April 2018
 Public Culture within a penumbra of similarities, and such similarities may be seen in the style
of the flaneur, the mystique of fashion, the magic of the city, the ethos of irony, or
the anxiety of mimicry—all ineffable yet recognizable across the noise of differ-
ence. What is common to these strings of similarities is a mood of distance, a
habit of questioning, and an intimation of what Bauldelaire calls the “marvelous”
in the midst of the ruins of our tradition, the tradition of the new. Whether these
common intensities, which regularly find expression in popular media, espe-
cially in film and music, will one day pave the way for an ethic of the global
modern remains to be seen.
Thus, just as societal modernization (the prime source of convergence theories)
produces difference through creative adaptation or unintended consequences, so
also cultural modernity (the prime source of divergence theories) produces simi-
larities on its own borders. This double relationship between convergence and
divergence, with their counterintuitive dialectic between similarity and differ-
ence, makes the site of alternative modernities also the site of double negotiations
— between societal modernization and cultural modernity and between hidden
capacities for the production of similarity and difference. Thus, alternative mod-
ernities produce combinations and recombinations that are endlessly surprising.
The essays in this volume chronicle the range of surprises and submit the follow-
ing tentative conclusions: Everywhere, at every national/cultural site, modernity
is not one but many; modernity is not new, but old and familiar; modernity is
incomplete and necessarily so.

Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar teaches rhetoric and cultural studies at Northwestern

University. His recent publications include “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric
of Science” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics (1996) and a coedited volume, Discipli-
narity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (1996).

18

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/11/1/1/452760/ddpcult_11_1_1.pdf

by guest
on 01 April 2018