Imaginaries of Modernity

Politics, Cultures, Tensions

John Rundell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317118718
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a new perspective on the issue of modernity through a series of interconnected essays. Drawing centrally on the works of Castoriadis, Luhmann, Heller and Lefort, and in critical discussion with Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Adorno, Habermas and Taylor, the author argues that modernity is not only a unique historical creation but also a multiple one.

With a focus on five broad themes - the problem of understanding of modernity after the decline of grand narratives; the complexity of the modern condition; politics, especially with reference to freedom and totalitarian regimes; the variety and density of modern life; and the centrality of a concept of culture to social and critical theory - John Rundell advances the view that modernity is not the outcome of an evolutionary process or historical development, but is unique and indeterminate, as are the constitutive dimensions that can be identified as 'modern'. There are, then, different modernities.

A rigorous engagement with a range of prominent and contemporary social theorists, Imaginaries of Modernity casts new light on the significance of understanding the multidimensional character of modernity and the plurality of its forms beyond the conventional paradigms associated with only the West. As such, it will appeal to scholars of social theory, critical theory, sociology and philosophy concerned with questions of culture, politics and modernity.

Part 1

Tensions of modernity

1 From communicative modernity to modernities in tension

Introduction

From his earliest work onwards, Jürgen Habermas has been a theorist of modernity and has deployed – if not always explicitly – an image of a modern world that is internally differentiated, rather than one that is coordinated by a single totalising logic, such as that of capitalism. Sociologically, Habermas contests the one-dimensional view of modern societies that sees them as deriving from a basic unifying core, feature or structure, the assumption of which produces a totalising picture that becomes the basis for a totalising critique. More recently, Habermas’s sociological discourse of modernity has also enabled him to engage with the post-1989 and post-9/11 environments that include phenomena such as terrorism, unilateralism, population movements, and new nationalisms as well as post-national politics and multiculturalism. Instead of upholding a modernisation theory that privileges economic and industrial development, and a neoliberalism that privileges markets, then, Habermas is able to critically engage in the so-called ‘new’ global environment with his political ideal and programme of deliberative democracy and cosmopolitanism, underpinned by his theory of communicative competence and learning processes (Habermas, 1996, 2001, 2006, 2009).

Nonetheless, this chapter will seek to contrast Habermas’s sociological discourse of modernity and his underlying theory of evolutionary learning processes with an alternative theory of modernity as tension-ridden, dynamic and multiple. In what he has termed ‘the linguistification of the sacred’, Habermas has argued that there is an internal connection between the increasingly complex and differentiated evolution of our relations with nature and the organisation of society, and the equally differentiated evolution of cultural forms (1987a). In Habermas’s view, these cultural forms are embodied arguments, rather than only world views. However, the first section of the chapter will argue that, in tying argumentation and the evolution of world views together, Habermas circumscribes his own sociological discourse of modernity.

In the second section, Habermas’s theory of modernity will be contrasted with a counter-model which is more pluri-dimensional and tension-ridden, and thus contestable and open-ended. Rather than drawing on a linguistic paradigm and evolutionary impulses, this counter-model is based on the concatenation of historically indeterminate social imaginaries, among which there are irreducible tensions, conflicts and interpenetrations. This alternative theory of modernity opens our understanding to non-Western versions of modernity that are not circumscribed by evolutionary or occidental models.¹

Habermas’s sociological discourse of modernity

While it may appear that Habermas’s work is tied and oriented to a European project and a European modernity, and can thus be charged with a Euro-centrism, he avoids this charge by grounding his sociological discourse of modernity in a post-metaphysical philosophy that appeals to universal quasi-transcendental and linguistically constituted competences that develop at the social level through culturally situated evolutionary learning processes (Habermas, 1979: 5–44). As is well known, for Habermas, modernity as a societal type is characterised by a differentiation and development of three types of action and institutional complexes – science, morality and political legitimation, and aesthetics. This differentiation has a homology at the philosophical level in that the differentiation of society is matched by the differentiation of rationality and the formation of modalities of reason, knowledge and action appropriate to the three spheres: science is developed according to the principles of a cognitive construction of rationality with its validation in terms of truth; political and legitimate patterns of action and knowledge develop and proceed according to the principles of a moral‒practical rationality with its validation in terms of normative rightness; and modern aesthetics develops according to its own distinctive forms of rationality, the expressive, with its own forms of validation regarding truthfulness and authenticity. The result of this ‘internal differentiation of the sacred’, to draw on Habermas’s reconstruction of Durkheim, is that there are three distinct linguistically constituted (rather than simply mediated) realities with their own forms of validation (Habermas, 1984, 1987a; Rundell, 1989: 5–24, 1992: 133–140).

For Habermas, at the level of the human species modernity is not only a world-historical phenomenon, but also the result of species-wide learning processes that are not reducible to context-dependent situatedness. To put it slightly differently and in the language of Habermas’s critique of communitarianism, modernity is not a ‘communitarian’ project (Habermas, 1998: 205–208, 2006: 115–193). Rather, it is an unfinished one in which its normative content for legitimation can only be grounded in an intersubjectively constituted notion of reasonableness that can be argued and learnt (Habermas, 1987b: 336–367). In the context of crises of social differentiation, or of clashes between traditional and post-traditional forms of life, Habermas argues that there is recourse to ‘intermundane learning processes’ through which the universality of normative rightness can be articulated, even if painfully and gradually (Habermas, 2006). Habermas thus combines his differentiated theory of modernity with a commitment to the political form of modern society.

Notwithstanding changes in formulations in Habermas’s oeuvre, it is continuously fuelled by a very simple idea. It is worth fleshing out this ‘simple idea’ in order to grasp its complexity and insights, as well as its limitations when confronted with Habermas’s own meta-theory.

In the context of ‘a modernity at variance with itself’ (Habermas, 1987b: 396), Habermas is preoccupied with the public and non-violent strength of the better argument. Everyone should be able to take a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ position to statements about the world and the way it is understood – whether or not these refer to nature, to society or to selves (Habermas, 1984: 70). In the wake of his ‘linguistic turn’, Habermas develops a notion of politics, which, at its most minimal and anthropological, means a non-violent intersubjectivity in the making, where words – or, more strictly, sentences or speech acts – rather than rituals or weapons, are the form of intercourse that counts. This utopian horizon remains the central, obstinately persistent feature that resonates throughout his work. The utopian horizon is thus freedom interpreted by him as reflexive deliberation, which is his own version of democracy. This, in turn, is formulated as a rationally motivated and discursively redeemable consensus formation. Moreover, it typifies his work as belonging to one of the self-understandings of modernity – a self-understanding that he constantly defends, criticises and reconstructs (Habermas, 1984, 1987a, 1987b).

At the sociological level, Habermas’s theorisation of the political form of modern society is filtered through a historically rendered interpretation of the formation of the public sphere. In Habermas’s important early analysis this involved the separation of civil society from the state, and the public sphere’s formation as a sphere of public opinion formed by free and autonomous citizens separate from the private realm of capitalistic economic activity. Habermas rightly argued that economic ‘man’ and ‘citizen’ stand as two differentiated and competing aspects of the modern world, aspects that were either minimised or treated as derivatives of one or the other in political philosophy and social and critical theory from Kant onwards (Habermas, 1989).²

In subsequent work, Habermas has reconceptualised the public sphere in the context of the intersubjectively constituted lifeworld, from which norms originate and can be challenged in the form of reflexive argumentation. He considers all other forms of interaction to be power-saturated, ‘distorted’ or ideological, or determined by systems imperatives. For Habermas, this principle of rational deliberation is also the founding one of critique. It is here that his earlier historicised notion of the public sphere is circumscribed and folded into a discursive notion of politics and is reconceptualised through the perspective of his differentiated image of a modern society with its paradoxes and pathologies. These pathologies emerge as a result of the conflictual relations between system and lifeworld, which constitute the battleground between the dynamics of modernity. There are systemically derived colonising tendencies that encroach upon the lifeworld, tendencies that take the form of administrative‒bureaucratic control, which can be challenged by various groups and social movements (Habermas, 1987a). For Habermas, this challenge should take the form of normatively grounded arguments that originate from the lifeworlds of these social groups and social movements.

In Between Facts and Norms (1997a), Habermas theorises democracy in terms of a deliberative constitutional republic in which the public sphere takes the form of a formal‒deliberative democracy, still anchored in the intersubjective and normative imperatives of the lifeworld. In Habermas’s later work, the public sphere becomes identical with the notion of undistorted and unimpeded rational‒deliberative argumentation about matters that can become topicalised and politicised. The public sphere is viewed as both the space for rational argument and a conduit through which democratisation is expressed in its formalisation through law (Habermas, 1997a, 1998).

It is in this context of deliberative argumentation, which is the result of the increasing, intersubjectively constituted ‘linguistification’ of the politically ‘sacred’, that Habermas articulates his concerns in terms of contemporary political modernity. For him, political modernity is no longer synonymous with the territorial boundedness of the nation state. The post-national constellation of supra-state organisations, conventions and treaties means that for Habermas political modernity has transcended state boundaries. The problem, for him, is whether in this context there is normative ‘over-taxing’ or ‘over-stretching’ – that is, whether normativity can be anchored in a community of citizens where these political citizens do not share a common set of lifeworld experiences, especially in the face of increasing diversity of forms of life in secular, post-national and even religious settings. ‘Europe’ may not be enough (Habermas, 2001: 58–112, 2006: 115–193, 2009: 78–105). ‘Really existing Europe’ becomes a vehicle through which Habermas can explore his own disquiet, with some interesting results that nonetheless expose the limits of his own theorisation.

As Habermas makes clear in his remarks on cosmopolitanism or the ‘internationalisation of international law’, as well as on the place of religion in ‘post-secular’ society, a learning process is required on both sides of the national‒post-national divide, or the secular‒religious one, to acknowledge the linkage in modernity between norms, law and democracy in which recognition of diversity – diverse polities, diverse religions – occurs through the modern category of citizenship. Citizenship is the point of mediation for this diversity, and democratic constitutions are their ‘linguistified’ form of articulation. Citizenship, for Habermas, is an actor‒category, not only of inclusion, but also, in principle, of the citizen qua actor’s capacity for rational, public, deliberative and even ‘disobedient’ argumentation through which a political consensus can be formed (Habermas, 1985: 95–116, 2006: 115–193, 2009: 59–77). Habermas extends this notion of the democratic constitution to include treaties and conventions that lie at the heart of the European Union and other ‘post-national’ arrangements and agreements.

In so arguing, Habermas articulates and prioritises the rational‒argumentative as a principle of linkage between the ‘linguistically-constituted’ formations or systems of the nation state, post-national arrangements and political democratisation. For him, the linkage occurs between law and democracy with the republican‒democratic constitution as the point of mediation. Constitutionality mediates and operationalises the tension and mutual interpenetration between legal forms and democratic‒discursive principles. This occurs on a background assumption that citizens qua (contingent) strangers come together voluntarily as free and equal consociates to form a legal community, rather than simply a polis (Habermas, 1997a: 118–131).

In terms that attempt to bring together liberal and republican dimensions, as well as formal and contextualist ones, Habermas argues that there is a necessarily conceptual relation between private and public autonomy and right. The bearers of individual rights are intersubjectively constituted, and it is here that Habermas makes the internal link. In his view, the linguistically construed intersubjective constitution of the lifeworld means that at the deepest anthropological level, politics is already a form of association, a form of sociability that is an open embodied argument which is normatively structured and contestable. Instead of ‘the fragmentation of multicultural societies and the Babylonian confusion of tongues in an overly complex global society’, there is the capacity for normative claims and their validation in universalistic terms, because these are imbedded in the speech acts between interlocutors (Habermas, 1996: 125–137, 1997a: 1–41). For Habermas, the modern constitution as the form of modern politics is an institutionalised form of intersubjectively constituted interlocution. As indicated above, this theory of political modernity is the centrepiece of Habermas’s entire work.

However, in tying political forms to language and to sociocultural evolution, Habermas is faced with at least two problems. By linking history with validation, and especially with the validation of norms, he ultimately considers the formal articulation of these norms in argument to be enough. The issue here is not so much, as many critics have pointed out, that validation is separated from originating contexts. Rather, an earlier criticism still stands – namely, that this formal separation does not generate the possibility for new content. It only makes explicit the implicit veracity of the speech act (Arnason, 1982: 228). The explication exposes the universalistic potential of all claims against which the ‘living’ veracity of old and new forms of life can be judged. Especially in Habermas’s later work, a tension emerges between his allowing a conceptual space to emerge for the creation of new social meanings in all of their hues, from the most brutal to the most benign, and his reduction of this conceptual space to quasi-transcendental formalistic criteria. From a more contextualist vantage point, the issue is one of competing images and programmes of modernity that are situated within longer-term contexts and orientated by particular horizons.

The linkage between law and democracy and the formation of democratic constitutional states can only be viewed as an achievement of modernity. Yet, it is a contingent achievement, rather than the result of an a priori intersubjectivity that combines language and normativity and develops as sociocultural evolution through learning processes. No matter how sophisticated his formulation the evolutionary thrust of Habermas’s theory through learning processes restrictively thematises the existence of the human species to that of language users, a thematisation that predetermines and sets limits to the historical direction of human development and to changes in the ways humans and human societies perceive and understand themselves. In Habermas’s work this evolutionism means that the ‘higher stage’ – modernity – is trapped in a hermeneutical circle orientated to a prior value of validation. Modernity, and indeed different modernities, is judged by Habermas in terms of the increasing ability to argue and test the case for truth statements or normative rightness, and to reach agreements about these. There is thus an internal relation between argumentation and the lessons that can be learnt concerning this deliberative ability. Habermas therefore views catastrophes such as the totalitarianisms of yesterday and the fundamentalisms of today as pathological movements away from a learning process, rather than as historical creations in their own right.

This reliance on learning processes becomes evident, for example, in Habermas’s recent discussions concerning the heightened sensibility to religious pluralism in contemporary (European) societies. Habermas thinks that inter-religious encounters may be resolved through learning processes and the steps that European states, as well as the European Union, are willing to take to embrace or limit the plurality of religious practices. He admits that it remains an open question whether the relation between faith and democracy can be pursued through learning and argumentation alone (Habermas, 2008). Perhaps it would be more accurate to suggest that this possibility depends on a perspective shared by both believers and non-believers that ultimately cannot be argued either for or against, and is also unenforceable. But if this is the case, then the force and the creation of this perspective must originate, not from language and learning processes, but elsewhere. This leaves open the question that learning and argumentation are grounded in imaginary horizons that precede both. It is to the nature and creation of these imaginaries, in their ontological and modern forms, that we now turn.

Contingent imaginaries of modernity

A critique of Habermas’s sociological discourse of modernity can begin from an observation that modernity, like social worlds more generally, is indeterminate, rather than the result of sociocultural learning processes. Apart from the teleologically inspired hermeneutical entrapment there is also the problem of the status and weight that Habermas attributes to learning processes themselves. For there to be a learning process there needs to be a disposition to learn at least something. My argument is that a pre- and/or non-linguistic and non-cognitive dimension through which we can create social meaning orientates this disposition. The learnt phenomenon of the political, like learning in general, is a second-order process (Castoriadis, 1991).

Social phenomena are indeterminate and distinct world creations. This indeterminacy and distinctiveness highlights their contingency. Following Castoriadis’s formulation, the creation of contingent social worlds can be termed the creation of social imaginaries. Rather than concentrating on the activities of linguistification, or phenomenological or interpretative worlding, Castoriadis concentrates on the creation of societies.³ For Castoriadis, societies and their histories are indeterminate creations, not ‘things’ that are perceived as real, nor are they products of rational thinking or language games. Put differently,

reality, language, values, [norms], needs and labour in each society, specify, in each case, in their particular mode of being, the organisation of the world and the social world related to the social im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Details of Published Work
• Introduction: Modernity is out of joint
• PART 1: Tensions of modernity
• PART 2: Political modernities
• PART 3: In search of transcendence
• Bibliography
• Index