ABSTRACT
In Exploring the Modern, John Jervis (1998) proposes that we can fruitfully think about modernity as ‘project,’ ‘experience’ and ‘representation.’ Modernity is a ‘project’ to the extent that ‘modern society’ involves the goal of ‘rational purposive control of the environment’ (Jervis, 1998: 6). By contrast, modernity as ‘experience’ is much more fluid and transitory, and sometimes in direct tension with modernity as ‘project.’ Jervis (1998: 5) describes modernity as ‘experience’ as presenting us with ‘the world as a rich tapestry, of transient impressions, bright lights … the pleasures and dangers of city life … the fashions and foibles of street culture.’ The third form of modernity, he describes as ‘representation.’ Jervis (1998: 10) defines the latter as an attitude to modernity that involves moderns confronting the challenge ‘to our potential to represent it, for grasping it in consciousness and picturing it through imagery or language.’ Modernity as ‘project,’ ‘experience’ and ‘representation’ – three irre-
ducible dimensions, that defy simple explanations or straightforward cognitive mapping. Then there are those for whom modernity is essentially the sensation of change, speed, fashion, velocity and perpetual transformation. Writing in 1932, the Spanish philosopher and cultural critic Jose Ortega y Gasset would describe it thus:
The primary meaning of the words ‘modern,’ ‘modernity,’ with which the recent times have baptized themselves, brings out very sharply that feeling of ‘the height of time’ … ‘Modern’ is what ‘is in fashion,’ that is to say, the new fashion or modification which has arisen over and against the old traditional fashions used in the past. The word ‘modern’ then expresses a consciousness of a new life, superior to the old one, and at the same time an imperative to be at the height of one’s own time.
