ABSTRACT
Modern, modernity, and modernism are terms that historically have been defined in respect to Europe and to Western capitalist countries like the United States. Modernity, for example, refers to the postfeudal historical period beginning in the eighteenth century with the philosophers of the Enlightenment, and characterized by faith in the “cognitive potentials” of “man.” The guiding force behind the modern project, “the rational organization of everyday life” (Habermas 9), had two implicit paradoxes, however. Since the modern is constantly seeking the new, all that is perceived as traditional and old is contemplated with horror and shunned. Yet this obsession for the new makes it very difficult to “organize” society in a coherent way. Men and women under modernity experience great displacement, disaffection, confusion; the rules and values they know and understand, together with the physical space they live in—the city—have changed so dramatically that human beings find themselves exhilaratingly alone:
To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are … it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, “All that is solid melts into air.” (Berman 15)
