[MB.]

I am interested in what the forum thinks are the characteristics that define modernity, and when you would place the concept, chronologically.

Modernity has traditionally been associated with bourgeoise revolutions (Marxism), industrialization (Manchester school), the decline of religious authority (Whig history), the development of the bureaucratic nation state (Weber), the European treaty system (Realism), and the scientific revolution (Kuhn), amongst many other theories.

What is your opinion on this matter?

[The Immortal Goon]

I think those are all aspects of the same basic form of modernity. I would also argue that modernity sees history as a progression and that it has to do with a unified theory of everything. Trotsky, for instance, reconciled both high literature, pop culture, and Freud with Marx.

Post-modernism attempts to reject this...by applying a unified theory of everything and celebrating that they accept both high literature and pop culture, thus separating them from people like Freud and Marx who are part of a unified theory.

...snarky comment aside, I see a division from a pre-modernism and modern set of ideas, but have yet to really see any sense to post-modernism.

[Atlantis]

The shift from traditional society to modernity is marked by a transition from cronyism to transparent government. That in itself is capable of explaining all other changes, and it doesn't matter whether it's the cause or the effect.

[Potemkin]

...snarky comment aside, I see a division from a pre-modernism and modern set of ideas, but have yet to really see any sense to post-modernism.

Whenever I think of post-modernism, I imagine Qatz cycling on his modern lightweight carbon-fibre bike through a modern metropolis while simultaneously posting one of his primitivist condemnations of modern urban society to PoFo on his iPhone. Sort of says it all really.

[Paradigm]

In his book We Have Never Been Modern, French philosopher Bruno Latour identifies himself as an "amodernist," proposing that modernity as a project has never actually been realized. The "project" of modernity he is describing is the nature-culture divide, with a transcendent, objective nature that is nonetheless mobilizable (immanent) and an immanent, subjective society that nonetheless surpasses us (transcendent). In pre-modern societies, this subject-object distinction did not exist. Signs and their referents were one and the same (which was why knowing the name of something was said to give one power over it). In post-modernity, the objective is reduced to the subjective (or rather, intersubjective), with signs only pointing to other signs in an infinite regress that places the Real forever out of reach. Latour argues that the post-modernists (as well as the anti-modernists) have essentially been duped into believing that modernity actually succeeded in dividing nature and society, when in fact they have only expanded the bricolage of the pre-moderns. Rather than a world of subjects and objects, the moderns have only created an ever-expanding network of quasi-objects: natural-social hybrids that are partially constructed while also having a natural, objective component. Where the pre-moderns had forest spirits and totems, the moderns have quasars and electrons and genes and any number of quasi-objects with which they can construct their understanding of the world around them. Thus, he suggests that what modernity explicitly forbids (the hybridization of subject and object) it requires in practice. Post-modernists took the bait and went about trying to deconstruct the objective a divide that all along had existed only as an ideal.

[QatzelOk]

It's not easy to describe what modernity is or when it starts.

I'm going to posit that modernity involves mandatory fashions. Mandatory fashions in clothing, mandatory fashions in religion, mandatory fashions in transportation, language, associations, and family structure.

One year, homosexuality is generalized(prechristian Europe), then fashion changes and it's punishable by death, then it's fashionable again and we bomb countries that aren't pro- gay enough.

Powerful groups are behind these changing fashions. Ordinary people are forced to forget or suppress their natural, instinctive feelings (propaganda can help with this), and follow the fashions that are imposed on them.

Machiavelli is often cited as the beginning of the era of forced fashions, but I think the forced conversion of Europe to Christianity ( dungeons and dragons and Jewish ancestor worship) is more accurate a starting point.