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    Preface and Acknowledgments

    On the night of 2 November 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered


    on a deserted beach near Rome. Pasolini devoted the final months of
    his life to drafting some pedagogical writings.1 His pedagogy aimed at
    unveiling the false promises of modernity that had fed the aspirations
    of the post-­World War II Western European generations and the cul-
    tural conformism that the faith in the salvific potential of modernization
    was producing. As a rhetorical device, these writings were addressed to
    an imaginary interlocutor: a boy from Naples, Gennariello. From this
    imaginary boy, Pasolini wrote, he would have learned the secrets of ques-
    tioning modernity, which the life-world of Neapolitans treasured. For
    Pasolini Naples represented, in Western Europe, what the urban ghet-
    tos of New York meant for the United States and what other places he
    had filmed in Yemen, Uganda, Tanzania and India were able to express
    for non-Western worlds. They were sites of passive poetical resistance to
    modernization, where the inability of modernity to come to terms with
    the progressive, universal, and emancipatory power it claimed to possess
    was exposed. ‘Neapolitans are like a great tribe that, instead of living in
    the desert or in the savanna, as the Tuareg or the Beja, lives in the womb
    of a big sea city. And this tribe has decided to resist what we use to call
    modernity … It is a refusal raised from the heart of the collectivity (it is

    1
     A recent edition of these collected writings is Pasolini 2008

    vii
    viii  Preface and Acknowledgments

    known about collective suicide of herds of animals) … It is a profound


    melancholy, as all the tragedies that take place slowly; but it is also a pro-
    found consolation; because this refusal, this negation of history, is just, it
    is sacrosanct.’2
    Pasolini romanticized what Gramsci had identified as the position of
    subalternity that Southern Italy came to incarnate in the imagery of the
    Italian post-Unitarian nation-state. An imagery whose hyper-masculine
    grammar combines uneven historiographical simulacra: the national-
    ist epopee of political unification (Risorgimento); the mythology of the
    pristine Italian origins of cultural modernity (Rinascimento), and the
    perennializing glorification of the Roman Empire (Fascismo), with the
    silenced ominous histories of the colonial expansion in Africa (Italiani
    brava gente), the caricatural official narrative of the brutal repression of
    the peasant revolts that followed the Savoy colonization of the South of
    the peninsula (Brigantaggio), and the epic of the struggle for liberation
    from Nazi-Fascism that led to the constitution of the post-World War
    II Republic (Resistenza). A monstrous, fragile imagery, whose rhapsodic
    sense of belonging, for many people nationwide, still remains anchored to
    the alterity represented by the stigmatized migrant ‘southerner’ (terrone)
    from the ‘failed’ regions of the South (Mezzogiorno), of which Naples is
    the epitome. Pasolini meant to oppose what he described as his own mod-
    ern bourgeois, northern, erudite, clerical education, with the vitalism, the
    spontaneity and the intuitive intelligence that his ideal-typical plebeian
    Naples dweller naturally bore. Yet, in so doing, he wrapped Gennariello
    in a reversed version of that traditional narrative, thereby not fully chal-
    lenging the nationalist post-colonial construction of polarizing identities
    he aimed at countering. On the contrary, (un)fortunately, the Naples as
    a passionate fresco of ‘heretic orientalism’ that Pasolini loved to paint, if
    ever existed, was already dissolving rapidly into the diegetic peri-rural,
    trans-urban habitat of oblique, scattered, elided social in-betweenness,
    filmed by Salvatore Piscicelli in those same years.
    Notwithstanding the grating dissonance between the anthropologi-
    cal exceptionalism with which Pasolini invested me and what I experi-
    enced growing up in an urban neighborhood on the eastern periphery

    2
     A more recent edition of the same interview is retrievable in Siti and De Laude 1999: 230.
      Preface and Acknowledgments  ix

    of Naples, Ponticelli, his words remained in my mind. For a long time,


    I have been unable to detect that an enigma hides deep beneath that dis-
    sonance. Ex definitione, an enigma provides its own solution in the way
    it is ­formulated but, at the same time, it conceals the solution beneath
    its contradictory, ambivalent, incongruous formulation. Only enigmas
    wrongly formulated are unsolvable. Today, I understand that it was a dif-
    ferent formulation of Naipaul’s Enigma of the Arrival; the same uncanny
    arrival from the sea that Giorgio De Chirico had prefigured in an hyp-
    nagogic hallucination, decades before.3 Whereas Naipaul was confronted
    with his arrival from Africa to England, Pasolini knew that Gennariello
    could find his own pathway to decrypt the enigma of the arrival of moder-
    nity in Naples, that is, the enigma of the arrival of Naples into modernity.
    Rather than a mere existential encounter in space and time, the arrival is
    the epiphany of forces that run along intangible ties, revealing existing
    connections. Connections resuscitate visions of shared forgotten remem-
    brances: the colonial, imperial, capitalist formation of the imagery of
    modernity. Remembrances speak the intimate idiom of silenced histories
    that animate alternative politics of theory. Contemporary social theory
    no longer has to contend with the arrival of thoughts and thinkers from
    Africa to Europe; rather with the presence of Africa in Europe. That is the
    synecdoche for the planetary transformative embodiment of the colonial
    difference into the conceptual archive of the West.
    Working and thinking far from my home town in the years that fol-
    lowed that early pedagogical reading, I have found a certain relief in
    appreciating that the exceptionalism that had forged my cultural identity
    and shaped my political intemperance was not endowed in se with any
    essential, intrinsic trait (except for Naples as a football team). For the vast
    majority of places, and people too, the dissonances within modernity
    are the existential as well as the historical norm. For the awareness of
    this planetary condition is a viable heterodox strategy of escaping what
    Dipesh Chakrabarty defined as ‘the waiting room of History’. The moder-
    nity we have all been obliged to join as temperate guests is a habitation
    managed by hosts who compete among themselves to establish who has

     Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad. 1988. The enigma of arrival. A novel in five sections. New York:
    3

    Vintage.
    x  Preface and Acknowledgments

    the authority to define what modernity is and impose this definition on


    all the others, when they are unable to persuade the others to accept that
    ­definition and what comes along with it. A competition governed by rules
    that are presented as barely debatable, because simultaneously distinctive
    and self-generated within modernity’s own distinctiveness. Anyone who
    is ‘not yet modern’ or ‘not modern enough’ should adhere to those rules.
    Under the sign of those rules, the social hierarchies among humans that
    centuries of capitalism and colonialism produced come to be naturalized.
    Unthinking Modernity concerns the rationalized foundations of the reit-
    erate mental representations that render these illegitimate asymmetries of
    power coherent, reasonable, defensible and extensible: true.
    Many people have contributed to this book, intentionally or not, both
    within and outside the professional structures of knowledge production.
    People who solicit critical thinking, something that remains the main
    antidote to vulgar display of power, complacent conformism and intel-
    lectualistic pedantry. Thank you: Gurminder Bhambra, Iain Chambers,
    Marco Meriggi, Sandro Mezzadra, Robbie Shilliam, Kapil Raj, Mara De
    Chiara, David Inglis, Meera Sabaratnam, Wong Yoke-Sum, Sanjay Seth,
    Fa-ti Fan, Arturo Escobar, Deepshikha Shahi, Clara Ciccioni, Giuliano
    Martiniello, Giuseppe Guerriero, Sergio Albano, Manuel Marzullo,
    Giuliano Falcone, Claudia Riccardo, Antonio Della Volpe, Michele
    Pesce, my family and my students.

    References
    Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 2008. Scritti Corsari. Milano: Garzanti.
    Siti, Walter, and Silvia De Laude (eds.). 1999. Pasolini. Saggi sulla politica e sulla
    società. Milano: Mondadori.
    Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad. 1988. The enigma of arrival. A novel in five sec-
    tions. New York: Vintage.
    Contents

    1 Introduction: The Epistemological Ritual of Modernity  1

    2 The Scientific Revolution and the Dilemmas


    of Ethnocentrism  27

    3 Modernity and Eurocentrism  61

    4 Secularization as Ideology  91

    5 Emancipation as Governamentality  129

    6 The Predicament of the ‘Global’  167

    7 ‘Degenerative’ Capitalism  207

    8 Conclusion: The Future of  Social Theory  247

    Index253

    xi

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