The Emergence of the Individual
“Modernity is neither a sociological concept, nor a political concept, nor exactly a historical concept. It is a characteristic mode of civilization which opposes itself to tradition.” In that way Jean Baudrillard began his definition of modernity for the Encyclopedia Universalis. The very first sentence shows the difficulties of dealing with such a slippery concept. Most authors agree that modernity is not a historical concept. More than designating a period or epoch, it designates some specific ways of thinking and approaching the world. “As modernity is not an analytic concept, there can be no laws of modernity: there are only traits of modernity. There is no theory of it either: only a logic of modernity and an ideology” (Baudrillard, p. 63).
But authors also seem to agree that its logic and ideology have an historicity. The initial point we should look for the roots of modernity is the Renaissance that put an end to the long period of the Middle Ages. (This period can be conceived as pre-modernity, where the individual was dominated by tradition). The ideas that emerged by Christopher Colombus, Galileo, Luther and Protestantism can be seen as paradigm’s shifts on the logic and ideology of that period that can be called an early modernity. Iñaki Urdanibia (Urdanibia, p. 45) and Jean Baudrillard (1985, p. 65) argue that the philosophical ground of modernity was placed in the XVII and XVIII centuries with Descartes and the Enlightenment. Rousseau, Diderot, a centralized monarchical State, and physical and natural sciences, with their applied technologies, also are emblematic of the establishment of philosophical modernity.
The philosophy of the Enlightenment viewed the individual as no longer being subjected to any Devine predisposition. The individual should only be subjected to the State, which is the abstraction of a social contract among “free” individuals. The smell of those ideas became that of powder and blood that impregnated the streets of Paris in 1789, and was dispersed throughout Europe. More than the establishment of “the modern centralized and democratic, bourgeois state, the nation with its constitutional system, its political and bureaucratic organization” (Baudrillard, p.65) what was fundamental for the configuration of the logic and ideology of modernity was that it proved that man (meaning it literally) had in his own hands the power to change and to bring “the new”.
The core aspect for understanding modernity is viewing it as “aesthetic of change for change’s sake” (Baudrillard, p. 69). For Gianni Vattimo, “modernity is the epoch in which the trait of being modern comes to be the determinant value.” He defines modern as opposed to “«reactionary», that is, stick to the values of the past, to tradition, to «exhausted» ways of thinking” (Translation is mine; Vattimo, p. 9). For Marshall Bergman, being modern is being surrounded by a world that gives man the promise of his transformation and that of the world itself (Bergman p. 1). For Baudrillard, this constant interest in the new is paradoxical because it becomes a “tradition of the new” (p. 63). The new becomes “a regulatory cultural function and thereby surreptitiously rejoins tradition” (p. 64); then Modernity’s ideology becomes conservatism through change.
Being very schematic we can identify some of the ideal-type traits of modernity -or its Metanarratives- in the following outline:
The Emergence of the Individual
The Grand-Narrative of History: Progress and Change
Science: The Light of Modern Knowledge
The Political Economy of Modernity
Those metanarratives overlap among each other. The conception of the individual in Modernity is directly linked to that of history, knowledge, politics, economy and narrative. That is also true regarding the other grand narratives of Modernity. But as I mentioned several times, the relation among them is sometimes a paradoxical one (“modernity is paradoxical, rather than dialectical”-Baudrillard, p. 70). Since several decades ago, some critical traditions have stated that the rules configured by modernity had undergone several shifts and ruptures. Those traditions speak about assuming these changes by approaching those issues from the perspective of a postmodern condition.
Some Remarks About Post-Modernity