Modernity and "Whiteness"

Bolivar Echeverria, Rodrigo Ferreira

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509533619, 9781509533602
• eBook ISBN: 9781509533633
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Bolívar Echeverría was one of the leading philosophers and critical theorists in Latin America and his work on capitalism and modernity offers a distinctive account, informed by the experiences of Latin American societies, of the social and historical forces shaping the modern world. For Echeverría, capitalism and modernity do not coincide: modernity is a long-term historical phenomenon that involved a new set of relations between human beings and nature and between the individual and the collective, while capitalism is a particular form in which modernity has been realized. As Marx showed, capitalism is a mode of reproduction that involves the growing commodification of social life – everything, even human labor power itself, is turned into a commodity. Echeverría introduces the notion of blanquitud or "whiteness" to capture the new form of identity that is brought into being by the totalizing and homogenizing character of capitalism. While blanquitud includes certain ethnic features, it is not so much an ethnic category as an ethical and cultural one, referring to a type of human being, homo capitalisticus, which threatens to spread throughout the world, overcoming and integrating identities that might otherwise resist it. But capitalism is not the only form of modernity – there are alternative modernities. In the final part of the book Echeverría explores the baroque as a characteristic of Latin American identity and sees it as a way of theatricalizing and transforming reality that takes some distance from Eurocentric paradigms and resists the homogenizing forces of capitalism.

Echeverría's analysis of the dynamics of capitalism and modernity represents one of the most important contributions to critical theory from a Latin American perspective. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical theory and postcolonial theory and anyone concerned with the global impact of capitalism on social and cultural life.

1
A Definition of Modernity

The novelty of the modern

This wooing of the cosmos – this attempt at a new, unprecedented marriage with the cosmic powers – was enacted in the spirit of technics. But because the lust for profit of the ruling class sought to satisfy its ambition through it, technics betrayed mankind and turned the bridal bed into a bloodbath.

Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street”¹

We should perhaps begin by stating the obvious: modernity is the determining characteristic of a set of behaviors that have been appearing in social life everywhere for many centuries and that common sense recognizes as discontinuous with and even opposed to the traditional constitution of life. Modernity further refers to a set of behaviors potentially in the process of replacing that traditional constitution of life, after having shown it as obsolete, or as inconsistent and ineffective. From another perspective, modernity can also be seen as a set of objective facts that are sharply incompatible with the established configuration of the lifeworld and that appear as substantial innovations, as facts meant to satisfy a need for transformation arising from the very bosom of this world.

Taken as such, as a set whose elements complement and strengthen one another, modern phenomena appear as a civilizational tendency endowed with a new unitary principle of coherence or a new mode of structuring civilized social life and its corresponding world, of a new “logic” that would replace the ancestral organizing principle, which it designates as “traditional.”

To clarify the matter further, I will discuss in no particular order three phenomena in which this characteristic of modernity is manifested or in which this new, modern “logic” is visible in action.

First, I would like to mention that particular modern phenomenon that is perhaps the main one. I am referring to the emergence of a practical form of trust in the purely “physical” dimension – that is, not the “metaphysical” one – of human technical capacity, in a technique based on the use of a kind of reason that protects itself from delirium by means of a form of self-control of mathematical quality. It therefore attends preferentially or exclusively to the profane or non-sacred functioning of nature and the world. The central element of this first modern phenomenon is this trust, present in everyday behavior, in the human capacity to approach or to face nature in purely mundane terms. In other words, it is trust in the human capacity to achieve, through programmed and calculated action – itself derived from a kind of “mathematized” knowledge – more positive effects than those that the traditional approach to the Other, which was an approach of a magical order, could ever guarantee. It is trust in an efficientist immediate (earthly) technique, detached from any mediate (celestial) consequence not intelligible in terms of rational-mathematical causality.

This trust expands and complements itself with other equally modern phenomena, such as the “progressivist” experience of temporality in regard both to life and to the world. This phenomenon refers to the empirical conviction that humans were placed on the earth to dominate it, and increasingly exercise their capacity to conquer it over time, following the straight and ascending timeline of progress. A spatial or geographical version of this progressivism is given by another modern phenomenon, consisting of what can be called “the determination of the city as the proper place of the human.” According to this trend, such a place has ceased to be the countryside, the rural world, and has been moved instead to the site of technical progress, where the technical application of mathematical reasoning is established, developed, and used commercially.

As we can see, this is a new kind of trust that imposes itself over the ancestral technical trust. It opposes the capacity for humans to magically summon benevolent supernatural forces to intervene in their lives, to give rise to favorable actions either from the gods or, ultimately, from the Creator itself.

This central modern phenomenon involves a kind of atheism in the realm of reflective discourse, a disbelief in magical metaphysical instances; it brings along with it everything we know from existing literature on modernity about the “death of God,” the “disenchantment” of the world (Entzauberung), according to Max Weber, or “de-deification” (Entgötterung), according to Heidegger. It is a phenomenon that consists of a radical substitution of the source of human knowledge. Any wisdom obtained through revelation is set aside as a “superstition” and, instead, wisdom appears as only obtainable through reason, which mathematizes nature, the “physical world.” Surpassing trust in the cyclical temporality of “eternal return,” a new kind of trust appears, which counts on human life and history being projected upward and forward, in the direction of improvement through time. Promises that “city air liberates” and that “life in the Great City is better” begin to appear, while the idea that agricultural life represents authentic human life gradually disappears, as does the Tolstoyan vision of paradise.

A second major phenomenon that can be examined as typically modern involves what could be called the “secularization of the political” or “political materialism.” This is the fact that a primacy is awarded in social life to “economic policy” above all other types of policies that one can imagine. In other words, primacy is increasingly given to “civil” or “bourgeois” society to define political affairs. This constitutes a modern phenomenon insofar as it breaks with the past and imposes itself over the tradition of political “spiritualism.” That is, it imposes itself over a political practice in which the religious is fundamental, or in which the political is primarily and fundamentally related to the cultural (to reproducing social identity). Political materialism, the secularization of politics, implies the transformation of state institutions into a “superstructure” of that “bourgeois base” or “material” in which society operates as a struggle between private owners, defending their own interests in their respective economic enterprises. This is the determining factor of life in the modern state; the Other, the more communitarian, cultural aspect in the reproduction of collective identity, becomes secondary.

Third, let us now think about individualism, that practical social behavior that presupposes that the elementary particle of human reality is the singular individual. This is a characteristically modern phenomenon that implies, for example, first, egalitarianism, or the conviction that no one person is superior or inferior to another. Second, it implies recourse to the notion of a contract, first private and then public, as the essence of any relationship that is established between singular or collective individuals. Third, and finally, it implies the democratic conviction that, if a republican government is necessary, it has to be consented to and decided on equally by all. Individualism is a modern phenomenon that is always in the process of imposing itself on the ancestral tradition of communitarianism, that is, on the conviction that the fundamental social unit is not the singular individual but a set of individuals, a collective individual, a community, however minimal it may be: a family, for example. It is also always in the process of eliminating the hierarchical differentiation that is generated spontaneously among individuals in the community, and of ignoring the allocation of social commitments made in pre-modern traditional societies that are both innate and transcendental to the singular individual. Individualism is opposed to all this: to the natural authoritarianism present in traditional public life; to having a natural social hierarchy; to the fact that the old or the wise, for example, may have greater value in certain aspects than the young, and to the fact that the “lords,” meaning the landowners, may be more important or more capable of making decisions than other citizens. Individualism is thus one of the major modern phenomena; it introduces an unprecedented way of practicing the opposition between singular individuality and collective individuality.

These are three examples of modern phenomena insofar as they affirm themselves to be radically discontinuous with the traditional structure of the social world and as having been “called” to overcome and replace it.

In reference to them, I would now like to briefly draw attention to two particular points that problematize this act of self-affirmation, of modernity affirming its actual presence as a radically innovative discontinuity with respect to tradition.

The first thing that should be noted about modernity as a structuring principle of the “actually existing” modernization of human life is that it is a civilizational modality that dominates in real terms over other non-modern or pre-modern structuring principles that it encounters, but is far from having nullified, buried, or replaced them. In other words, modernity presents itself as a perpetually ongoing attempt to overcome them, but this attempt is not fully completed. This state of perpetuity must be maintained, and therefore it has to coexist with the traditional structures of the social world. In this sense – more so than in Habermas’s terms – we can say that the modernity that we know up to now is “an unfinished project,” always incomplete. It is as if something within it incapacitates it from being what it intends to be: a civilizational alternative “superior” to the ancestral or traditional one. This is the first peculiar fact that, in my opinion, must be taken into account in regard to these modern phenomena.

The second fact worth noting, from my point of view, is that established modernity is always ambiguous and always manifests itself in an ambivalent manner with respect to the search by social individuals for a better provision of satisfactions and greater freedom of action. In other words, the modernity that exists in fact is always positive, but at the same time it is always negative. Indeed, if modernity is presented as a necessary rupture or discontinuity with tradition, this is undoubtedly because it allows singular individuals the provision of both larger and better satisfactions and the enjoyment of greater freedom of action. However, what is interesting is that the experience of this “superiority” turns out to be an ambivalent experience, given that – although it is positive with respect to these two needs, to which it claims to be responding – at the same time it is negative in regard to the quality of those satisfactions and that freedom. Something of the old, some aspect, some sense of the ancestral and traditional always remains as insurmountable, as preferable in comparison to the modern. The ambiguity and ambivalence of modern phenomena and their modernity are elements that should not be ignored in their examination.

Modernity and the “challenge” of “neo-technics”

I would like to turn to a second point in these reflections on the concept of modernity. Perhaps the most convenient way to define modernity is to describe where it comes from, what its origin is, what its basis or foundation is; in other words, to date, even in a general and approximate way, its historical appearance. Perhaps in this way the modernity of these modern phenomena can be better perceived or defined.

First, it must be said that, in the historical discourse on modernity, a good number of “early-modern” or proto-modern phenomena have been identified in moments long before the nineteenth century, the “modern century” par excellence. These phenomena have been identified by writers, not only in moments when the historical beginning of modernity is usually located, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but also in the Renaissance, with the emergence of the “new man.” For some writers, this “new” figure stands in clear contrast to the “old” human of medieval times: it is a bourgeois man who believes that he can “make himself” ex nihilo, who can intentionally recapture the qualitative density of concrete human identity that had been sacrificed by European evangelizers and their radical Christianity, and who is contemptuous of the “earthly world” and its qualities. Other writers have identified a correspondence between the appearance of modernity and the discovery of America, given that it was from that moment that the world stopped being a closed universe and became open toward infinite borders, as Alexandre Koyré says. Yet other writers have placed the emergence of modernity much later in history; they argue that it really begins with the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century and, therefore, that it properly corresponds to the nineteenth century, to the consolidation of the Great City that then took place.

However, most interestingly, there have also been writers, such as Horkheimer and Adorno, in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, who detect a budding modernity already present in the ancient Western world, thus underlining the Western character of modernity in general. Some of these writers have focused, for example, on the presence, within the tradition that starts from Greek mythology, of a figure like Prometheus, the Titan who gives fire to mankind, who breaks the ancestral monopolistic dominion of the priestly caste over it as a means of production and over the management of its use. In doing so Prometheus awakens in the hearts of mortals the hope that “things change,” that misery can be mitigated, and that time can cease to be the always repeating, cyclical time of “eternal return.” By opening up new possibilities for the use of fire, Prometheus awakens the idea of a temporality that ceases to be closed and is open toward the future, thus inaugurating an essential element of modern phenomena and their modernity. Yet, other writers, such as Horkheimer and Adorno, have emphasized the proto-modernity of a Homeric figure like Odysseus, the hero who already makes a detached or “enlightened” use of archaic mythology and is capable of unfolding himself as a subject that has himself available as an object. Odysseus can talk to himself about himself as if he were with another and talking about another, and thus he can manipulate the moment of conquering nature present in the renunciation (Entsagung) or productivist postponement of pleasure, in the self-sacrifice of singular individuals. For these writers, the character Odysseus is already a sketch for a new type of human being, a proto-bourgeois, an individual identifiable as modern.

Within this category, other writers have also spoken of the Greek technē, which mythically represents itself in the figure of Daedalus, the craftsman, the inventor par excellence, who, for example, among so many other feats: devises a simulacrum of a cow so that Queen Pasiphae can deceive nature and enjoy the wonderful bull given by Neptune to Minos, her husband; suggests to Ariadne and Theseus the use of a guiding thread to escape from the labyrinth after killing the Minotaur; and also makes a pair of wings, equal in effectiveness to those of a bird, with which to fly away from the island of Minos, which had been converted into a prison. He is also the artist who breaks with canonical hieratism in visual arts by making efficient cause visible in them. With the figure of Daedalus appears the first clearly “technical” man: he who proposes, invents, calculates, and designs new instruments by imitating from the human perspective, and for the human realm, the effectiveness of nature’s behavior. Connected intimately with the mythic figure of Daedalus is Theseus, the founding hero for Athenian Greeks – also the involuntary murderer of Aegeus, his father, the sacred king, and conqueror of Minos, the guarantor of sacredness in exchange for the blood of young Greeks. Theseus was known for discovering the profane legitimacy of political power and establishing sovereignty and autonomy in the polis over the traditional and divine sovereignty of prior kings. In sum, there has been no shortage of fascinating evidence pointing to the fact that the modernity of modern phenomena was already visible in glimmers during the epoch of ancient Greece.

***

Without dismissing any of these approaches, it seems to me, however, that modernity is better expl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Series Title
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Foreword – Diana Fuentes
• Translator’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1 A Definition of Modernity
• 2 “Technological Rent” and the “Devaluation” of Nature
• 3 Meanings of Enlightenment
• 4 Images of “Whiteness”
• 5 “American” Modernity: Keys to its Understanding
• 6 From Academia to Bohemia and Beyond
• 7 Art and Utopia
• 8 Sartre from a Distance
• 9 Where is “the Left” Now?
• 10 Meditations on the Baroque
• 11 The Mexican ’68 and its City
• 12 Mexican Modernity and Anti-Modernity
• Index
• End User License Agreement