modernity

vanessa andreotti's framing:

I have tried to map the dynamic play of stories about modernity that circulate in academic contexts. Some of the stories defend and others critique modernity. I introduce the term modernity/coloniality and also draw attention to some peculiar characteristics of modernity.

In academia there are many competing stories about modernity from different disciplines, angles, perspectives, and agendas.

If you are interested in the academic literature in this area, I invite you to compare works written about modernity by authors in the global north and south, paying attention to how the positionality of the authors and their different geopolitical experience of modernity may have affected their content and approach to the subject. I recommend the following authors from the global south: Gayatri Spivak, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, David Scott, Arundhati Roy, Vandana Shiva, Leela Gandhi, Ramon Gosfoguel, Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Ailton Krenak, Saurabh Dube, and Arturo Escobar. I recommend books by the following authors from the global north: Zygmunt Bauman, Ann Stoler, Frederick Jameson, Arjun Appadurai, Bruno Latour, Elizabeth Povinelli, Anthony Giddens, and Marylou Hill.

The general overview I present here maps the difference between these stories in terms of where people think modernity comes from, why they think modernity is here, what modernity has given us, and what is at stake when modernity dies.

One of the most contested things about modernity is its origins. In many stories, modernity is presented as emerging in response to the authority and rule of the Church in Europe in medieval times. Other stories present modernity as a historical period that began with the Renaissance in the seventeenth century or the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Some stories present it as starting in the late fifteenth century with the colonization of what is known today as the Americas, and the initiation of the transatlantic slave trade. There are even stories that root modernity’s original seedlings in antiquity, in Greek philosophy.

Two other important contested issues are modernity’s intentions and legitimacy. One widespread story presents modernity as a general project of civilization that seeks to engineer society through humanism, reason, science, progress, and technology. There are stories that present it as a particularly Western project of civilization that has achieved nearly universal reach because of its merits. Other stories describe modernity as a local European design that has been imposed globally through explicit and subtle violence.

Still other stories present modernity as a project that has been resisted, transformed, and redesigned by different cultures.

Stories of post-modernity follow similar patterns of diversity.6

It is also important to note that most stories written about modernity defend modernity as the greatest achievement of humanity and the best of all possible worlds.7 Other stories see it as an expression of humanity’s capacity to simultaneously manifest extraordinary and terrible things, arguing that other worlds are possible.8 In these stories, many who benefit from modernity would be prepared to fight to secure its continuity. Many of those who are exploited by modernity would prefer to benefit from it, regardless of the costs.

Many would like to see modernity replaced by a different system. Some of those believe modernity is stuck in self-infantilizing behavior; some see it recklessly crossing several tipping points leading to its decline; others see it as approaching or already past its expiration date. Some believe a genuinely new system is only possible if we are able to learn the lessons that modernity has to offer in its decline.9

This book's intention is not to provide a synthesis of stories already told, but to offer different stories that can help us take a step back. This allows us to develop the dispositions to be taught by modernity itself—with honesty about its flaws and gifts—without trying to defend it, fix it, or prematurely replace it.

In this sense, modernity is not a corrupt project of the West that needs to be defeated and replaced with a more righteous and virtuous non-Western alternative, but rather something that is now (unevenly) part of all of us, conditioning the ways we experience reality.

The educational stories of modernity presented here do not seek to put modernity in a box as an object, or to describe it objectively and universally, or to prescribe what exactly you should do with it. Instead, the stories seek to move us to experience and observe manifestations of modernity and ourselves within it differently, with more sobriety, maturity, discernment, and accountability. This is crucial if we want to repair relations and make better-informed and more responsible choices as we face the storms ahead of us

10 This is an accessible starting point for the idea of coloniality: Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 168–178.

Modernity/Coloniality

This term functions as a reminder that the benefits we associate with modernity are created and maintained by historical, systemic, and ongoing processes that are inherently violent and unsustainable. In other words, this term underscores the fact that modernity cannot exist without expropriation, extraction, exploitation, militarization, dispossession, destitution, genocides, and ecocides.

This is substantiated by economic, political, and historical data, but, like climate crisis data, this data is deemed “too hard to deal with,” and largely ignored or reframed as something else. For example, in many stories of modernity these effects are considered the collateral damage of modernity rather than the necessary preconditions for modernity to exist.

One hell of a trick of modernity/coloniality is making itself appear benevolently omnipresent, while rendering its violence and unsustainability invisible. In the global north the stage is set to uphold the virtues of modernity, thus critics of modernity, especially from the global south, are often framed as not knowing what they are talking about. It feels like one is always being asked: “How can’t you see that modernity is the greatest thing that has happened since sliced bread?” To interrupt this ingrained assumption of greatness and benevolence, the term modernity/coloniality was created to underscore the fact that violence and unsustainability are necessary for modernity to exist.

The term has a Latin American origin and builds on a distinction between colonialism and coloniality proposed by Aníbal Quijano.11 While colonialism is often presented as the formal occupation and administration of lands and the subjugation of the original peoples of these lands, coloniality refers to the enduring manifestations of colonial relations, logic, and situations—even after the official decolonization of formal structures of governance. In this sense, coloniality represents a global hegemonic form of power that organizes bodies, time, knowledge, relationships, labor, and space according to economic parameters (i.e., exchange value) and to the benefit of particular groups of people, with or without formal colonization.

both colonialism and coloniality are constitutive of, and inseparable from, modernity:12 they are two sides of the same coin.13

Colonialism and coloniality were necessary for the creation of modernity—they are necessary for its preservation and they will be necessary for its expansion. The term also draws attention to the fact that conquest is the driving force of modernity/coloniality: the colonial desires to “discover,” to conquer, occupy, own, rule, and control propel modernity “forward.”14

While most critics of modernity/coloniality associate colonialism with the expansionist occupation of lands and the subjugation of peoples, many Indigenous peoples see these manifestations of violence as symptoms of a deeper and older form of violence that happens at ontological and metaphysical realms—the realm of “being.”15

This deeper, older violence is the imposed sense of separation between ourselves and the dynamic living land-metabolism that is the planet and beyond, as well as the theological separation between creature and creator. This imposed sense of separation, or separability,16 is based on human exceptionalism, the idea that humans are a superior species that deserve to conquer, dominate, own, manage, and control the natural environment.

The idea of separability is older than that of modernity itself.

Others focus on how it manifested in Greece, when Greek philosophy moved from oral traditions to the technology of writing, replacing contextual knowledge with a quest for universal meanings defined and documented by particular humans (i.e., logocentrism).17

This technological shift contributed to the perception that the trees and the land could no longer teach us anything of value and that human progress is to be found in cities. This is illustrated by a passage in one of the Platonic dialogues, Phaedrus, where Plato documents Socrates’s words: “I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open country won’t teach me anything, whereas men in the town do.”

In this sense, separability is a project of emancipation or liberation from “nature” that is carried forward by modernity/coloniality.

In addition to naturalizing separations and hierarchies between humans and nature, modernity/coloniality also produces separations and hierarchies within humanity. For instance, the capacity to reason in a legitimate way, or at all, is attributed to particular human bodies and particular cultures. This is the source of hierarchies where the worth of bodies and cultures is tied to their perceived ability to produce knowledge in a specific way. The capacity (attributed to certain bodies) to produce knowledge of universal worth has historically been used to justify cultural and gendered supremacy and to rationalize the occupation of lands and the racial subjugation and enslavement of peoples. Cultural supremacy secures a position where certain bodies are perceived to naturally embody authority and to be the legitimate arbiters of justice who are best fit to impose on other bodies what they believe to be objective and universal parameters and protocols for morality, ethics, economy, politics, and science.

is there an alternative?

Indexing the World into Words

If the primary orienting project of modernity/coloniality is to control and engineer reality through objective unequivocal knowing, this process can only happen through fixed categories of meaning. Knowledge production in this context focuses on certainties, objective descriptions, and moralizing prescriptions. This reflects a desire to index the totality of the reality of the world in unambiguous language that can describe it objectively. This is like putting everything in the world in boxes that can be labeled, categorized, and described accurately in an encyclopedia, forever captured in alphabetic writing in a fixed and perfect form. The next step is to create a powerful tower of knowledge made of brick-like encyclopedias that can stand the test of time and also represent a particular culture’s achievement, greatness, and legacy over centuries. I refer to this as “wording the world.” Wording the world drives the privileging of meaning within modernity/coloniality. We search for the meaning of life. We value things that are meaning-full, we ignore things that we perceive to be meaning-less. This obsession with meaning overrides other sensibilities to the point where we can only register what we consider meaning-full, and we may numb to sense-fullness (in the broadest, most sensorial sense).