What is Modernity?

‘Modernity remains a perplexingly moving target’

Peter Marshall is Professor of History at the University of Warwick

As an undergraduate in the 1980s, my ‘Modern History’ BA commenced with the Romans’ departure from Britain in the early fifth century. The syllabus was even then a mummified relic of a mindset which neatly bifurcated world history into ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’. It was also a reminder of how periodisation – the perhaps necessary but invariably problematic process of carving the past into manageable chunks – has a slippery history of its own.

Awareness of living in a ‘modern’ age was strong among humanists of the Renaissance – the term invented in the 19th century to denote a 15th- and 16th-century scholarly movement seeking to restore Greek and Roman philosophy. Renaissance humanists were responsible for popularising the notion of the ‘Middle Ages’, a long and gloomy interlude between the collapse of classical civilisation and its alleged rebirth in their own time.

Historians are stuck with the terminology of Middle Ages and ‘medieval’, but it is in some ways profoundly unhelpful, threatening to flatten out centuries of dynamic development, and implying a pejorative contrast with a recognisable ‘modernity’ commencing at some arbitrarily designated historical moment – Gutenberg’s invention of printing, Columbus’ ‘discovery’ of America, or Luther’s defiance of Rome.

Matters have not been helped by the tendency taking off around the middle of the 20th century to insert an ‘early modern’ era (the 16th, 17th, and sometimes 18th centuries) between the Middle Ages and modernity proper. ‘Early modernity’ has become deeply ingrained in university courses, and in the working practices and identities of historians (myself included), but it exhibits worryingly teleological aspects, privileging change over continuity and claiming these centuries to be more emphatically an ‘age of transition’ than any others one might randomly pick.

Modernity itself remains a perplexingly moving target – is it the ‘now’ of a shared historical consciousness, or a distinct historical period succeeded (in the 1980s?) by postmodernity or the ‘contemporary’ era? In whatever case, periodisation should always be regarded as a tool rather than as a goal of meaningful historical analysis. What is modernity? As so often in study of the past, continuing to ask the question matters more than agreeing upon an answer.

‘It is the mediation of life through abstract forms’

Jon Wilson is Historian of South Asia and Professor of History at King’s College London

Buildings made of white boxes; furniture with no ornaments; paintings of lines or abstract forms; fast communication; the codification of law; massive factories. The term modernity is usually associated with a hard-to-define cluster of changes which accelerated from the 18th century, sometimes earlier. I think we can use it to denote something far more precise, which this diverse list shares: the mediation of life through abstract forms.

Modern ways of doing things developed to allow people to connect in greater numbers over long distances. Perhaps the most important modern phenomena are commodities, things produced solely to be sold (often over large distances). As Karl Marx argued, as they become commodities complex objects are reduced to abstract form, whose only meaning for everyone other than the end user is their price.

Modernity links people and things into bigger systems by disconnecting them from the particular situation in which they emerge. That process occurred in different walks of life. Bureaucracies emerged that dealt with individuals as generic units. Statistics reduced societies to numbers, allowing them to be compared on a global scale. Art, architecture, and design jettisoned links to particular places and traditions, to appeal across the globe,so an office block in Brazil and Bangladesh conform to the same international style. Modern democracies reduce the complexity of the public voice to the abstraction of polling numbers.

Modernity’s romantic critics thought that this process of disconnection destroyed what mattered, arguing that its abstraction annihilated the depth and complexity of individual lives. My point is different: it is that the abstract nature of modern practices means modernity can only go so far. Even in modern societies, life remains rooted in non-modern forms of connection: face-to-face conversation, embodied engagement with the physical world, apparently archaic practices such as ritual, sovereignty, or honour. We have, as the French sociologist Bruno Latour put it, never been modern; never completely at least. The historical question is how, in particular contexts in different ways, modern ways of doing things have been spliced together with non-modern forms of life.

‘For most of the world, modernity arrived as a fully formed composite’

Ooi Kee Beng is executive director of Penang Institute and author of Signals in the Noise: Notes on Penang, Malaysia and the World (Faction Press)

Modernity has to be considered a global event. It is quite impossible for us today to imagine a geographically limited modernity – confined, say, to Europe – in which technologies and ideas, or capital, goods, and labour, in one territory remain separate and inconsequential to another. If the world is fully connected, modernity is what made the connection.

Originally an explosive expression of European socio-political and philosophical development, modernity has come to be strongly associated with colonisation. For most of the world modernity arrived fully formed in the centuries preceding the Second World War, as a composite of established dynamics into which they were dragged in subjugated roles. For the illustrative example of Japan in the 1860s, modernity was a matter of learning and importing those dynamics – pertinently a modern military and Western scientific thinking. The Japanese thus experienced a ‘modernisation’ from within, embracing the process with haste. Many other countries did not want – or were unable – to go as far as Japan, and sought to limit the spread of modernity.

Modernity, then, was a violent process, revolutionary and disruptive. Only with the independence of the world’s colonised regions since the mid-1900s could modernity be considered a cultural and civilisational phenomenon rather than a political and imperialist one. ‘Localising modernity’, one could glibly say, is what ‘nation-building’ means to those postcolonial states that are now members of the United Nations.

How far they need to go –how ‘modern’ they need to become – remains a plaguing question. Thus we have seen the emergence of tag-on phrases such as ‘with Chinese characteristics’ or ‘with Asian values’. But it is a question that cannot be answered without the realisation that modernity is also tantamount to the establishment of international economics. A city-state like Singapore, established in 1819 to aid Britain’s post-Napoleonic global growth, was, in that sense, ‘modern’ from day one. Despite the ‘localising’ of Singapore since its independence in 1965, it remains the modern phenomenon that it always was: a hub for international economic activity.

‘All that can be ascribed to modernity can equally be ascribed to capitalist accumulation’

Christine Grandy is Associate Professor in History at the University of Lincoln

What is ‘modernity’ if not the equivalent of a laser pointer cast on a wall for historians to vainly chase? Deeply fashionable in the 1990s and early 2000s, modernity has all but disappeared from current works. The term has become so all-encompassing as to be virtually meaningless and has been debated to within an inch of its life. A distraction, a red herring, an anachronism, that does little to help us make sense of the past.

Much time has been spent by historians trying to ascertain when ‘modernity’ arrived in certain geographic and national contexts. Did the arrival of ‘the nation’ and nationalism usher in modernity? Did technology? The First World War and its very modern, destructive warfare is often pointed to as ground zero for modernity in the West. As a media historian, I’m inclined to argue that it was cinema, radio, and television that collapsed the boundaries of time and space and ushered in a life of scale and complexity for those living in the 1920s that surely marked something essentially different from what came before. But that, too, does not quite account for the continuities of traditions that stayed stubbornly untouched by access to the modern. Modern technologies can carry incredibly conventional ‘traditional’ narratives, as my work on the persistence of ‘blacking up’ in film and television has shown. The internet is hardly a vehicle of modernity at all: more old-fashioned exchanges around sexuality and race are difficult to imagine. It is the mass and frequency which cause us to want to see it as a product of modernity.

Casting back to the 1990s again, I still think the most convincing take is David Harvey’s argument in The Condition of Postmodernity that modernity is just a more fashionable term for industrial capitalism. All that can be ascribed to modernity can equally be ascribed to capitalist accumulation on an ever-increasing scale from the 19th century onward. Indeed, what smacks more of modernity than ‘deindustrialisation’? I’m being facetious, but I hope that illuminates just how unhelpful modernity as a term is to the historian. It is just a bit of ’90s nostalgia now and it does very little to help us conceptualise the traditions and ruptures of the past.