ABSTRACT
The critique of meta-narratives and their putative demise has entailed the explicit critique of teleological versions of history that attempted to look for developmental laws in the formation of modern societies, and in so doing reconstruct and theorise their evolution and growth. One version of the teleological model viewed this developmental history as progressive in that it moved from un-freedom to freedom, as with Hegel’s positing of the voyage of reason. Alternatively, this teleological narrative has also been constructed negatively. World history is depicted as moving from progress to decline, either in terms of nihilistic decadence, or in terms of a rationalistically driven self-destruction. In each of these scenarios utopias are modernity’s other – existing elsewhere
in a nether world that was either past or in the future. In the positive version we invariably built on lessons that were there to be learnt and which were accumulated over millennia by trial and error, or there was a ‘hidden hand’, an evolutionary, developmental impulse that determined the positive course. A better world simply awaited us. In the negative version – and in the bleaker ones there was nothing positive, only misanthropy – the utopias turned either into dystopias, or are superseded, branded as old fashioned and permanently in the supermarket ‘sale’ bin of consumerable ideas. This means that we are left with only a memory of their vitality and fecundity. Utopias are either for the first flush of a supine youth located in antiquity, or a self-deluder who has been administered an elixir in the twilight of life to enable a state of final flourishing. Hence we are left to mourn, memorialise and remember as if they are dead. We, the mere mortals, are once again in the age of ossified monumental history – the history of monuments where a utopia stood like a giant among the dwarves. We stand only as dwarves and not on the giant’s shoulders, but at their feet staring blankly into dusk, as the owl of Minerva lies dead before us. It took to the sky and promptly plummeted earthward. Or so the story goes. Modernity was always out of joint and this has given rise to both negative
and positive possibilities rather than utopias. A modernity without a predetermined course or exit strategy does not entail that its routes are straight well-lit boulevards and malls – the avenues of positive or negative
predictability. There have always been the alleyways and back streets among its cities; detention camps, gulags and bestiarium in its nations and empires. And there have always been alternative routes to unknown destinations – modernities with different and even positive imaginaries and value horizons, even if they might be fragile. In other words, there are different modernities, and not all of them straightforward progressions into freedom or decline. To be sure, these images of different modernities have a long theoretical
trajectory arguably beginning with the work of Max Weber.1 Notwithstanding Weber’s rationalisation thesis, a substantial and even countercurrent in his work concentrates on the analysis of both modern and non-modern societies from historical and comparative perspectives, as will be explored in Chapters 5 and 6. Weber’s thesis concerning the rationalisation of purposive rationality is thrown into relief within his work by a counter-trend concerning value rationality. For Weber, this latter form of rationality challenges the propensity for the systematic success at both cultural and institutional levels of purposive or instrumental rationalisation with very mixed results.2 Value rationality is found in modernity in its political-democratic forms as my discussions of The City in Chapters 5 and 6 indicate. In addition there are other social forms such as musical-aesthetic creativity that cannot be fully rationalised. My discussion of aesthetic and musical modernity in Chapter 15 suggests that the intellectualisation or radical development of conceptualisation (including musical conceptualisation) that purposive rationalisation requires cannot fully account for other aspects that Weber would simply classify as ‘irrational’. He cannot integrate them fully into a narrative concerning rationalisation. For example, within the world of intimate social relations love is classified as such an irrational force, as is the ‘work’ of the seventh note within the diatonic modern musical system. As I argue, it is more fruitful to view these aspects as ‘out of joint’, as resistant to ordering and intellectualisation rather than viewing them as simply irrational. In addition to different cultural formations Weber’s social theorising also points to the development of different modernities in different regional – for him civilisational contexts. In contemporary social theorising the result of the recognition of different
and comparative modern perspectives, experiences and long-term histories has been the formation of a notion of multiple modernities. The ‘multiple modernities’ approach tends to emphasise different geographical regions, histories and interactions between civilisational contexts and modernity in general. In other words it tends to regionalise the different experiences of modernity.3
