Leiden, 27-­‐11-­‐2014 Transcript “Our World Today: Why Modernity Matters More in Lesotho than in London.” Speech by Cleveringa Professor Carol Gluck (Columbia University) A Story I would like to start today with a story. The place is Lesotho and the time is 1983. A man from Lesotho, Mr. Lebona, declared his intention to build what he called a “European style“ house: a rectangular house, with a cement floor, and a steel roof. Hearing him say this was an American anthropologist who was happily going native, living in a traditional roundhouse with stonewalls and a thatched grass roof, and marveling how his house stayed cool in the summer and warm in the winter. The well-­‐meaning anthropologist asked Mr. Lebona why he would want to build a European style house, which was less practical, and more expensive. Why would he want a “European” house, when a local house had all the advantages? Mr. Lebona looked him in the eye and asked, “What kind of house does your father have, there in America? Is it round?” “No, it’s rectangular.” “Does it have a grass roof?” “No, it does not.” “Does it have cattle dung for a floor?” “No.” “How many rooms does your father’s house have?” asked Mr. Lebona. “About ten, I think.” After pausing to let this sink in, Mr. Lebona said, “That is the direction we would like to move in.” Chastened, the earnest young anthropologist, who was James Ferguson, realized that Mr. Lebona’s aspiration for a European style house was not simply copying Western ways, but was instead “a powerful claim to a chance for transformed conditions of life… a place in the world, a standard of living, in short, ‘a direction we would like to move in’.”1 One name for that direction toward transformed conditions of life is modernity. What Does Modernity Mean to You? That depends not only on the country you live in, but also on your status in that country – your “place in the world” to quote the anthropologist again. Not everyone lives in the same time, even those who live in the same place, because the socio-­‐economic unevenness associated with modernity and capitalism occurs within countries, not only between them. 1 James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham: Duke University Press 2006) p. 18-­‐19. If you live in a well-­‐off country such as this one, or one of the G8 countries – Germany or Japan, Britain or the US – and if you and your family are relatively well-­‐off – with four rooms, say, rather than ten – you may even have heard that you are living in the era of postmodernity, in postmodern times, the era after the modern. Perhaps the word “modern” suggests a style of architecture, or maybe a painting by Picasso, or atonal music, and so on. Probably the architecture you think of as modern is not a rectangular house with a steel roof, but you have some sense that it is part of modern, or modernist culture, as we sometimes call it. But you probably don’t think modernity is something to aspire to, or reach out for, the way Mr. Lebona did. Or perhaps you have another name for what it is you do aspire to and reach out for. It is just not called modernity. So lucky you, one might say, or lucky us, who have the middle-­‐class equivalent of a ten-­‐ room house, but for much of the world, where the word “development” is today a stand-­‐
in for what used to be called “modernization”, modernity is – I quote the anthropologist again – not a distant abstraction, but a “folk category” of everyday life.2 It is a concept in daily living, and an aspirational one. That is why modernity means more in Lesotho than in London. What is Modernity? Look around and you will see in the early twenty-­‐first century world a collection of characteristics that amount to what can be considered a common “grammar of modernity”. It is a grammar because like all grammars it doesn’t exist unless it is embodied in particular sentences of a particular language. The grammar of modernity consists of such aspects as: • The nation-­‐state, which emerged as the political form of modern times. At the start of the twentieth century there were only 50 nation-­‐states, now the number is close to 200 and still increasing. • Mass society, increasingly urban (indeed the largest urbanization in terms of numbers is taking place now and will continue at least to 2050), with the accompanying disruptions and changes in communal life and the life of the countryside. • A national citizenry, the insistence in modern times that people know not only that they live in a nation, but that they are that nation’s nationals. They have to know that they are Japanese, or French, or Indonesia; a consciousness of national identity that did not exist in compulsory form before the modern period. • Political participation, the expectation, even if merely rhetorical, that the national citizenry participate in some way in the polity, whether in democracies, one-­‐
party-­‐dominant or even single-­‐party-­‐only countries. • Industrialization and capitalism, the structural changes in economic life that are global (even in socialist economies) and effect agriculture, industrial and postindustrial sectors, everyone and everything. 2 Theory Talk #34: James Ferguson: “James Ferguson on Modernity, Development, and Reading Foucault in Lesotho” (Nov. 22, 2009); http://www.theory-­‐talks.org/2009/11/theory-­‐talk-­‐34.html • Integration in the world order, whatever that world order is and whoever it is that dominates it. Integration in the world order – what we now call “globalization” – is not new, but it was never perhaps as ineluctably global as it is today. I think few will argue with these commonalities of modernity, although there are lots of other things one could mention, most of them quite evident in the world around us. Mr Lebona expressed views that demand our respect when he said, “That is the direction we would like to move in.” When is Modernity? It is an historical concept. It refers to a period that began to take shape in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. It is after the medieval, or, and this is the more common way of talking about it today, it is after the pre-­‐modern. Which simply suggests that modernity has absorbed the whole of history in a teleological way so that it’s all on its way to the modern. That period that began that long ago, I’m contending, still continues. We are still modern after all these years, and not post-­‐modern. Where is Modernity? We know modernity began to take its historical shape in England and France, but modernity has no nationality, anymore than railroads or constitutions or steel roofs do. Because modernity happened first in Europe, the definition of the modern – the definition that theorists and politicians and institutions have so often used – was derived from the empirical example of Western Europe. Yet actual existing modernity around the world does not necessarily follow that definition. It would be more accurate to say that modernity follows its nose, responding to time and place. Just as few would describe Christianity as an Asian religion because it originated in Western Asia, it is inapt to say that modernity is Western just because it began in Europe. But then you will ask, because you have learned your postcolonial lessons, “What to do about Eurocentrism?” How – in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty – to “provincialize” Europe? How do we allow societies around the world their own modernities, rather than keeping the so-­‐called non-­‐West forever in what Chakrabarty calls the “waiting room of history”, always not yet modern, while the West occupies the main halls of modernity.3 First we have to recognize that many of the aspects that originated in the West have long since been naturalized in other soils. As a historian, one of my favorite examples is to contemplate how difficult it would be to persuade generations of Asian and African historians that they should renounce the influence of Marx because he happened to be a German writing in England with unenlightened views of the non-­‐Western world. The power of Marxism in so many countries arose not from its foreignness but from its familiarity: Marx seemed to be describing the world the historians knew so well: their own. 3 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2000). It would be outrageous for Westerners to suggest that these historians abandon Marxism in the cause of liberating non-­‐Western peoples so they might have their own ideas of the development of history. These are modern ideas that belong to anyone who thinks they make sense. Chakrabarty gives another example when he writes that there is no way for post-­‐
colonial India to jettison the universal ideas of the European Enlightenment without also losing the concepts of citizenship, civil society, human rights, and social justice. These are not concepts that Chakrabarty (and many others) sees as belonging to any particular geographically or historically privileged modern place. Arguing for a heterogeneity of the modern in China, Wang Xiaoming described a “bidirectional process” of globalization, where what came from the West had to be interrogated and transformed by what came from within. In that regard, he acknowledged that McDonald’s in Beijing provided nutrition, convenience, speed, and efficiency, all part of the “life concept of the modern”.4 The point therefore was not to reject McDonald’s but to create a modernity with a Chinese difference. In short, modernity was Western, but also it was not. These are the aspects of what I call “modernity in common,” and it is no longer solely Western. Here I would add that when Western critics assuage their Eurocentric guilt by calling for societies to develop “their own modernity,” they are being, I believe, nearly as arrogant and condescending as the earlier Eurocentric colonial point of view that insisted on separating their modernity from ours. Which brings me to the question of: Alternative Modernities; Are There Any? In keeping with the impulse not to impose Western versions of the modern around the world, it has been fashionable for some time now to suggest that there are many ways to be modern, that societies can choose and develop their own modern and produce alternative, or multiple, modernities. But can they really? Is the nation state, for example, an optional form of political organization? It scarcely seems so. Is integration into the world capitalist order something a society can choose not to pursue or accept? Hard to imagine. In short, not optional. Modernity is the historical form, the destiny of our age. The world’s societies have modernity in common because, as one historian has noted, modernity is “historically a global and conjunctural phenomenon, not a virus that spreads from one place to another.”5 4 Wang Xiaoming, “Chūgoku ni okeru gendaika (kindaika) sōzō,” Shisō, no. 914 (Aug. 2000) p. 93-­‐95. 5 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400-­‐1750,” Daedalus 127, no. 3 (Sept. 1998) p. 98-­‐99. In the global conjuncture of modernity, one might identify two modes: one, coercive and the other, aspirational. In the imperialist international order of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, British imperial rule in India or Japanese colonial rule in Korea forced modernity on their subjects, and Japan’s defensive modernization itself was undertaken to avoid being colonized by the West. One can argue that this particular form of modernity was coercive; it was modernity “from the barrel of a gun”, which is how imperialism operated even if it sometimes claimed otherwise. But there were other aspects at the same time that were aspirational. Driven by the magnetic attraction of the modern, not only for elites but for wider society as well – think of Mr. Lebona’s European style house with the cement floor and the steel roof. In Japan and China, Egypt and Morocco, and lots of other places in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, “civilization” was defined in terms that seemed both Euro-­‐American (which was the Japanese word) and universal at the same time. Thus nationalist reformers in these countries regarded the unified nation-­‐state as the universal – not only European – political form of modernity and for that reason considered it desirable, even necessary. In response to their conjunctural moment, they assumed that modernity demanded a world of nations (and their empires) and they looked both to existing Western models and also to the theories that explained or underlay them. It’s important to note that these commonalities of global conjuncture in the late nineteenth and twentieth century did not apply only to “new nations” like Japan, Germany, and Italy, unified around the same time in the 1870s, but to nations as old as France, which were also responding to the imperatives of the nation-­‐state in its nineteenth-­‐century form, a form that demanded national citizens, national identity, and national unity. Across the changing global conjunctures of the twentieth century, modernity appeared in places all over the world. What is called the “westernization of the modern world” was in fact a “world-­‐ization of modernity”: modernity in common but differently inflected in different places. Some of you know that my current work is posed as a counter to earlier conceptions of modernity derived from the empirical basis of European experience. We now have what I call “a globeful of modernities” from which to develop different theories, different definitions of the modern. For my part I am trying to think about theorizing modernity on the basis of the empirical experience of Japan, just as that anthropologist, now enlightened, was doing based on the experience of modernity in Lesotho. Arguing for “modernity in common” means that I don’t believe that there are “alternatives,” in the sense of utter difference. Nor am I happy with terms like hybrid modernities, creolized modernities, or translated modernities to express the fact that modernity is both the same and different in different social places. So here I offer you yet another term, equally problematic, but I think you’ll see why I like it. Blended modernities The term “blending” comes from cognitive science. It is one way of describing how the human mind thinks. Greatly oversimplified, it goes something like this. The mind selects aspects of one thing (Input A) and aspects of another (Input B) and projects them to a third “mental space.” The resulting “blend” possesses what is called “emergent structure,” which means it is something new: it has aspects that are present in neither in Input A nor Input B. It is therefore not a hybrid; it is in fact “new,” the creative product of the process of conceptual blending. We might think of contemporary modernities as “historical blends.” Input A might consist of evolving historical conditions in a given time and place, the caste system, say in India (which was itself the product of early imperialist blending). Input B might refer to some Western, or “modern” component such as a parliament. The resulting historical blend was not a simply a hybrid or a dialectical synthesis of A and B. It was something new, “emergent,” with aspects that existed neither in A – India of earlier times – or in B – European parliaments. And indeed, scholars have suggested that over decades of parliamentary democracy, India developed a distinctive form of “caste politics.” The castes behaved differently in the parliamentary context, and electoral coalitions did not follow the class or ideological lines typically associated with European political parties. Indian parliamentary politics, in these terms, was new, a blended modernity. Of course you can see why this metaphor appeals to me. It enables every society to follow its modernizing nose, to produce new blends, with the result that in this case the Indian parliament is just as modern as other parliaments without its being just the same. Perhaps what we have now is a globeful of “blended modernities,” whether in Japan, Brazil, Iran, Thailand, or Lesotho. This suggests that we are all of us more or less modern in one way or another. Yet it also suggests that no particular modernity is merely imitative or inferior, since by definition each of them emerged as a new blend in a third space. Moreover, no society was exempt from the processes of historical blending: England, France, the Netherlands developed in precisely the same way. History offers no abstract model of the modern, only embedded real modernities produced by creative blending that never reaches an end. Historical blending, I submit, accounts both for the commonalities in modern times and also – because the blends were different – why we have differently inflected modern experiences. One might also identify transnational blends, where input A and input B emerge in a third transnational space, such as international human rights, human security, or transitional justice, which operate in different national settings neither as Western nor universal but as new historical blends. So to conclude, we live in a time of: Global Modernities: What Are Our Obligations to Our Age? • To understand the conditions that produce or impede the aspirational modern in places like Lesotho, conditions that lie both within and outside any given country, some of our own making, for example, how the World Bank and other international organizations or the GDPism of the development industry sometimes impedes rather than fosters the aspirational modern. • To understand the conditions that destroy or compromise the aspirational modern in places like London, where minorities do not have access to a modern “place in the world.” Or in Japan, which ranks near the bottom in the Global Gender Gap Report issued each year by the World Economic Forum. No one sits in a privileged position, vis a vis the task of getting the modern right. • To try to improve our global modernity by impelling it, as Mr. Lebona said, toward “a direction we would like to move in”, a direction we would all like to move in, a more human, more humane direction, a direction that is still modern, still true to our time but better. That is our task.