Enchantments of Modernity

Empire, Nation, Globalization

Saurabh Dube

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000159417
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: History

The notion of modernity hinges on a break with the past, such as superstitions, medieval worlds, and hierarchical traditions. It follows that modernity suggests the disenchantment of the world, yet the processes of modernity also create their own enchantments in the mapping and making of the modern world. Straddling a range of disciplines and perspectives, the essays in this edited volume eschew programmatic solutions, focusing instead in new ways on subjects of slavery and memory, global transformations and vernacular and vernacular modernity, imperial imperatives and nationalist knowledge, cosmopolitan politics and liberal democracy, and governmental effects and everyday affects. It is in these ways that the volume attempts to unravel the enchantments of modernity, in order to approach anew modernity's constitutive terms, formative limits, and particular possibilities.

1

Modernity and its Enchantments: An Introduction

Saurabh Dube

The idea of modernity rests on rupture. It brings into view a monumental narrative — the breaching of magical covenants, the surpassing of medieval superstitions, and the undoing of hierarchical traditions. The advent of modernity, then, insinuates the disenchantment of the world: the progressive control of nature through scientific procedures of technology; and the inexorable demystification of enchantments through powerful techniques of reason. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the privileged dispensation of legislative reason within regimes of modernity gathers together nature and humanity as conjoint attributes of a disenchanted world.

Yet, processes of modernity create their own enchantments. These extend from the immaculately imagined origins and ends of modernity through to the dense magic of money and markets; and from novel mythologies of nation and empire through to hierarchical oppositions between myth and history, emotion and reason, ritual and rationality, East and West, and tradition and modernity. Intensely spectral but concretely palpable, forming tangible representations and informing forceful practices, the one bound to the other, such enticements stalk the worlds of modernity’s doing and undoing. The enchantments of modernity give shape to the past and the present by ordering and orchestrating these terrains.

Enchantments of Modernity discusses the place of such enchantments in the mapping and molding, the making and unmaking of the modern world. Straddling a range of disciplines and perspectives, the articles collected here eschew programmatic solutions and answers. Rather, they focus in newer ways on subjects of global transformations and vernacular modernity, imperial imperatives and nationalist knowledge, cosmopolitan politics and liberal democracy, and governmental effects and everyday affects. It is in these ways that this volume attempts to unravel the enchantments of modernity, in order to approach anew modernity’s constitutive terms, formative limits, and particular possibilities.

Abiding Antinomies

There is something uncannily pressing, unerringly close to home, about modernity’s enchantments, now drawing in and now reaching beyond scholarly understandings.¹ Consider the manner in which the term ‘medieval’ bears enormous import for delineations of modernity, an issue that I have discussed elsewhere in relation to imperatives of contemporary politics. The point here is that specters of the medieval as darkly delineating practices, beliefs, cultures, faiths, and histories are a prior presence and an ongoing horror in the mirrors of modernity. They hover in the present in ominous ways.

Why should this be the case? I began by noting that as an idea, ideal, and ideology modernity and the modern appear as premised upon fundamental ruptures: a surpassing of tradition, a break with the medieval.² Time after time, in this vision of the past, present, and posterity, an exclusive, imaginary, and bloated West has morphed into history, modernity, and destiny – for each society, any culture, and every people.³ Even more widely, assiduously plotted against the horizon of a singular modernity, distinct meanings, practices, and institutions appear as primitive or progressive, lost or redeemable, savage or civilized, barbaric or exotic, ever-behind or nearly-there, medieval or modern. These peoples have missed the bus of universal history, or they hang precariously from one of its symmetrical sides. Patiently or impatiently, they still wait for the next vehicle plying the road of modernity. Comfortably or uncomfortably, they now sit within this transportation of time. Their distance from the modern registers redemptive virtue or their falling behind on this route reflects abject failure.⁴ Rather more than ideological errors, awaiting their inexorable exorcism through superior knowledge, such mappings circulate as structures of feeling, instituted as categorical entities, intimating the measures and the means of the modern — which is to say, they are abiding enchantments of modernity.

From where do such hierarchal oppositions and their immense enchantments arise? For a long time now, formidable antimonies between static, traditional communities and dynamic, modern societies have played an important role in understandings of history and culture.⁵ At first, the duality might seem to be little more than an ideological plank of modernization theory, counter-posing (primarily non-Western) tradition with (chiefly Western) modernity. But the antinomy has wider implications and deeper underpinnings.⁶ It is not only that the duality has animated and articulated other enduring oppositions, such as those between ritual and rationality, myth and history, community and state, magic and the modern, and emotion and reason. It is also that as a lasting legacy of the developmental idea of universal, natural history and an aggrandizing representation of an exclusive, Western modernity, such antinomies have found varied expressions among the distinct subjects that they have named, described, and objectified since at least the 18th century.⁷ Representations emanating from the European Enlightenment have played a key role here.

It would be hasty and erroneous to see the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries as all of a piece. From contending strains of rationalism in France and of empiricism in Britain through to different conceptions of universal and natural history, it is more useful to speak in the plural of Enlightenments (Porter 2001; Pococok 1999; and Kelley 1998; see also Muthu 2003). Here were to be found, too, challenges to rationalist procedures through varieties of Counter-Enlightenments, which shaped the Enlightenment (Berlin 2001: 1–24; McMahon 2002). Despite such plural procedures, it has been generally accepted that the period of the Enlightenment was accompanied by ideas and processes of the secularization of Judeo-Christian time (see, for example, Fabian 1983: 26–7, 146–7). Actually, such secularization of Judeo-Christian time during the Enlightenment was an emergent and consequential idea, but a circumscribed and limited process.⁸

In this context, discrete yet overlaying developmental schemes underwrote grand designs of human history, from the rationalist claims of Voltaire and Kant through to the historicist frames of Giambattista Vico and Johann Gottfried von Herder. There was profound contention among such schemas, yet in different ways they each projected developmental blueprints of universal history.⁹ Such contrary strains and convergent emphases were bound to the fact, many times overlooked, that the Enlightenment was as much historical as philosophical, as much about the rewriting of history as about the rethinking of philosophy. The consequences were limited yet significant. On the one hand, throughout the 19th century but also afterwards Judeo-Christian and Messianic time and temporality did not lose their influence in Western worlds.¹⁰ On the other hand, by the second half of the 19th century, at the very least in the Protestant West, secularized time could acquire a naturalized aura and developmental thought was distilled (uncertainly yet potently) as historical progress.¹¹

It followed that time came to be increasingly mapped in hierarchical ways to plot peoples and cultures in the movement of history that was primarily projected as the passage of progress. Frequently articulated by the Ur-opposition between the primitive and the civilized, in place here nonetheless was neither a singular Western ‘self’ nor an exclusive non-Western ‘other’. Rather, at play in this terrain were the cultural severalty of Western selves and the historical hierarchies of non-Western otherness. In this scenario, many peoples (for example, Africans, African-Americans, and indigenous groups in the Americas and across the world) were still stuck in the stage of barbarism and savagery with few prospects of advancement. Other societies (for example, those of India and China) had reached the ascending steps of civilization yet lacked the critical foundations of reason. Still other people (chiefly of Western and Northern European stock) had evolved to the higher reaches of humanity through advantages of race and rationality and propensities of history and nationality. Indeed, it was the past and the present of this last set of people, comprising the enlightened European elect, that was seized on and rendered as a looking-glass at large. In this mirror was envisioned the universal history of human destiny — a destiny represented as groups and societies either failing before or rising to the stage of modernity.

It was registered earlier that the notion and narrative of modernity involve a break with the past, stories ever intimating ruptures with ritual and magic and breaches with enchantment and tradition. Following authoritative understandings, as an epochal concept, modernity has been seen as embodying a distinct and new status from preceding periods. Two immensely influential, contemporary discussions explicating the critical attributes of modernity should suffice here.

The philosopher Jürgen Habermas has suggested that under modernity the notion of the ‘new’ or the ‘modern’ world loses a ‘merely chronological meaning’ to take on instead ‘the oppositional significance of an emphatically “new” age’. It follows from this that the normative order of modernity has to be grounded out of itself rather than drawing its dispositions from models offered by other, obviously earlier, epochs (Habermas 1987: 5). Similarly, the historian Reinhart Koselleck has argued that, starting in the 18th century, the regimes of historicity under modernity have entailed a series of homologous disjunctions between the past and the present, prophecy and prediction, and eschatological imaginings and secular visions. This is to say that modernity innately insinuates novel orientations to the past, present, and future (Koselleck 1985: 3–20). Now, these are persuasive arguments that carry their own truths. But they also present modernity in idealized terms. At the same time, precisely for these reasons, the understandings are acutely representative. None of this should be surprising. For, the persuasions and truths of such arguments and their presentation of modernity in idealized terms are inextricably entwined with each other. Indeed, at stake here is nothing less than the abiding enchantments of modernity.

First, influential and commonplace explications of modernity have for a very long time now proceeded by locating its constitutive terms as being entirely internal to Europe. This is to say that they have understood modernity as phenomena generated purely internally within the West. Produced within an imaginary but palpable West, it was only later that modernity was variously exported to other parts of humanity. Now, precisely this measure serves to override the dynamic of colonizer and colonized, race and reason, and Enlightenment and empire that has been constitutive of the terms and textures of modernity as history.¹²

Second, modernity has been frequently approached through a sieving of the historical processes that have attended its emergence and development through resolutely overarching filters. From history to sociology and philosophy, modular designs of modernity are assumed in place more or less a priori, which then provide the means with which to approach, analyze, and apprehend the causes, characteristics, and consequences — as well as the terms, terrains, and trajectories — of the phenomena.¹³ This has served to subordinate the everyday manifestations and critical margins of modernity, further underplaying its contentions and contradictions — in Western and non-Western worlds.

Third and finally, representations and definitions of modernity and its attendant processes such as secularization as well as its cognate concepts such as liberty have entailed a ceaseless interplay between their ideal attributes and their actual manifestations. This has meant not only that the actual has been apprehended in terms of the ideal, but that even when a gap is recognized between the two, the actual is seen as tending toward the ideal with each shoring up the other. At stake are more than simple errors of understanding, since it is exactly the admixtures of the actual articulations and the idealized projections of modernity that have defined its worldly dimensions. In different ways, I shall return to some of these issues.¹⁴ My point now is that taken together these procedures announce salient registers of hierarchical mappings of time and space. In both conscious and inadvertent ways, such registers entail two simultaneous measures. Rehearsing the West as modernity, they equally stage modernity ‘as the West’ (Mitchell 2000: 15, emphasis in the original).

The idea of modernity as a coming apart from the past rests on the imagination of ruptures within Western history. But such an idea cannot help also turning on the importance of disjunctions of the West with non-Western worlds, whether explicitly or implicitly. On the one hand, the caesura defined by modernity as the new beginning is shifted onto the past, ‘precisely to the start of modern times’ in Europe.¹⁵ It is ahead of this threshold that the present is seen as being renewed in its vitality and novelty under modernity. On the other hand, exactly when the modern is privileged as the most recent period, the novelty and vitality of modernity confront specters of the ‘medieval’, the ‘superstitious’, the ‘prophetic’, and the ‘spiritual’ meandering in their midst. These spirits are a prior presence and an ongoing process. Each attempt to engage them in the present entails marking them as an attribute of the past. My reference is to the ways in which in dominant representations, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are simultaneously ‘coeval’ and ‘medieval’; and the manner in which in pervasive understandings the importance today of ‘Hindu spirituality’ and ‘Indian tradition’ is at once contemporary yet anachronistic.

I am suggesting, then, that the meanings, understandings, and actions that fall outside the disenchantment-driven horizons of modernity have to be plotted as lagging behind this novel stage. Here spatial mappings and temporal measurements of the West and the non-West come to rest on the trajectory of time, an axis that claims to be normatively neutral but is in fact profoundly hierarchical. This is to say that the precise notion of modernity as a rupture with the past carves up social and historical worlds into the traditional and the modern, further naming and animating other oppositions such as those between ritual and rationality, myth and history, and magic and modernity.

Why should the antinomies of modernity have played an important role in the mapping and making of social worlds? These oppositions emerged embedded within formidable projects of power and knowledge, turning on Enlightenment, empire, and nation as well as within the challenges to these projects. These have been motivated if diverse projects ‘not simply of looking and recording but of recording and remaking’ the world, as Talal Asad (1993: 269) tells us. Unsurprisingly, the oppositions themselves assumed persuasive analytical authority and acquired pervasive worldly attributes, variously articulated with representations of modernity and its trajectory as a self-realizing project of progress and a self-evident embodiment of history.

Their critical questioning notwithstanding, these oppositions continue to beguile and seduce. Leading a charmed life in the academy and beyond, they inhabit conservative understandings, liberal imaginings, radical visions, and primitivist and New Age alternatives. On the one hand, the oppositions under discussion not only lie at the heart of the dense institutionalization of the West as history and modernity — and acute fabrications of race and reason within civilizing missions and colonial cultures — but at the core of aggrandizing blueprints of third world modernization and governmental development. Ever enmeshed with the complicities between representations of history and ruses of progress, they shape and suture militant agendas of militarist nationalism, from the muscular peacekeeping of George Bush and his cronies through to celebrations of the Hindu and the Islamic bomb in India and Pakistan. On the other hand, these antinomies have been central to the fabrications of tradition and community by colonized peoples and contemporary subalterns, defining anti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Modernity and its Enchantments: An Introduction
• Effects: Colony and Nation
• Affects: The Global and the Vernacular
• Notes on Contributors