Modern Times

Reflections on a Century of English Modernity

Mica Nava, Alan O'Shea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135085599
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Confronting the contemporary poststructuralist debate from the perspective of cultural of cultural historiography, this book presents an historical study of race and ethnicity. Specifically, it provides an account, both theoretical and applied, of the combination of sexual, racial and ethnic underpinning and shaping the experiences of English men and women in various colonies in the nineteenth century. Although accessible for the student, the book will be received seriously by both theorists and historians.

1
English Subjects of Modernity

Alan O'Shea

To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and our world — and at the same time threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.

(Marshall Berman)¹

Take it easy and avoid excitement.

(Psychiatrist's advice to Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times)

In the course of Charlie Chaplin's him Modern Times (1936) our hero works on an awesome, dehumanising production line and is made the guinea-pig for a time-and-motion experiment involving feeding the workers on the job; he is eventually sent crazy by the repetitive nature of his work and committed to a mental hospital. On his release he is told to 'take it easy and avoid excitement'; we are then offered a giddy montage of machinery, cars and jostling crowds, and Charlie is caught up in a freedom march, arrested as a communist agitator and serves a sentence in prison, where he mistakenly takes cocaine and finds himself preventing a riot. He is released into a world of mass unemployment, street riots and crime, and tries to be rearrested into the comparative tranquillity of prison. But he falls in love with an equally destitute young waif and his life is given purpose. He finds work as a nightwatchman in a big department store and at night his beloved sneaks in and they enjoy together the profusion of food, luxurious clothes and leisure goods. After further spells in prison, factory work and jobs as dancer and singing waiter, the couple's past catches up on them and they have to leave town. The heroine is in some despair, but, as the tune 'Smile' swells up on the soundtrack, Charlie persuades her to put a brave face on it; and laughing and holding hands they set off down a long country road into the dawn light, presumably towards a better future.

Throughout his films, the world of Chaplin is characterised by rapidly changing conditions, by repression and brutality, by corruption and hypocrisy, by insecurity and want and by dark despair; but also by the little mans spirit and resilience and an unquenchable aspiration for freedom, love, security, equality, communality, abundance and playfulness. These same themes, and this same tension recur again and again in Western popular cultural forms of the twentieth century. Marshall Berman, as the quotation at the head of this chapter indicates, has described the experience of this tension — between 'life's possibilities and perils' — as the condition of modernity,²

This chapter will attempt to characterise modernity as a popular structure of feeling and consider how it has been inflected in the context of twentieth-century England. While Berman sets a usefully provocative agenda, his argument also falls short at significant points. I will attempt to extend Berman's argument in two directions. Firstly, while Berman claims to deal with the (contradictory) experience of modernity, he fails to characterise how this is lived as a psychic formation: I will suggest how such a characterisation might be developed. Secondly, he has been rightly criticised for an over-universalistic concept of modernity. I will argue for historical differentiation: firstly, that modernity took on decisive new features in Western societies from the last decades of the nineteenth century; and, secondly, that there are crucial national differences. It is no coincidence that we begin with both a theorist and an instance of popular modernity which are American; the USA has undoubtedly had a paradigmatic role within twentieth-century Western modernity. Berman argues forcefully for a common experience of modernity; his case holds — up to a point — but his specific experience, as a New York left intellectual, inflects his account. I will argue not only that the English engagement with this structure of feeling developed certain unique features, but also that it was internally differentiated for different sections of the population.

Modernity

Berman's book did nor come out of the blue: it is a contribution to a wide-ranging debate about the nature of modernity which has obsessed social and cultural theorists in recent years — all the more because some have argued that we (in the West) are witnessing a deep transformation best understood as the end of modernity. This is not the place for an exhaustive account of these debates, nor of the particular historical conditions which have given rise to them.³ Nevertheless, a brief sketch is needed to make clear the particular orientation to modernity adopted in this chapter (and deployed in several of the chapters which follow).

Peter Osborne has usefully distinguished three senses of modernity: 'as a category of historical periodisation, a quality of social experience, and as an (incomplete) project.'⁴ We will here be largely concerned with the first two senses and the relationship between them, but these cannot be fully discussed without reference to modernity as a 'project'. In this latter sense, modernity is understood as the visions of the Enlightenment philosophers, with their faith in a science which would enable mankind to harness nature and so remove scarcity and poverty; and in a human reason which would liberate us from the shackles of religious mysticism and superstition and produce a rational moral and political order — which would remove injustice and oppression and achieve universal freedom. These visions played, of course, a crucial role in the French Revolution and the struggle for an independent USA. If we focus on the history of these visions, we can identify the common ground between Liberalism and Marxism, popularly seen as polar opposites, as sharing not just the broad goals of the 'Enlightenment project', but many of the strategies for its realisation — industrialism, powerful economic systems, secular nation states and their expansion through militarism, the destruction of tradition and the rational (bureaucratic) organisation of society.⁵

Much recent debate has been concerned with the fate of this project. There is a powerful tradition of argument which asserts that it has failed: there is Max Weber's thesis that in actuality, the dominant legacy of the Enlightenment is 'instrumental rationality which, far from liberating humanity, imposes the 'iron cage' of bureaucratisation on every sphere of social life — a scenario vividly portrayed in the labyrinthine nightmare of Kafka's novel, The Castle. Adorno and Horkheimer similarly argued that the will to 'master' nature could not be separated from the will to dominate human beings.⁶ Lyotard extends these critiques to warn against the dominating tendency of any of the 'grand narratives' of modernity which claim a monopoly of the truth, whether the march of Reason, the class struggle or whatever.⁷ Others have stressed their Eurocentrism and complicity with the oppressions of colonialism.⁸ Against this, Habermas argues that the project of modernity can be rescued. He acknowledges the critique of such unreflective confidence in Reason and the dominance of an oppressive instrumental rationality, but argues that the progressive, emancipatory elements of the project have not been eliminated and can be reconnected to 'reason', so long as it is understood not as absolute and autonomous, but as a consensus to be achieved through historical struggle.⁹ Berman has some sympathy with such a political direction, but shifts the terms of the debate towards modernity as an existing mode of experiencing social life, and one which can be periodised historically. While for Habermas the achievement of the Enlightenment ideal lies somewhere in the future, Berman insists that an unremitting focus on future global achievement produces a deep pessimism which overlooks 'the signs in the street'; here he finds a spirit of modernity which is repeatedly being realised in the emancipatory practices of individuals and small groups, perhaps only local and provisional, but in which participants become the 'subjects of modernity', creating 'meaning, dignity and beauty for themselves'.¹⁰

Furthermore, while Habermas sees the spheres of science, morality and

Figure 1.1 An irrepressible subject of modernity? Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, 1936

Source: BFI stills, posters and designs

aesthetics as having been separated since the Enlightenment and the project of modernity as being concerned with their future reunification,¹¹ Berman's 'signs' are instances of their unification in the present: his categories of 'meaning, dignity and beauty' refer precisely to these spheres. In fact, for Berman the great beacons of modernity have been — Marx aside _— artists rather than philosophers: Goethe, Dostoyevsky and Baudelaire, writers who grasped both sides of the dialectic of modernity, its 'possibilities and perils'.

Berman's account also suggests the dangers in conducting a debate, as Habermas and Lyotard do, solely at the level of epistemology and political philosophy. Their argument — particularly over the relative value of consensus versus heterogeneity — is of crucial political importance.¹² But there is a danger of idealism — of reaching political solutions through theoretical debate alone and without reference to complex historical situations and balances of forces. Berman's argument insists on a relation between these two. For him modernity is the experience of living through and making sense of the _'world-historical' social processes of 'modernisation' in terms of the _'Variety of visions and ideas' provoked and nourished by these processes ('modernism'). For all our criticisms of Berman_'s work, it is this conception of modernity that the contributors to this book have chosen to work with — modernity not as an ideal, but as the practical negotiation of one's life and one's identity within a complex and fast-changing world.

We shall not, however, be concerned with _'the world_' in general, but with modernity in a particular period and place, and with a particular moment of 'modernisation_' — a term which, as the next section explains, needs to be handled with care.

Modernisation

Berman's account of modernisation is as follows:

The maelstrom of modern life has been fed from many sources: great discoveries in the physical sciences, changing our images of the universe and our place within it; the industrialisation of production, which transforms scientific knowledge into technology, creates new human environments and destroys old ones, speeds up the whole tempo of life, generates new forms of corporate power and class struggle; immense demographic upheavals, severing millions of people from their ancestral habitats . . . rapid and often cataclysmic urban growth; systems of mass communication dynamic in their development, enveloping and binding together the most diverse peoples and societies; increasingly powerful national states, bureaucratically structured and operated, constantly striving to expand their powers; mass social movements of people, and peoples, challenging their political and economic rulers, striving to gain control over their lives; finally bearing and driving all these peoples and institutions along, an ever-expanding, drastically fluctuating capitalist world market.¹³

I have quoted this passage in full for several reasons. Firstly, it begins to specify the economic, political, social and cultural co-ordinates of modernisation within which modernity has to be lived out. These will be scrutinised more closely in due course. Secondly, it offers a gloss on Marx's famous dictum that 'people make their own history but not of their own free will: not under conditions they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted'.¹⁴ Berman's elaboration is that the conditions which restrict agency are not necessarily established structures holding us back, but can also be structural processes pulling us along pell-mell: it is turbulent movement, not structure, which characterises the condition of modernity, as Chaplin's Modern Times illustrates so effectively. This is one way in which a framing concept of modernity could renew and develop existing histories of subordinate groups. Many of these are couched in terms of struggles for change against imposed structures; if we reread that material in terms of understanding such groups as trying to keep abreast of imposed changes, new insights will be gained.

Thirdly, though Berman's engagement with Marxism is strong, and the expanding capitalist market is seen as framing other changes, his account of 'modernisation_' draws also on the sociologies of Durkheim, Weber, Simmel and Tonnies.¹⁵ One of the ben...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ENGLISH SUBJECTS OF MODERNITY
• 2 MODERNITY'S DISAVOWAL
• 3 SENSATION OF THE ABYSS
• 4 NIGHT BATTLES: HOOLIGAN AND CITIZEN
• 5 SODOMY TO SALOME
• 6 THE MYSTERIES AND SECRETS OF WOMEN'S BODIES
• 7 BLACK METROPOLIS, WHITE ENGLAND
• 8 RE-PLACING BRITISH MUSIC
• 9 WHAT A DAY FOR A DAYDREAM
• Index