Does modernity emerge? And if so, when? How often? Where?

These are the fundamental questions before us. They are questions about a term, modernity, that has been understood as a historical period, a type of historical event, a mindset or an attitude, a relative description, and an absolute one. Answering them requires not only some knowledge of the history of modernity (the thing that the word “modernity” might refer to), the history of “modernity” (the term that names the thing), but also some sense of the other terms that circulate around modernity – including “classical,” “primitive,” and “postmodernity,” but also “modernism” and “modernization” – and how those terms delimit and extend the meaning of the concept-word.

Before answering these questions, however, we need to consider something even simpler. “Modernity” is, most of the time, the name of a historical period (or periods). And periods are weird. For starters, how do we know when a historical period begins or ends? What helps us know? Sometimes periods begin with the death of a king or queen; some periods are also named for dynasties or for other major shifts in the political winds (e.g. Japan's Meiji Restoration). Sometimes periods begin and end around wars: the post-1865 United States, postwar Europe. Some periods address technologies: the Stone, the Bronze, or Information ages. Other periods refer to developments in aesthetics, like Baroque or Rococo. Some periods organize themselves around groups of events, like the Renaissance; some name loose cultural eras, like the Hellenistic Age. Some periods correspond simply to a time span (the Mesozoic era). And sometimes temporal periods grow, like the “long eighteenth century,” which today extends from the Glorious Revolution (1688) to the Battle of Waterloo (1815).

Now, obviously, these periods do not appear in quite the same way to the people living in them. No one living in the first years after the coronation of Queen Victoria thinks of themselves as living in the Victorian Age. Likewise no one went around in Iron Age England banging a drum and shouting, “The End of the Iron Age Has Arrived! Let the Roman Period Begin!” Periods are defined retrospectively, by people who have seen how things turned out. The other thing to say is that periods generally define an ethos or an attitude: we understand that lots of things happened in the Stone Age or the Jazz Age, but we consider the period in general to be characterized by the use of stone tools or the rise of jazz music. The period, that is, functions like a synecdoche, in which a part of something stands in for the whole thing, and is taken in some respects as representative of it.

Let's take these two basic intuitions about periods as a guide to thinking about modernity: that they are retrospectively constructed, and that they characterize a whole by describing some fundamental characteristic or ethos.

The first thing to say, then, is that “modernity” is a name given retrospectively to a period of human history. The people who named it were Europeans, and what they sought to do was to explain the shifts in European technology, culture, and society that were shaping their lives in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Looking backwards, they observed that a series of developments that included the European voyages of discovery, the rise of capitalism, the establishment of the modern nation-state system, the Scientific Revolution, and the beginnings of industrialization – all taking place between roughly 1500 and 1800, in different measures – seemed responsible for a pretty significant shift in the nature and structure of human life. Among the changes they observed among educated and powerful Europeans of the 1500s were a different sense of the very nature of temporality, a sense of the present time as something different from and potentially even superior to the past. This change, this sense of the present as somehow important and worth noting, contrasted sharply with what Europeans in previous centuries seemed to have thought – which is that their Europe was a pale shadow, in terms of civilizational richness and technological and intellectual power – of the classical world of Greece and Rome. This change explained among other things the rise in a number of European languages of the very word “modern,” composed from the Latin modo, just now, and meaning “in the present time.” The word appeared in French in the 1300s and in the other European languages in the centuries after; the Oxford English Dictionary lists its first appearance in English from 1485. The tension between old and new was exemplified in any number of ways, including the “quarrel of the ancients and the moderns” which swept the intellectual circles of Paris in the early 1600s. One way to think about modernity is that it involves the shift from a neutral meaning of “modern” as something present or contemporary, to a sense that the “modern” is inherently preferable to the classical, the new to the old, the present to the past.

The rise of this term “modernity” in the nineteenth century is responsible for the most common European division of the world into three major historical periods: the classical, the medieval, and the modern. We moderns, under such a projection, are characterized by the developments in science and technology, in the post-1750 nation-state and its apparatuses of power, stability, and control, in the rise of an economy characterized by financial flexibility and the use of capital-intensive processes of production, in the development of a theoretically neutral legal system, of mass education and the mass media, and perhaps most of all by a new attitude toward history itself. For “modernity” is not just the name of a historical period, but the name of a period characterized by its relation to time, change, and progress. To be “modern” is above all to believe that history moves forward, that the power of humankind to improve its situation is unlimited, and that the resources for that improvement can (and ought) to be shared equally among all human beings.

It is thus a critical fact about modernity that, for a philosopher like G.W.F. Hegel, a sociologist like Max Weber, an economist like Adam Smith or Karl Marx, this sense that something called modernity had happened or arrived was a claim not only about European history but about the history of the world. If modernity were real, then it marked the future not only of Europe but of the entire planet. The goods of modernity were not, after all, only available to those who thought they'd invented them. They were, in fact, usable by just about anyone, and indeed claimed, in the political and philosophical documents characteristic of the last decades of the eighteenth century, to speak to the “rights of man and citizen” or for “all men” who were “created equal.” In this way the worldview that comes to believe in modernity would unite the world into a single history that applied equally to everyone, and would reduce differences among nations to differences in their location on a temporal axis of development that had the wealthy nations of Europe as its leading edge. This transformation of all kinds of other differences into temporal ones – so that the difference between Angola and France is, from a certain point of view, merely an effect of the fact that Angola is “behind” France in economic or political or social terms, and all we have to do is help Angola catch up – is one of the fundamental driving forces behind the post-World War II structures of globalization (Fabian 2002).

This view holds true not just for the modern technological goods or economic structures, but for cultural and philosophical norms as well, as one sees in this question of Max Weber's, from 1920: “What chain of circumstances led to the appearance in the West, and only in the West, of cultural phenomena which – or so at least we like to think – came to have universal significance and validity?” (Weber 2002, 1). Whether or not it is true that (i) there are cultural phenomena of universal significance and validity, and (ii) they appeared in the West and only in the West, the very structure of the questions directs us neatly to the fundamental and somewhat unusual structure of modernity as a historical period. Modernity, for most of its conceptual history, means universalism, and, what's more, a universalism that begins in the West. It cannot mean otherwise; that is its ethos.

This universalizing habit explains some of the eventual criticisms of the concept. At its worst, “modernity” feels like some good old Eurocentric self-congratulation. Beginning in the 1990s, resistance to a single modernity took the form of a theory of multiple modernities, which “presumes that the best way to understand the contemporary world … is to see it as a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs” (Eisenstadt 2000, 2). Such theories might be thought of as attempts to democratize the notion of a universal modernity by splitting off its cultural and social elements from its technological and economic ones, what one might think of as the material apparatus of industrial and financial modernization. The latter, such theories imagine, is essentially universal, and imposes upon the world and its users some degree of similarity that merits the name modernity. But everyone can come to this technological and even technocratic modernity in his or her own way … the Chinese will then have Chinese modernity, the Indians Indian modernity, the Bolivians Bolivian modernity, and so on. In each case the cultural and social elements are conceived as a kind of flavoring or sauce for the main dish, itself still technological and economic. Whether such a theory restores a sense of full equality to the citizens of the planet or demotes Europe from its self-named position as the leader of history is, to my mind, fairly dubious, but you can see some of its appeal.

One more recent and cleverer version of this position argues for the treatment of modernity as a relative and transhistorical concept, referring then not only to the varieties of human culture after 1500, but also to a number of other critically important eras in human history that saw vast expansions in cross-cultural exchange, both technological and cultural, and that produced substantial changes in a variety of social, religious, aesthetic, economic, or scientific fields (Friedman 2015). This version of multiple, transhistorical modernities is just one of the more radical recent attempts to think the problem of modernity's emergence; it is also possible that, as Bruno Latour has argued, the whole idea of modernity is a hoax, and we have never been modern at all (Latour 1993). Other major revisions or adjustments to the standard narrative of modernity include theories of postmodernity, which could be explicitly Marxist (Harvey 1991) or not (Lyotard 1984), and various attempts to theorize the late twentieth century “inside” the framework of the modern. Hence “liquid” modernity (Bauman 2000) or “high” modernity (Giddens 2013), as well as “second” modernity (Beck 1992) and “trans” modernity (Dussel 2002). We may think of all such theories of history as attempts to understand the present's difference from the past, or the future's potential difference from the present – and this way as attempts to locate the horizon of modernity, either as something still far ahead of us (Giddens, Bauman, Beck) or as something visible, immediate, and potentially even already past (Lyotard, Jameson, Dussel). By the 2010s, however, much of the energy around the end of modernity seems to have dissipated, a loss characterized by Jameson's claim that it is easier today “to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” (Jameson 2003, 76). Indeed today the end of the world seems all-too-imaginable, even if most of our visions of post-apocalyptic futures caused by self-inflicted environmental or biological disasters of all kinds (zombies, for example) seem merely to return us to an earlier, more “primitive” point on our own historical timeline – a pretty universalizing, and hence modern, way of imagining the future.

In fact that's one of the problems with the idea of modernity: even if it did once emerge, it seems impossible that we should be able to emerge, in turn, from it. For every invocation of the postmodern, of a future constituted by commonwealth (Hardt and Negri 2009) or multitudes (Hardt and Negri 2005), of the time when “man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault 1994, 387), of the posthuman in all its varieties (Hayles 1999; Poster 2006; Clarke 2008), it is difficult to conceive of a future that would be as different from the modern as the modern is – allegedly – from the medieval, the classical, or the primitive. Part of what it means to be modern is, in this sense, to imagine both that the entire world shares a single, unitary history, philosophy, geography, and set of economic, scientific, and social possibilities – for good and for ill! (Hayot 2012) – while also locating oneself on the other side from a premodern lifeworld whose difference from the present is absolute. This contradiction is at the heart of the emergence of modernity, which, after all, is an invention of the nineteenth century, and not necessarily a fact about the sixteenth.

Part of what this means is that the next few chapters in this book will be written about people who had no idea that modernity existed, or that they were a part of it. It may well be that in the long run modernity will turn out not to have existed at all – that humans in some distant future will come to believe that modernity was a particular kind of delusion propagated by the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries upon themselves – much as I believe, today, that the golden age from which the people of pre-Christian Babylon felt themselves to have slipped was a mere projection of their own emotional and social needs onto the distant past. But of course even if modernity never really emerged, even if it never really existed, we can nonetheless be quite sure that “modernity” did. The impact of the theory-concept of modernity on the history of the last 200 years is unmistakable, for it is by people who thought of themselves as moderns, and by nation-states, corporations, non-governmental organizations, societies, and cultural groups of all sorts that thought of themselves as modern, that the history of recent centuries has been made. In this sense “modernity” emerges after all, and the ways of its thinking, and of its impact on the history of literature, are certainly visible in the chapters that follow – if only because of how we read them, today, as our precursors and forebears.

SEE ALSO: Introduction to World Literature 1451 to 1770; Introduction to World Literature 1771 to 1919; Bridge Essay: Colonial Encounters in the Worlding of Literature; Bridge Essay: Nation: The Mighty Idea and the Novel; Bridge Essay: Inalienable: Human Rights and World Literature; Introduction to World Literature 1920 to the Early Twenty‐First Century; Bridge Essay: From Decolonization to Decoloniality; Bridge Essay: Literature and Liberalism: An Evolving Symbiosis; Bridge Essay: From Human Rights to Social Justice: Literature and the Struggle for a Better World