Download or read book Instead of modernity written by Andrew Ginger and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book revisits the claim that a key dimension of cultural modernity – understood as a turn to the autonomy of the signs and the erasure of the 'face of man' - arose in the mid-nineteenth century. It presents an alternative to that obsession, focusing instead on the aesthetic appreciation of forms through which connections are realised across place and time. The book is one of few to offer a comparative approach to numerous major writers and artists of this period over diverse countries. Specifically, the comparative approach overcomes the constitutively ambiguous relation between the modern and the Hispanic. The Hispanic is often imagined as at once foundational for and excluded from the modern world. Its reincorporation into the story of the mid-century unsettles the notion of modernity. The book offers instead an experiment in writing, tracing commonalities across place and time, and drawing on mid-century expressions of such likenesses.
Download or read book Alternative Modernity written by Andrew Feenberg and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1995-11-07 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new collection of essays, Andrew Feenberg argues that conflicts over the design and organization of the technical systems that structure our society shape deep choices for the future. A pioneer in the philosophy of technology, Feenberg demonstrates the continuing vitality of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. He calls into question the anti-technological stance commonly associated with its theoretical legacy and argues that technology contains potentialities that could be developed as the basis for an alternative form of modern society. Feenberg's critical reflections on the ideas of Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-François Lyotard, and Kitaro Nishida shed new light on the philosophical study of technology and modernity. He contests the prevalent conception of technology as an unstoppable force responsive only to its own internal dynamic and politicizes the discussion of its social and cultural construction. This argument is substantiated in a series of compelling and well-grounded case studies. Through his exploration of science fiction and film, AIDS research, the French experience with the "information superhighway," and the Japanese reception of Western values, he demonstrates how technology, when subjected to public pressure and debate, can incorporate ethical and aesthetic values.
Download or read book Bauman Elias and Latour on Modernity and Its Alternatives written by Sandro Segre and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Bauman, Elias and Latour on Modernity and Its Alternatives’ provides a comparison between the conceptions of modernity and its alternatives in the works of Bauman, Elias and Latour. Their work and research are linked to their distinct views on modernity and its alternatives. For Bauman, the rationality, effectiveness and impersonality that characterize present-day bureaucratic apparatuses are the distinguishing features of modernity. Its post-modern or ‘liquid’ alternative has none of these traits. For Elias, modernity has two different and contrasting faces, that of civilization and barbarity. Elias conceives of civilization as a process connoted by self-control and pacification, which prevail as a consequence of the restraint which honor and morality exert on individuals. By contrast, the breakdown of civilization involves barbarity. For Latour, modernity if defined by a separation between society and nature, or humans and non-humans, has never existed. By virtue of their intimate association, humans and non-humans have formed hybrids, whose proliferation is the hallmark of our age. Modernity, therefore, has never prevailed. Alternatives to hybrids are, in the current age, failed hybrids. The set of alternatives is then as follows: modernity vs. post-modernity (Bauman); civilization vs. barbarity (Elias); and successful vs. unsuccessful hybrids (Latour).
Download or read book Insurgent Universality written by Massimiliano Tomba and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars commonly take the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, written during the French Revolution, as the starting point for the modern conception of human rights. According to the Declaration, the rights of man are held to be universal, at all times and all places. But as recent crises around migrants and refugees have made obvious, this idea, sacred as it might be among human rights advocates, is exhausted. This book suggests that we need to think of a different idea of universality that exceeds the juridical universialism of the Declaration. Insurgent Universality investigates alternative trajectories of modernity that have been repressed, hindered, and forgotten. Investigating radical upheavals, Tomba excavates an alternative idea of universality that is based on popular political practices that disrupt and reject the existing political and economic order. The book shows how this tradition builds bridges between European and non-European political and social experiments.
Download or read book Modernity and Subjectivity written by Harvie Ferguson and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few concepts have come to dominate the human sciences as much as modernity, yet there is very little agreement over what the term actually means. Every aspect of contemporary human reality--modern society, modern life, modern times, modern art, modern science, modern music, the modern world--has been cited as a part of modernity's distinctive and all-embracing presence. But what is the exact nature of the reality to which the term modern refers? Has not such a promiscuous, ill-defined concept come to obscure and confuse rather than clarify a genuine understanding of our experience? Harvie Ferguson proposes a new view of modernity, arguing that, although it may variously be associated with the Renaissance, the European discovery of the New World, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and many other significant ruptures with primitive or premodern society, modernity fails as an idea if it only defines itself against what it replaced. Instead, he writes, modernity finds its clearest definition through an exploration of subjectivity. For the modern world there is no higher authority than experience. No longer is the human world subordinate to a divine reality beyond the capacity of its own senses. This idea finds its greatest expression in the philosophy of doubt originated by Descartes. Doubt seemed the radical starting point from which to found a wholly modern philosophy that makes the distinction between subject and object, but those who came after Descartes soon reached the limits of self-discovery and became trapped in deepening levels of despair. This despair in turn found expression in the concepts of self and other, and eventually in a dialectic of ego and world, which distinguishes and links together the most important social, cultural, and psychological aspects of modernity. Moving beyond these dualities of subject and object, mind and body, ego and world, and replacing them with the triad of body, soul, and spirit, Ferguson redraws the map of contemporary experience, finding links with the premodern world that modernity's self-founding concealed.
Download or read book Alternative Modernity written by Andrew Feenberg and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1995-11-07 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new collection of essays, Andrew Feenberg argues that conflicts over the design and organization of the technical systems that structure our society shape deep choices for the future. A pioneer in the philosophy of technology, Feenberg demonstrates the continuing vitality of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. He calls into question the anti-technological stance commonly associated with its theoretical legacy and argues that technology contains potentialities that could be developed as the basis for an alternative form of modern society. Feenberg's critical reflections on the ideas of Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-François Lyotard, and Kitaro Nishida shed new light on the philosophical study of technology and modernity. He contests the prevalent conception of technology as an unstoppable force responsive only to its own internal dynamic and politicizes the discussion of its social and cultural construction. This argument is substantiated in a series of compelling and well-grounded case studies. Through his exploration of science fiction and film, AIDS research, the French experience with the "information superhighway," and the Japanese reception of Western values, he demonstrates how technology, when subjected to public pressure and debate, can incorporate ethical and aesthetic values.
Download or read book Instead of Modernity written by Andrew Ginger and published by . This book was released on 2024-08-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the heart of the book is a departure from the obsession with "modernity" that has been so prominent in nineteenth-century cultural studies.
Download or read book Post Growth Living written by Kate Soper and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An urgent and passionate plea for a new and ecologically sustainable vision of the good life. The reality of runaway climate change is inextricably linked with the mass consumerist, capitalist society in which we live. And the cult of endless growth, and endless consumption of cheap disposable commodities isn't only destroying the world, it is damaging ourselves and our way of being. How do we stop the impending catastrophe, and how can we create a movement capable of confronting it head-on? In Post-Growth Living, philosopher Kate Soper offers an urgent plea for a new vision of the good life, one that is capable of delinking prosperity from endless growth. Instead, she calls for a renewed emphasis on the joys of being, one that is capable of collective happiness not in consumption but by creating a future that allows not only for more free time, and less conventional and more creative ways of using it, but also for more fulfilling ways of working and existing. This is an urgent and necessary intervention into debates on climate change.
Download or read book Modernity in Indian Social Theory written by A. Raghuramaraju and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-06 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike the West, India presents a fascinating example of a society where the pre-modern continues to co-exist with the modern. Modernity in Indian Social Theory explores the social variance between India and the West to show how it impacted their respective trajectories of modernity. A. Raghuramaraju argues that modernity in the West involved disinheriting the pre-modern, and temporal ordering of the traditional and modern. It was ruthlessly implemented through programmes of industrialization, nationalism, and secularism. This book underscores that India did not merely the Western model of modernity or experience a temporal ordering of society. It situates this sociological complexity in the context of the debates on social theory. The author critically examines various discourses on modernity in India, including Partha Chatterjee’s account of Indian nationalism; Javeed Alam’s reading of Indian secularism; the use of the term pluralism by some Indian social scientists; and Gopal Guru’s emphasis on the lived Dalit experience. He also engages with the readings on key thinkers including Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Gandhi, and Ambedkar.
Download or read book Spectacular Modernity written by Lisa Blackmore and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2017-07-22 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In cultural history, the 1950s in Venezuela are commonly celebrated as a golden age of modernity, realized by a booming oil economy, dazzling modernist architecture, and nationwide modernization projects. But this is only half the story. In this path-breaking study, Lisa Blackmore reframes the concept of modernity as a complex cultural formation in which modern aesthetics became deeply entangled with authoritarian politics. Drawing on extensive archival research and presenting a wealth of previously unpublished visual materials, Blackmore revisits the decade-long dictatorship to unearth the spectacles of progress that offset repression and censorship. Analyses of a wide range of case studies—from housing projects to agricultural colonies, urban monuments to official exhibitions, and carnival processions to consumerculture—reveal the manifold apparatuses that mythologized visionary leadership, advocated technocratic development, and presented military rule as the only route to progress. Offering a sharp corrective to depoliticized accounts of the period, Spectacular Modernity instead exposes how Venezuelans were promised a radically transformed landscape in exchange for their democratic freedoms.
Download or read book Modernity and Power written by Frank Ninkovich and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994-11-15 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernity and Power provides a fresh conceptual overview of twentieth-century United States foreign policy, from the Roosevelt and Taft administrations through the presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson. Beginning with Woodrow Wilson, American leaders gradually abandoned the idea of international relations as a game of geopolitical interplays, basing their diplomacy instead on a symbolic opposition between "world public opinion" and the forces of destruction and chaos. Frank Ninkovich provocatively links this policy shift to the rise of a distinctly modernist view of history. To emphasize the central role of symbolism and ideological assumptions in twentieth-century American statesmanship, Ninkovich focuses on the domino theory—a theory that departed radically from classic principles of political realism by sanctioning intervention in world regions with few financial or geographic claims on the national interest. Ninkovich insightfully traces the development of this global strategy from its first appearance early in the century through the Vietnam war. Throughout the book, Ninkovich draws on primary sources to recover the worldview of the policy makers. He carefully assesses the coherence of their views rather than judge their actions against "objective" realities. Offering a new alternative to realpolitic and economic explanations of foreign policy, Modernity and Power will change the way we think about the history of U.S. international relations.
Download or read book Alternative Modernities written by Giuseppe Vacca and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-23 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antonio Gramsci lived the Great War as a “historic break,” a profound experience that left an indelible mark on the development of his political thought. Translated into English for the first time, Alternative Modernities reconstructs and analyses this critical period of Gramsci’s intellectual formation through a systematic analysis of his writings from 1915 to 1935. For Gramsci, Soviet Communism, “Americanism,” and the “new” Fascist State were the principle responses to the crisis of the old world order. He portrayed them as the three protagonists of twentieth-century modernity, alternatives destined to tragically clash in the worldwide struggle for hegemony. Among the arguments in his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci casts doubt on the political strategy of Soviet Communism and the theoretical underpinnings of “official Marxism.” Instead, he suggests a radical revision of Marxism by breathing life into a new interpretation whose fundamental concepts are: politics as the struggle for hegemony, the “passive revolution” as a historical paradigm of modernity, and the philosophy of praxis as the welding between visions of the worlds, historical analyses, and political strategies. Gramsci’s intuitions culminate in a new theory of the political subject, supported by a reflection upon the 20th century that still speaks to us today, pointing the way toward a new narrative of world history.
Download or read book Interventions written by Andrew Smith and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to intervene in current critical contexts for the study of nineteenth-century literature within the academy and beyond. Topics discussed include science and technology, poetry and philosophy, the Gothic, anatomical exhibitions, the global spread of liberalism, Anglo-American publishing, Punjabi popular culture and the neo-Victorian in literature, film and performance. By bringing together a broad range of intellectually challenging perspectives, the book offers an engaging critical overview of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies that will appeal both to scholars working within the field and students and teachers encountering this fascinating area of study for the first time.
Download or read book Alternative Modernities written by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A special issue of PUBLIC CULTURE, this volume of essays examines modernity from transnational and transcultural perspectives, holding that within different cultures, there are different starting points of the transition to modernity that lead to differen
Download or read book Hospicing Modernity written by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thought-provoking guide to facing global pandemics, climate change, and other modern crises with maturity, humility, and integrity—for fans of Everything Is F*cked and Against Purity This book is not easy: it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers. Instead, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira presents us with a challenge: to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth, and to interrupt the modern behavior patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of. Driven by expansion, colonialism, and resource extraction and propelled by neoliberalism and rabid consumption, our world is profoundly out of balance. We take more than we give; we inoculate ourselves in positive self-regard while continuing to make harmful choices; we wreak irreparable havoc on the ecosystems, habitats, and beings with whom we share our planet. But instead of drowning in hopelessness, how can we learn to face our reality with humility and accountability? Machado de Oliveira breaks down archetypes of cognitive dissonance—the do-gooder who does “good enough,” then retreats to business as usual; the incognito capitalist who, at first glance, may seem like a radical change-maker—and asks us to dig deeper and exist differently. She explains how our habits, behaviors, and belief systems hold us back . . . and why it's time now to gradually disinvest. Including exercises used with teachers, NGO practitioners, and global changemakers, she offers us thought experiments that ask us to: • Reimagine how we learn, unlearn, and respond to crisis • Better assess our surroundings and interact with difference, uncertainty, complexity, and failure • Expand our capacity to hold personal and collective space for difficult and painful things • Understand the “5 modern-colonial e’s”: Entitlements, Exceptionalism, Exaltation, Emancipation, and Enmeshment in low-intensity struggle activism • Interrupt our satisfaction with modern-colonial desires that cause harm • Create space for change driven neither by desperate hope nor a fear of desolate hopelessness For fans of adrienne maree brown, Sherri Mitchell, and Arundhati Roy, Hospicing Modernity challenges our assumptions and dares to ask more of us, for the sake of us all.
Download or read book Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity written by Maria Cristina Fumagalli and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2009-11-02 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking up the challenge of redefining modernity from a Caribbean perspective instead of assuming that the North Atlantic view of modernity is universal, Maria Cristina Fumagalli shows how the Caribbean's contributions to the modern world not only provide a more accurate account of the past but also have the potential to change the way in which we imagine the future. Fumagalli uses the myth of Medusa's gaze turning people into stone to describe the way North Atlantic modernity freezes its "others" into a state of perpetual backwardness that produces an ethnocentric narrative based on homogenization, vilification, and disempowerment that actively ignores what fails to conform to the story it wants to tell about itself. In analyzing narratives of modernity that originate in the Caribbean, the author explores the region's refusal to succumb to Medusa's spell and highlights its strategies to outstare the Gorgon. Reflecting a diversity of texts, genres, and media, the chapters focus on sixteenth-century engravings and paintings from the Netherlands and Italy, a scientific romance produced at the turn of the twentieth century by the king of the Caribbean island Redonda, contemporary collections of poetry from the anglophone Caribbean, a historical novel by the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, a Latin epic, a Homeric hymn, ancient Egyptian rites, fairy tales, romances from England and Jamaica, a long narrative poem by the Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, and paintings by artists from Europe and the Americas spanning the seventeenth century to the present. Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity offers an original and creative contribution to what it means to be modern.
Download or read book Subjects of Modernity written by Saurabh Dube and published by AFRICAN SUN MeDIA. This book was released on 2017-10-11 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "e;Dube ranges widely and globally - from histories of empires and genealogies of disciplines to recent Dalit artwork from India - to explore and carefully delineate a tension he regards as fundamental to the formation of the modern: the modern subject's inevitable entanglement with those subject to modernity. A tour de force, this book offers a critical, timely and powerful sequel to postcolonial and subaltern studies."e; - Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago
