Modernity: some general considerations

In this book I use the term `modernity' in a very general sense, to refer to the institutions and modes of behaviour established first

-- 15 --

of all in post-feudal Europe, but which in the twentieth century increasingly have become world-historical in their impact. `Modernity' can be understood as roughly equivalent to `the industrialised world', so long as it be recognised that industrialism is not its only institutional dimension. ³ I take industrialism to refer to the social relations implied in the widespread use of material power and machinery in production processes. As such, it is one institutional axis of modernity. A second dimension is captialism, where this term means a system of commodity production involving both competitive product markets and the commodification of labour power. Each of these can be distinguished analytically from the institutions of surveillance, the basis of the massive increase in organisational power associated with the emergence of modern social life. Surveillance refers to the supervisory control of subject populations, whether this control takes the form of `visible' supervision in Foucault's sense, or the use of information to coordinate social activities. This dimension can in turn be separated from control of the means of violence in the context of the `industrialisation of war'. Modernity ushers in an era of `total war', in which the potential destructive power of weaponry, signalled above all by the existence of nuclear armaments, becomes immense.

Modernity produces certain distinct social forms, of which the most prominent is the nation-state. A banal observation, of course, until one remembers the established tendency of sociology to concentrate on `society' as its designated subject-matter. The sociologist's `society', applied to the period of modernity at any rate, is a nation-state, but this is usually a covert equation rather than an explicitly theorised one. As a sociopolitical entity the nation-state contrasts in a fundamental way with most types of traditional order. It develops only as part of a wider nation-state system (which today has become global in character), has very specific forms of territoriality and surveillance capabilities, and monopolises effective control over the means of violence. ⁴ In the literature of international relations, nation-states are often treated as `actors' -- as `agents' rather than `structures' -- and there is a definite justification for this. For modern states are reflexively monitored systems which, even if they do not `act' in the strict sense of the term, follow coordinated policies and plans on a geopolitical scale. As such, they are a prime example of a more

-- 16 --

general feature of modernity, the rise of the organisation. What distinguishes modern organisations is not so much their size, or their bureaucratic character, as the concentrated reflexive monitoring they both permit and entail. Who says modernity says not just organisations, but organisation -- the regularised control of social relations across indefinite time-space distances.

Modern institutions are in various key respects discontinuous with the gamut of pre-modern cultures and ways of life. One of the most obvious characteristics separating the modern era from any other period preceding it is modernity's extreme dynamism. The modern world is a `runaway world': not only is the pace of social change much faster than in any prior system, so also is its scope, and the profoundness with which it affects pre-existing social practices and modes of behaviour. ⁵

What explains the peculiarly dynamic character of modern social life? Three main elements, or sets of elements, are involved -- and each of them is basic to the arguments deployed in this book. The first is what I call the separation of time and space. All cultures, of course, have possessed modes of time-reckoning of one form or another, as well as ways of situating themselves spatially. There is no society in which individuals do not have a sense of future, present and past. Every culture has some form of standardised spatial markers which designate a special awareness of place. In pre-modern settings, however, time and space were connected through the situatedness of place.

Larger pre-modern cultures developed more formal methods for the calculation of time and the ordering of space -- such as calendars and (by modern standards) crude maps. Indeed, these were the prerequisites for the `distancing' across time and space which the emergence of more extensive forms of social system presupposed. But in pre-modern eras, for the bulk of the population, and for most of the ordinary activities of day-to-day life, time and space remained essentially linked through place. `When' markers were connected not just to the `where' of social conduct, but to the substance of that conduct itself.

The separation of time from space involved above all the development of an `empty' dimension of time, the main lever which also pulled space away from place. The invention and diffusion of the mechanical clock is usually seen -- rightly -- as the prime expression of this process, but it is important not to

-- 17 --

interpret this phenomenon in too superficial a way. The wide-spread use of mechanical timing devices facilitated, but also presumed, deeply structured changes in the tissue of everyday life -- changes which could not only be local, but were inevitably universalising. A world that has a universal dating system, and globally standardised time zones, as ours does today, is socially and experientially different from all pre-modern eras. The global map, in which there is no privileging of place (a universal projection) is the correlate symbol to the clock in the `emptying' of space. It is not just a mode of portraying `what has always been there' -- the geography of the earth -- but is constitutive of quite basic transformations in social relations.

The emptying out of time and space is in no sense a unilinear development, but proceeds dialectically. Many forms of `lived time' are possible in social settings structured through the separation of time and space. Moreover, the severance of time from space does not mean that these henceforth become mutually alien aspects of human social organisation. On the contrary: it provides the very basis for their recombination in ways that coordinate social activities without necessary reference to the particularities of place. The organisations, and organisation, so characteristic of modernity are inconceivable without the reintegration of separated time and space. Modern social organisation presumes the precise coordination of the actions of many human beings physically absent from one another; the `when' of these actions is directly connected to the `where', but not, as in pre-modern epochs, via the mediation of place.

We can all sense how fundamental the separation of time from space is for the massive dynamism that modernity introduces into human social affairs. The phenomenon universalises that `use of history to make history' so intrinsic to the processes which drive modern social life away from the hold of tradition. Such historicity becomes global in form with the creation of a standardised `past' and a universally applicable `future': a date such as the `year 2000' becomes a recognisable marker for the whole of humanity.

The process of the emptying of time and space is crucial for the second major influence on modernity's dynamism, the disembedding of social institutions. I choose the metaphor of disembedding in deliberate opposition to the concept of `differentiation' sometimes

-- 18 --

adopted by sociologists as a means of contrasting pre-modern with modern social systems. Differentiation carries the imagery of the progressive separation of functions, such that modes of activity organised in a diffuse fashion in pre-modern societies become more specialised and precise with the advent of modernity. No doubt this idea has some validity, but it fails to capture an essential element of the nature and impact of modern institutions -- the `lifting out' of social relations from local contexts and their rearticulation across indefinite tracts of time-space. This `lifting out' is exactly what I mean by disembedding, which is the key to the tremendous acceleration in time-space distanciation which modernity introduces.

Disembedding mechanisms are of two types, which I term `symbolic tokens' and `expert systems'. Taken together, I refer to these as abstract systems. Symbolic tokens are media of exchange which have standard value, and thus are interchangeable across a plurality of contexts. The prime example, and the most pervasively important, is money. Although the larger forms of pre-modern social system have all developed monetary exchange of one form or another, money economy becomes vastly more sophisticated and abstract with the emergence and maturation of modernity. Money brackets time (because it is a means of credit) and space (since standardised value allows transactions between a multiplicity of individuals who never physically meet one another). Expert systems bracket time and space through deploying modes of technical knowledge which have validity independent of the practitioners and clients who make use of them. Such systems penetrate virtually all aspects of social life in conditions of modernity -- in respect of the food we eat, the medicines we take, the buildings we inhabit, the forms of transport we use and a multiplicity of other phenomena. Expert systems are not confined to areas of technological expertise. They extend to social relations themselves and to the intimacies of the self. The doctor, counsellor and therapist are as central to the expert systems of modernity as the scientist, technician or engineer.

Both types of expert system depend in an essential way on trust, a notion which, as has been indicated, plays a primary role in this book. Trust is different from the form of confidence which Georg Simmel called the `weak inductive knowledge' involved in

-- 19 --

formal transactions. ⁶ Some decisions in life are based on inductive inferences from past trends, or from past experience believed in some way to be dependable for the present. This kind of confidence may be an element in trust, but it is not sufficient in itself to define a trust relation. Trust presumes a leap to commitment, a quality of `faith' which is irreducible. It is specifically related to absence in time and space, as well as to ignorance. We have no need to trust someone who is constantly in view and whose activities can be directly monitored. Thus, for example, jobs which are monotonous or unpleasant, and poorly paid, in which the motivation to perform the work conscientiously is weak, are usually `low-trust' positions. `High-trust' posts are those carried out largely outside the presence of management or supervisory staff. ⁷ Similarly, there is no requirement of trust when a technical system is more or less completely known to a particular individual. In respect of expert systems, trust brackets the limited technical knowledge which most people possess about coded information which routinely affects their lives.

Trust, of varying sorts and levels, underlies a host of day-to-day decisions that all of us take in the course of orienting our activities. But trusting is not by any means always the result of consciously taken decisions: more often, it is a generalised attitude of mind that underlies those decisions, something which has its roots in the connection between trust and personality development. We can make the decision to trust, a phenomenon which is common because of the third underlying element of modernity (already mentioned, but also further discussed below): its intrinsic reflexivity. But the faith which trust implies also tends to resist such calculative decision-making.

Attitudes of trust, in relation to specific situations, persons or systems, and on a more generalised level, are directly connected to the psychological security of individuals and groups. Trust and security, risk and danger: these exist in various historically unique conjunctions in conditions of modernity. The disembedding mechanisms, for example, purchase wide arenas of relative security in daily social activity. People living in the industrialised countries, and to some extent elsewhere today, are generally protected from some of the hazards routinely faced in pre-modern times -- such as those emanating from inclement nature. On the other hand, new risks and dangers are created through the

-- 20 --

disembedding mechanisms themselves, and these may be local or global. Foodstuffs purchased with artificial ingredients may have toxic characteristics absent from more traditional foods; environmental hazards might threaten the ecosystems of the earth as a whole.

Modernity is essentially a post-traditional order. The transformation of time and space, coupled with the disembedding mechanisms, propel social life away from the hold of pre-established precepts or practices. This is the context of the thoroughgoing reflexivity which is the third major influence on the dynamism of modern institutions. The reflexivity of modernity has to be distinguished from the reflexive monitoring of action intrinsic to all human activity. Modernity's reflexivity refers to the susceptibility of most aspects of social activity, and material relations with nature, to chronic revision in the light of new hiformation or knowledge. Such information or knowledge is not incidental to modern institutions, but constitutive of them -- a complicated phenomenon, because many possibilities of reflection about reflexivity exist in modern social conditions. As the discussion of Second Chances indicated, the social sciences play a basic role in the reflexivity of modernity: they do not simply `accumulate knowledge' in the way in which the natural sciences may do.

-- 21 --

In respect both of social and natural scientific knowledge, the reflexivity of modernity turns out to confound the expectations of Enlightenment thought -- although it is the very product of that thought. The original progenitors of modern science and philosophy believed themselves to be preparing the way for securely founded knowledge of the social and natural worlds: the claims of reason were due to overcome the dogmas of tradition, offering a sense of certitude in place of the arbitrary character of habit and custom. But the reflexivity of modernity actually undermines the certainty of knowledge, even in the core domains of natural science. Science depends, not on the inductive accumulation of proofs, but on the methodological principle of doubt. No matter how cherished, and apparently well established, a given scientific tenet might be, it is open to revision -- or might have to be discarded altogether -- in the light of new ideas or findings. The integral relation between modernity and radical doubt is an issue which, once exposed to view, is not only disturbing to philosophers but is existentially troubling for ordinary individuals.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 1054