The debate on the legacy of modernity still seems to be very much an ongoing one, both in the realm of contemporary art and in social and political life. Although for a time there was the belief that we had entered a post-modern era, over the last decade the signs have begun to change. Are we perhaps really living in the midst of a kind of remnantal modernity, however fragmented and transformed this may be? This idea seems not completely unfounded, at least with regard to aesthetics or the life-world. Or could it even be that a Second Modernity has begun, as is at times claimed in the social science discourse? In recent times, moreover, the focus of interest has shifted to the question of other, alternative concepts of modernity. In this account, other modernities are the historically under-examined and unexplored possibilities that need to be reassessed both retrospectively and with an eye to the future. In this sense, this winter issue of springerin takes up a leitmotif of documenta 12 - »Is modernity our antiquity?« - and tries to develop it along global parameters.
The Indian Raqs Media Collective, for example, sees modernity as a kind of waiting room in which countless other narratives than those that are actually realised appear or can be brought to light. The idea of ghostly parallel histories or a kind of »off-modernity« finds an echo in Lawrence Grossberg’s theoretical exposé of alternative, or indeed multiple, modernities. Andreas Fogarasi’s research project on Hungarian cultural and educational institutions of the post-war era and a short feature on the Serb artist Nesa Paripovic round off this first thematic block.
A number of other articles show that the liberation of modernity from a standardised, or even totalising view has a great deal to do with a change in representational parameters: Markus Miessen looks in his essay at the question of what form an understanding of participation in political and cultural processes could take that is not based on consensus, but charged with conflict. In an interview, Sergio Bologna examines problems of representation with regard to current working conditions. And Suzana Milevska focuses on the issue of what restrictions and potentials come to bear in the representation of »bare life«, taking a film about the Roma minority in Macedonia as her example. An issue that, in view of current refugee problems, is likely to lose none of its urgency in the near future – which is why it will be given a more extended treatment in the next issue.