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Jul. 18th, 2013 11:04 amI read a fascinating journal article the other day by Shannon Lee Dawdy called Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity (Current Anthropology , Vol. 51, No. 6 [December 2010], pp. 761-793). You may be able to find it for free online; I'm not sure.
There's a lot there to think about, and I suspect her citations are going to give me some excellent additional reading material! But there's one particular point I thought I'd write a bit about here, and ask for opinions on. But first, a quick summary of the article, 'cause I think it's neat.
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Dawdy talks about the concept of modernity a great deal, and about the way that its nature presupposes a break, or rupture, between the modern and the pre-modern. This break, she argues, is inherently arbitrary, mutable, and rather artificial. Beyond that, ruins can be evidence that modernity never quite arrives. That the creative destruction of capitalism is continually coming up with something better and newer and discarding the old and out-dated. Real modernity is always just up ahead, right around that bend in the road, forever receding. Embracing this arbitrary distinction has the effect of limiting scholarly inquiry and understanding. Were the cities of classical Rome or Greece truly different in some fundamental way that makes them incomparable to modern cities? We're not sure, because few people are doing those kinds of cross-temporal comparisons. She proposes that traditional archaeologists, historical archaeologists, and cultural anthropologists could work together on issues in a number of really productive ways that they currently aren't doing very much of.
She describes ruins, both modern and ancient, as sites that present an alternate, non-linear time that is disjointed, or folded circularly back on itself, in ways that question the existence of the rupture between modern and pre-modern. Though I don't have enough grounding in theory and the discipline of anthropology in general to read it with a really critical eye, I loved this article from the perspectives of both theory and aesthetics. It really resonated with me.
It doesn't hurt that she name-checked things like the Steampunk/Clockpunk movement and urban exploration!
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Anyway, here's my question for you.
If you were going to argue for the existence of a rupture (perhaps some might call it a singularity?) between pre-modern time and modern time, what would it be? Dawdy suggests the printing press, the "discovery" of the New World, Martin Luther's posting of his theses that began the Reformation, the first steam-powered mills, and others. My personal feeling is that, like so many other questions of this nature, it depends greatly on your personal experiences and values. As a historian, I suspect that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cmcmck's thoughts might be particularly interesting.
So what, in your opinion, is the point at which the world moved from "pre-modern" to "modern"?
(I've come to believe that various theoretical approaches to a given phenomenon aren't really ways of seeing "the truth". Rather, they are toolkits to apply to phenomena in order to rationalize them in a particular way, toward a particular kind of understanding of a fuzzy, perhaps inaccessible, ultimate truth. Likewise, my personal feeling is that the answer to this question of whence began modernity is mutable, and depends largely on what framework of analysis you want to apply to history, and toward what kind of understanding your analysis is directed. I never was very good at answering this kind of question. *grins*)
There's a lot there to think about, and I suspect her citations are going to give me some excellent additional reading material! But there's one particular point I thought I'd write a bit about here, and ask for opinions on. But first, a quick summary of the article, 'cause I think it's neat.
---
Dawdy talks about the concept of modernity a great deal, and about the way that its nature presupposes a break, or rupture, between the modern and the pre-modern. This break, she argues, is inherently arbitrary, mutable, and rather artificial. Beyond that, ruins can be evidence that modernity never quite arrives. That the creative destruction of capitalism is continually coming up with something better and newer and discarding the old and out-dated. Real modernity is always just up ahead, right around that bend in the road, forever receding. Embracing this arbitrary distinction has the effect of limiting scholarly inquiry and understanding. Were the cities of classical Rome or Greece truly different in some fundamental way that makes them incomparable to modern cities? We're not sure, because few people are doing those kinds of cross-temporal comparisons. She proposes that traditional archaeologists, historical archaeologists, and cultural anthropologists could work together on issues in a number of really productive ways that they currently aren't doing very much of.
She describes ruins, both modern and ancient, as sites that present an alternate, non-linear time that is disjointed, or folded circularly back on itself, in ways that question the existence of the rupture between modern and pre-modern. Though I don't have enough grounding in theory and the discipline of anthropology in general to read it with a really critical eye, I loved this article from the perspectives of both theory and aesthetics. It really resonated with me.
It doesn't hurt that she name-checked things like the Steampunk/Clockpunk movement and urban exploration!
---
Anyway, here's my question for you.
If you were going to argue for the existence of a rupture (perhaps some might call it a singularity?) between pre-modern time and modern time, what would it be? Dawdy suggests the printing press, the "discovery" of the New World, Martin Luther's posting of his theses that began the Reformation, the first steam-powered mills, and others. My personal feeling is that, like so many other questions of this nature, it depends greatly on your personal experiences and values. As a historian, I suspect that
cmcmck's thoughts might be particularly interesting.So what, in your opinion, is the point at which the world moved from "pre-modern" to "modern"?
(I've come to believe that various theoretical approaches to a given phenomenon aren't really ways of seeing "the truth". Rather, they are toolkits to apply to phenomena in order to rationalize them in a particular way, toward a particular kind of understanding of a fuzzy, perhaps inaccessible, ultimate truth. Likewise, my personal feeling is that the answer to this question of whence began modernity is mutable, and depends largely on what framework of analysis you want to apply to history, and toward what kind of understanding your analysis is directed. I never was very good at answering this kind of question. *grins*)
