Imagining Modernities

I begin this brief reflection¹ by noting that, in the West, »modernity« is often called upon at moments of profound change and uncertainty, moments of organic crisis. Such moments demand both an understanding of what it is to be modern, and a modern theory of the present crisis. The concept of modernity is an unavoidable grounding concept of what can only be called, acknowledging the circularity, modern life and thought. The development of modern (Western) thought has continued, paradoxically, to set the very terms according to which society continues to produce itself as modern (but never the same modernity). The modern has multiple and different trajectories, histories, formations and possibilities. Moreover, it is not enough to say that the very being of the modern is constituted by difference, as variations on a theme (usually the theme in European in its origins), as in various theories of »glocalism« or »alternative modernities.« Nor is it enough to make modernity more complex by adding the unacknowledged complexity, including its barbarity.
Instead, I want to pose the problem of other modernities as the possibility of a multiplicity of ways of being modern, to avoid thinking of modernity as either singular or stable, or as if it were evolving through various stages (from early to late and eventually, post), as if its dynamics were somehow internal to itself. Yet neither it is useful to think of modernity in a narrative of ruptures. Instead I assume that transformations from one modernity to another are the outcome of both geo-historically specific trajectories and struggles, struggles that are often experienced and articulated reflexively as struggles over modernity.
I want, with Chakrabarty, to »learn to think the present—the now that we inhabit as we speak—as irreducibly not one.«² I want, with Gilroy, to »allow our understanding of modernity to travel« and to ask, »In what sense does modernity belong to a closed entity, a ›geo-body‹ named Europe.«³ I want, with C.L.R. James, to wonder whether modernity was invented in the »periphery« of the world system, in the Caribbean.⁴ I want to think »modernity elsewhere« and even »else when.«
In that sense, the question is not when or where modernity belongs but what it is to belong under the sign of modernity. I am not concerned with the contradictions within modernity but with the possibilities of contradictions between modernities. What would it mean to see modernity as multiple, always irreducibly not one, and as something that is both inescapable and to be won or produced, an object of continual contestation, always contingently being produced through the articulation of many different machineries, projects and struggles. What then constitutes ways of being modern as a changing same, as a singular universal (as opposed to a universal singular) or, adopting a phrase from the Precarias a la Deriva,⁵ a »singularity in common.« How do we constitute a concept of a singular yet plural, that is to say, a multiple, modernity?
I doubt that such a multiplicity of modernities can be understood in terms of the features of a social formation or a historical conjuncture. Instead, I must leap into an ontology of belonging, with Asad: »Modernity is not primarily a matter of cognizing the real but of living in the world.«⁶ And with Gilroy, who defines modernity as »a distinctive ecology of belonging.«⁷

[b]History and event[/b]
There are many (overlapping) ways of defining modernity—e.g., in terms of any number of particular kinds of subjects, experiences, logics or institutions. But given the project of refusing the universal singular of modernity, and embracing the multiplicity of singular universals, as ways of being modern, I will focus on perhaps the most fundamental dimension of any such ontology of belonging and becoming: one’s way of belonging to and in time (-space). I divide theories of the modern then into two broad sets, each built upon a particular chronotope, describing different discourses and configurations of time (-space): the (topological) time of history, and the time of the event.⁸
The most common chronotope of modernity—history—sees time as movement or change, from a past through a fleeting present into a future; the future passes into the past through the ever-disappearing present. In European or Atlantic modernity, such a history is seen as linear and often as progressive, but this is not the only possible configuration of change or history. In history, the present is the articulation of different temporalities—past futures and future pasts, embodying the contingencies of the past and the future in the present. There are at least three different ways of understanding the historicality of modernity: through particular macro-institutional structures (e.g., Benedict and Perry Anderson, Marx); as the realization of one or more socio-temporal logics (e.g., Giddens, Jameson); the nature of the experience of time itself (e.g., Berman’s rereading of Marx’s »everything solid melts into air« or Reinhart Kosseleck’s division of the experience of time into the »space of experience« and the »horizon of expectations«).
The second chronotope of the modern animates Benjamin’s other history,⁹ what he calls messianic time as »a cessation of happening . . . an enormous abridgement.« It can be traced back to Baudelaire, although not in the common image of the flaneur (an image of the first chronotope) but in his emphasis on the present and presence, on the now. Modernity is the construction of the new, the present, as a discrete moment of temporality (as in Heidegger’s three ecstasies of time). The present is the ontological locus of the lived, and the temporal locus of the subject as the subject of experience. It is the present-ing of the individual as subject of his or her own experience (and hence, the invention of modern subjectivity). The now is the moment of experience, a way of being in time. Thus Hall says that being modern bestows upon one »the privilege of living to the full the potentialities of the present from the inside.«¹⁰ »The present becomes the fullest moment, the moment of the greatest intensity, the solemn moment when the universal makes its entry into the real . . . The present is no longer the moment of forgetfulness . . . it is the moment when the truth comes out.«¹¹
The ontological reality, the discontinuity, the contingency, the »event-being« of the present as a concrete abstraction, the singular universal, constituting the context of experience and subjectivity, defines the second chronotope. Here I stand against those, like Zizek and Badiou, for whom the event represents the unrepresentable, the unprecedented, the absolutely singular. For them, the temporality of the event embodies the fantasy of an absolute rupture with the past. This seems to make the event, as the concrete universal, into the negation of both the ordinary and the particular.¹²
But the event of the present itself is not merely the fleeting and disappearing portal through which the future becomes past; it has a being-structure of its own. The present is a structure of belonging (in the present) and simultaneously, as Heidegger demonstrated, a project(ion) into a future. The present opens onto an always open future (the virtual as it were), even as the openness of the future has to be struggled for in the present. It has at the same time a more convoluted (or involuted perhaps) relation to itself, so that the eternal includes itself within the event of the present. As Dilip Gaonkar suggests, »in modernity, everything turns to the present, and that present, having broken out of the continuum of history, is an unceasing process of internal ruptures and fragmentation,« although he retreats by describing this too quickly (as I shall explain shortly) as »a leap in the open air of the present as history.«¹³ I prefer Benjamin’s vision »a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop«¹⁴, a kind of ontological between. It is, in Heideggerian terms, the event as eventing or happening; with such terms, being modern might be seen as a performance, where different modalities of performance describe different ways of being modern.¹⁵
As Foucault put it in his rereading of Baudelaire: »The value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is.«¹⁶ Thus, for Foucault, the »permanent critique, the experimentalism of the modern, at one and the same time, marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task.« Similarly Derrida talks about the »noncontemporaneity with itself of the living present.«¹⁷ There is then, coded into the very event of the present, a figure of double consciousness, not merely a consciousness of discontinuity, contingency and fleetingness, but also the expression of, as Foucault describes it, the eternal, the heroic, the transcendent in the immanent.
The present, in which one can »separate out from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do or think«¹⁸ embodies a paradoxical structure that results from the negation of history, similar to the logic that Yoshima Takeuchi identifies in the poet Lu Xu’s story of the slave, a logic that contravenes Hegel’s parable of the master and slave: »When the slave rejects his status as a slave while at the same time rejecting the fantasy of liberation, so that he becomes a slave that realizes he is a slave: This is the state in which one must follow a path even though there is no path to follow; or rather, one must follow a path precisely because there is no path to follow.«¹⁹ We might see this differently in terms of the present always being greater than itself, for in its reality it includes not only the actuality of the now, but the virtuality of the becoming. Speaking figuratively, the now of the present includes its own way out, its own possibility of movement and self-critique, precisely as the singular, emergent, contingent event.

[b]Spatiality of everydayness[/b]
But the chronotope of the event remains oddly incomplete, much as a history without geography, of a time without space. Surely the event must always be a spatial presence. »The experience of modernity is constructed as a relationship between time and space. It is a particular way of expressing one in terms of the other.«²⁰ Baudelaire located the »marvelous« event, or what he calls the »intimation of the eternal in the ruins of our tradition,« in the spatiality of everyday life. Thus it is anything but fortuitous that Baudelaire’s search for modernity is fixed, not in a break between the old and the new, not in a notion of social change and movement, but at the crossing where the »fugitive materiality« of everyday life impinges on a sharpened consciousness of the present«.
While Benjamin suggested that the present was »the actuality of the everyday« (and vice versa?), I believe Baudelaire was, at least implicitly, suggesting not the equivalence but the articulation of the present and everyday life, of the now and the here. But importantly, Baudelaire’s everyday life is not the life-world (of either Husserl or Habermas), nor the pragmatists’ cultural context (Rorty), for these other concepts collapse too quickly and easily into a phenomenological notion of the daily social reality in state-spaces.²¹ For Lefebvre, everydayness is an open-ended, incomplete, and contradictory site of practices. Harootunian elaborates on this: it is »a framework of temporal immanence . . . a minimal unit of temporary experience . . . . This minimal unity of the present, however precarious . . . [is] the actual and unavoidable experience of everydayness . . . identified as distinctly modern.«²²
Lefebvre characterizes everyday life first as a residue, as that which remains when you subtract all the institutional structures, all the meaningful and significant practices, and second, as a space of routinization and boredom, the space of the repetitive and the ordinary.²³ And yet, as both Lefebvre and de Certeau make clear, it is for that very reason that everyday life is also the realm of the popular as the privileged domain of an experience without power, and of a creativity that always exceeds and resists power. As Peter Osborne observes, »Everyday life is the place where ›the riddle of recurrence intercepts the theory of becoming‹.«²⁴
Everyday life refers to the uncataloged, habitual and often routinized nature of day-to-day living. It is what we don’t think about while we are living it, encompassing all those activities whose temporality goes unnoticed (i.e., we simply don’t even notice the time they take). It has a certain messiness—unsystematic and unpredictable—quality to it. And despite the fact that it functions as the common ground of all human thoughts and activities, it has as well a certain mysteriousness, since it always remains outside of dominant knowledges. In fact, it is opposed to abstract thought, which is incapable of ever understanding the dense particularity of everyday life. The everyday is simultaneously a particular structure of power, and a particular re-organization of daily life.
Everydayness points to the banality of everyday life, to the fact that »nothing happens and everything changes.« Everydayness is not a system but an adjective, a quality, a virtual reality as it were, or in Lefebvre’s terms, »a denominator common to existing [sub-] systems, including juridical, contractual, pedagogical, fiscal and police systems«²⁵ without ever achieving the unity and consistency of a style. Everydayness or banality seems to acknowledge that it is the taken-for-granted ordinariness of life itself that can add the excess that escapes, »the excess of living« as it were. If banality is the »transformative potential,« it is the overflowing of the ordinary, the common, which overflows every specialty. As Blanchot says, »the everyday escapes. That is its definition. We cannot help but miss it if we seek it through knowledge . . . It is not the implicit . . . to be sure it is always already there, but that it may be there does not guarantee its actualization. On the contrary, the everyday is always unrealized in its very actualization which no event, however important or insignificant, can ever produce.«²⁶
But everydayness does not equate banality with some sort of vital essence of life itself. Instead, the transformative potential of everydayness (the lived as banality, as the ordinary) is available only at the end of a trajectory, that is, as the result of lived practices. And thus, the ordinary as a common place is not the beginning point of everyday life but its end point. The quality of the banality of the lived is an accomplishment, so that the arrival at a common place is something that comes into being. Only in this way does everydayness introduce itself into our practices and techniques, and in this way, it »can reorganize the place from which discourse is produced«.²⁷ Everydayness is both residue and escape: it escapes every abstraction, every claim to coherence and regularity even as it »brings us back to existence in its spontaneity and as it is lived,« as Blanchot says.

[b]Modernity as intermediate space[/b]
The event of everyday life, that articulation of the present to everydayness, produces a distinctive diagram of social space built upon a distinction between, or better, the co-constitution of, a quotidian space, the lived space of everyday life and the institutional spaces of history.
The present/everyday as the site of the popular, the ordinary, experience itself as eventmentality, is set in relation to and juxtaposed with the space of institutions (that space usually identified with the modern), a space of society and political economy. Thus the splitting or doubling of the modern—event/history, everyday life/institutional space—poses not only a new spatial economy but also a new demand of power. For the apparent independence of the present from history calls forth the very historicization of the present, and the institutionalization of everyday life as the site of experience. This requires new forms and organizations of power and the production of a new diagram of institutional (state) and everyday life. Such power involves the management of temporality—of the present and of the future.²⁸ »Modernity is best characterized . . . as a fruitless attempt to achieve structure and coherence.«²⁹
In fact the power of these institutional spaces consists in organizing the structures and conducts of populations in and of everyday life.³⁰ In this way, everyday life is produced as what I have called structured mobilities or territoralizations. The tension between these two spaces makes change not only structurally possible, but also even normal and perhaps necessary.³¹ The space between, as it were, is the site of possibility of political struggle. In non-modern societies, only the institutional space exists (while in nomadic societies, only a certain quotidian life exists)—although we cannot properly even label them as such. Change can come only from either the outside or via an explosive revolution. On the other hand, the social diagram of quotidian and institutional spaces allows for the rapid multiplication of sources of change, since the relation between them, defining both the source and locus of change, is constantly sliding.³²
So one cannot locate the modern in either of the two chronotopes, but rather the constant co-production or articulation of the two modalities of temporality, in the irreconcilable difference and articulation, the necessary belonging together that is always a positive and productive relationship—I am not sure whether it is always a conflict—between the presentism (event) and the historicality of the modern. As Chakrabarty identifies it, modernity is located in the space where »the urgency of the ›now‹ [is] in tension with historicism’s not yet.«³³
Insofar as the chronotope of the event focuses entirely on the ontology of the present, as it were, it gives up not only any notion of historical change, but of any possibility of theorizing the historical specificity of the event itself. And insofar as the chronotope of history focuses entirely on change, it gives up the possibility of understanding both the immediacy and the ordinariness of the lived. In the contingent relation between the two modes of being-in-time, each of which is itself contingent and contextually specific, in this space of a life lived in a historicized and eventalized present, human life is opened to mediation and to the multiplicity of affective economies and semiotic regimes (producing territoralizations). Seeing the articulation, Benjamin has written that »History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous empty time, but time filled by the presence of the new.«³⁴
And insofar as each of these two structures of belonging in time, as well as the relation between them, is never simply singular and universal, as if there were only one possibility of presentism, or of history, or of their articulation, there are always multiple ways of being modern. This suggests that we see human reality as defined by a (non-Hegelian) dialectic of the virtual and actual. This, I might add, returning to the contemporary context of struggle that makes the modern into a question again, grounds the politics of the new right in the U.S., and is significantly different from the economy of the possible and the real, a politics of truth and failure, which still describes much of the strategy of the left in the U.S..
Such a dialectic introduces a different universality, not a universal singular but a singular universal. If the former defines a hierarchical abstraction out of the particular against which all future particulars have to be measured, the latter sees universality as interdependent with the movement across particulars in a non-hierarchical position. The result is that universality is always qualified, so that every individual represents a universal only in its very dynamic and differentially constituted specificity. This is a universality that is neither teleological (developmental) nor expansive (totalizing).
The desire to imagine other ways of being modern has drawn me to Levantine society, a society that Maria Rosa Menocal describes as »the first full flower of modernity.«³⁵ It is a society that embodies »a will to establish a wholly new society,« without teleology or universality, a society not only of tolerance but also of translators rather than proselytizers. It is a society, not exactly of hybrids, but of the constant articulation among differences, a society that embraces contradictions, built upon (at least Menocal claims) an ethic of »yes and no.«
My point is not to hold this up as a model of what we might become, but to see in it the possibility of other ways of being modern so that we can at least begin to re-imagine imagination itself. The virtual, unlike the possible, is grounded in the real, offering a different notion of imagination. For in the end, I believe that the hope for a different and better future may depend upon »a conscious movement from one particularity toward and inclusive plurality of particularities seeking convergence«.³⁶ In slightly different terms, »The capacity to hear that which one does not already understand« may thus depend on the recognition that »other temporalities, other forms of worlding, coexist and are possible.«³⁷