ABSTRACT
In metaphorical terms, modernity can be viewed as a New World through which understandings of what it means to be modern can be continually rethought in both temporal and spatial terms. The temporal horizon of modernity can shift from one usually conceptualised in terms of an originary moment emerging in the eighteenth century, which is supplanted by a postmodern condition in the late twentieth century, to a longer-term one beginning in the fifteenth century that is fractured by a series of variegated distinctions, or a plurality of temporal horizons and possibilities (pasts, presents and futures). The spatial horizon also shifts from a modernity conceived as a social form with a single defining centre (usually Western Europe) to one that has multiple centres and multiple geographical locations. The spatial dimension, though, not only refers to multiple centres and geographies, but also to the multiple spaces in which modern subjects cohabit – spaces that they create but which also constrain them. The tension between the creation of spaces and the constraints that they impose generates a dissonance that emits its own sounds of contingency and possibility. It is in this sense of a change of paradigm in which multiple modernities
are conceptualised in terms of contingency and possibility that David Roberts writes ‘from a distance’ (Roberts, 1991: 3), and brings a New World perspective to Old World problems. For him, Adorno is representative of an Old World view of modernity. The theoretical motivation for Roberts’s critique of Adorno’s theory of the dialectic of the Enlightenment originates in Luhmann’s neosystem’s theoretical reconstruction of the historiography of modernity, which posits a series of New Worlds. The inspiration for this chapter comes from Roberts’s Art and Enlightenment
Aesthetic Theory after Adorno, and the way he looks anew at the temporal and spatial horizons of modernity. However, the chapter also signals a different interpretative possibility. Its aim is not to follow the path laid down by Roberts’s own analysis of the relation between the Enlightenment and its aesthetically inspired critique. Rather, the aim is to read Adorno and Luhmann against one another. Here Adorno need not be read as the critic of modernity’s
totality read as a history of technical-rational progress qua reification and alienation, that is, as a theorist of negative dialectics. One can read Adorno after Luhmann, as a theorist of open-ended possibilities that cannot be resolved, that is, as a theorist of contingency and dissonance (Seel, 2004). Drawing on Luhmann’s notions of differentiation and autopoiesis and Adorno’s philosophy of music, this reading will concentrate more on an image of modernity in spatial terms and less on its historical development and temporal horizons.
