[Framework Post] Week 1B: Modernism & Modernity.

In Jurgen Habermas’s Modernity – An Incomplete Project (1989), Habermas like many other scholars of the subject situates the drive of modernity to the spirit of the 18th Century Enlightenment. Habermas sums both eras’ belief in that “each domain of culture could be made to correspond to cultural professions in which problems could be dealt with as the concern of special experts” (9). He furthers—rightly so—that this specialised method or mode of inquiry resulted not so much in its idealistic aspiration of synergy [1], but more so a “distance [that grew] between the culture of the experts and that of the larger public” (9).

Habermas’s take on what he calls “the project of modernity” (8)—relationally, perhaps even the Enlightenment—seems myopic, or at best overly severe. Whilst much truth lies in his analysis of a “distance” formed, the other side of the coin remains that the split in knowledge production, since the Enlightenment, has seen information and, in turn, knowledge, exponentially increase over the last few centuries. With each division and sub-division of research developed since the production of knowledge broke into various independent—yet arguably ever interrelated—trajectories, the depth of knowledge for each field has taken such a deep plunge that it is not longer imaginable how each field may develop without its experts. The image of the Renaissance Man, capable of juggling his art, science, philosophies and soul, is no longer a truly viable option given the intense amount of information required of his processing. The amount of information that is being generated on a daily basis in this decade is more than a hundred folds what the early modernists had at hand, and more than 1000 folds what a Renaissance Enlightenment scholar would need to manage.

Much of today’s technological, artistic, political, medical, etc advancements first experience a genesis in what Habermas wrongly believes as a “meaningless” vacuum incapable of changing the “life-world” (14). Pure mathematics or science, for example, whilst always a game within itself, finds applied relevance when the need and opportunity arises. Without the seemingly masturbatory forward groping of these individual disciplines, potentially important synapses that will make important difference to the world may never occur. The professional disciplines will always have to progress faster than the speed of our society, its wants and desires in order for advancements in life to actually occur. Demanding instantaneous results, or a never-ending feedback to the general populace will probably only impede an earlier arrival of what we accuse this spirit of inquiry of not producing: a difference to our lives.




Footnotes:

[1]: A synergy that would instil “the control of natural forces but also understanding of the world and of the self […] even the happiness of human beings” (9).

References:

1. Habermas, Jurgen. “Modernity – An Incomplete Project.” Post-modern Culture. Foster, Hal. ed. London: Pluto Press, 1989. 3-15.