Rosa María Rodríguez Magda
TRANSMODERNITY
To think the world is to create it
through philosophical categories. And here the Hegelian dialectic was possibly
the most ambitious method of rational totalization. To confront ourselves with
the “global” brings us back to this very epic of meaning that we may have
certainly been somewhat oblivious to in these recent times of wastefulness and
dissemination.
Is it still possible to speak of a
grand narrative (grand récit)? Does the dynamism of the social still respond to
a dialectic although the game has already been declared over?
The final years of the 20th century
left us in a kind of gnoseological impasse.
By talking about postmetaphysical thought, philosophy seemed to inexorably
yield the floor to more positive disciplines such as sociology, economics and
even geopolitics. Yet through this very impossibility of the Absolute,
knowledge was marred by provisionality and granted a hypothetical, pragmatic,
potential character. Cultural relativism drowned the universality of
principles, and the grand theoretical constructs turned into little more than
models of understanding, the certainty of which, as well as being contingent,
was basically poetic: fuzzy logic, catastrophe theory, string theory in
physics, fractals and black holes all indelibly marked by the finite nature of
our theoretical ambitions.
The past century silently welcomed
the esthetics of murder, the disagreeable orgy of extenuation. The world ceased
to be a factum, an entity of facts, and
increasingly turned into a fictum, a
joint collection of simulacra. First the crime was committed against the
essences, the noumenal background through which antique metaphysics intended to
bestow upon phenomena an underlying scheme. Then later empirical materiality
lost the weight of its consistency to become little more than an illusionary
construct of our theoretical models. Subsequently it was Theory itself that,
isolated in itself with no convincing paradigms to follow, emerged as a
heterogeneous beam of micrologies. In view of such a three-fold crisis of
fundamental thought, i.e., metaphysical, empirical and theoretical, the most
deep-rooted notions became hardly more than a strategic consensus. Following
the death of God and the Self, by way of a silent epidemic, a faint extinction
completed the plague of extermination: Reality, Subject, History all produced
gasping sounds of death rattle. Thought turned into a dispirited shadow of
itself. An unusual occurrence of a phantasm that escaped, however, any
appearance of tragedy. A feverish apotheosis of the carnivalesque, a happy
cheerfulness of the ephemeral gave a festive air to these dances of death.
Pretending to celebrate the continuous glory of the body, we were eager in the
end to abandon the putrefaction of the flesh and prepared ourselves to become
mere images of ourselves, approximate entities in a virtual landscape.
The delirium of extinction, kind
irrelevance, the happy replacement of cathedrals by great surfaces. Yet let us
take a closer look at some of the above-mentioned references and moments.
A brief review of Hegel
In Hegelian thought,
understanding is the characteristic form of deductive thinking, an analytic
exercise appropriated for use in the sciences and the real world as a postulating
force for axioms and rules that atomize and conceptually drain the flow of
events. It constitutes but the first moment of philosophical thought, which was
bound to be followed by a second: Dialectics, or the self-displacement of the
finite judgements of the first. Dialectics puts order into a vast disarray of
contradictory and complimentary abstractions, into a flow of interdependent
notions that reflect in their dynamism the very movement of reality. Upon its
conception everything turns into its opposite, becomes transitory and mutable.
Beyond the principle of the
excluded third in formal logic, not only A
and not A is possible, but this
very contradiction at the heart of things becomes its primary driving force. A
world of contradictions is nothing unthinkable but its most profound reality.
We must therefore force our logic to include that the real becomes also
thinkable; it shapes the function of Dialectics, a moment of philosophical
thought itself overcome by Reason, that which will actively reveal the
underlying or immediate harmony of contradictions by embracing opposites in new
units. The rational or speculative phase of philosophy represents “a return of
thought to the unthinkable rationality of ordinary thought and language that
had previously been dismantled by the action of Understanding”. The anxiety of
an achieved Totality, the achievement and binding force of a first intuitive
experience that does not annul contradictions in a homogenous continuum but
instead embraces them and turns them into the very center piece of its superior
unity. A triadic movement that departs from an immediate total in order to
break it apart, then perceive its myriad dynamic explosions and finally raise
it to a new and higher stability.
Thesis, Antithesis and
Synthesis tirelessly proclaim the coming of the Spirit or Absolute Knowledge.
Truth is, without doubt, Everything; its way of manifestation is Wissenschaft or Systematic Science; its
task lies in reaching the Universal by “overcoming fixed or defined modes of
thinking”. The “idealism” of Reason is indicative of the achievements of
Understanding, i.e., world domination by way of Absolute Knowledge, while
managing to reconcile conscience and self-conscience. History has gone through
a series of fragmented moments that have later become reunited in the Absolute
Spirit. In this way, “to the extent that it can do away with the limitations of
the particular national spirits and its own mundane nature, the thinking spirit
of Universal History captures its own concrete universality and rises to become
the knowledge of the Absolute Spirit as the eternal truth in which cognitive
Reason is free in its own right, while necessity, nature and history merely
administer how it becomes revealed and are only vassals of its honor”[1].
I have deemed it
convenient to turn back to this brief outline of Hegelian thought in order to
illustrate how far removed we find ourselves now from its romantic epic and yet,
as I believe to have demonstrated, how obliviously bound up we are in its
totalizing rhetoric.
Don Jorge Guillermo
Federico was something of a visionary and, like a Napoleon of concepts,
suffered his own Waterloo of oblivion. The construct of modernity rests on the
stones of the Enlightenment and the mortar of industrialization replacing the
pomp of the Sturm und Drang. Yet
retrospectively it has never given up its systematic manner, which bestows upon
it the belief in universal values and an almost incontestable faith in the
bastions of the Subject, Reason, History or Progress.
According to Habermas the project
of modernity is originally based on the attempt to develop from reason the
spheres of science, morality and art, keeping them separate from the
metaphysical and religious realm. While the latter may be carried out in
theory, its material manifestations include a process of modernization, among
them the industrial revolution, scientific progress, population growth,
technological advances, the expansion of markets, capitalism etc., i.e., a
relentless force characterized by ever greater dynamism and innovation.
Modernity constitutes a view towards the future; it is there rather than in the
imitation of the past where individuals believe to find fulfillment of their
somewhat unrealistic visions. The new becomes attractive as a form of constant
denial and conquest, which fuels the pioneer spirit underlying the esthetics of
modernity. However, these two aspects, i.e., the theoretical tenets and material
development, are not equally firm: whereas the latter seems stable and takes on
new forms in the shape of the postindustrial society, new information
technologies etc., the former has been subject to serious criticism. As
Albrecht Wellmer points out: “From a technical and economic perspective
modernity is made of such solid wood that playing with its aims easily turns
into a child’s game. By contrast, its political and moral tenets, its
democratic and liberal traditions are so weak that playing with their aims is
like playing with fire. The transgression of modernity in the sense of a return
to barbarity today constitutes a real possibility”[2].
Despite the diversity of
its underlying concepts, modernity is perceived as a coherent mass of rational
beliefs and socio-ethical progress, the weakening of which is felt by many as
nothing short of a genuine threat. It is a paradigm, in which one could say,
everything occupies the right place. Knowledge responds to an objective and
scientific model validated by experience and the progressing domination over
nature and strengthened by technological development. All of this leads to a
higher emancipation of the individual and greater amounts of freedom and social
justice as gradually achievable goals. It is the very utopia underlying this
model, the decay of which can only lead from its own point of view to nothing
other than barbarity.
Modernity is therefore
anchored in the possibility and legitimacy of global discourse. The postmodern crisis
has as its target precisely this very possibility and legitimacy.
Lyotard proclaimed the
end of the Grand Narratives, e.g.,
the model illustrated earlier including Hegelianism, Marxism, Christianism etc.
History can no longer be conceived of in the form of linear progress towards
emancipation. According to postmodernists, we would embark upon, as Arnold
Gehlen puts it, the age of Post-history.
Universal Reason, they claim, would have uncovered the manipulative side of instrumental rationality (cf., the
Frankfurt School), and its utopian vision would have turned into a genuine iron cage (cf., Weber).
The end of the unitary
paradigm would pave the way for multiple micrologies, i.e., contextualised
narratives that offer heterogeneous and diverse perspectives. Fragmentation,
polysemy, difference, excess and hybridity were pet concepts to designate this
new situation. As innovation became frowned upon and the pioneer spirit
declined, the future ceased to function as the predominant sphere of reference,
and the past turned into a storehouse of images, lifestyles and ideas for us to
recycle. Pastiches, hypertexts, a culture of imitation and, ultimately, of
simulacra. It is imperative, however, to analyze not only the alleged break of
postmodernity with respect to preceding phases, but also the very breakup of
itself, i.e., its own conceptual crisis.
Any type of cultural
innovation has a critical and subversive moment once it departs from the
hegemonic discourse. Reality changes in our view and forces us to embrace new
concepts and to even give name to what previously had none. This is the labor
of intellectual pioneers. Later then, an entire legion of small workers comes
to back up the construction, to perfect its profile and to reproduce the model
indefinitely. This is the phase of scholastic paralysis that, as we can
typically observe, renders the theoretical construction obsolete.
We are then already
faced with the uncertainty of the pioneer who has entered unknown territory and
takes insecure steps forward without knowing whether the ground below is firm
enough to support his bold upward moves, except for the plain certainty of
parrots that echo common ground like axioms and, although they seem to talk
just like the pioneer, achieve precisely the opposite, i.e., in the face of
uncharted territory ahead they become centered on the Self and turn a blind eye
and deaf ear to a dynamic reality that explodes from all sides from a
conceptual suit that was tailored too tightly.
Can we still blindly
echo in the early days of the 21st century the types of post-notions that had disruptive powers
more than two decades ago?
One of the conceptual
pillars of post thinking, as pointed
out earlier, lies in negating the possibility of Grand Narratives, of a new
all-encompassing theory. And yet for the past decade we cannot help but notice
everywhere the emergence of a new key concept. Although the fragmentation and
multiplicity acknowledged by postmodernity seemed to irreversibly fall prey to
centrifugal forces, the scattered pieces were put into contact or “globally
joined” due to the virtual revolution of the Information Society, thus
facilitating a new Grand Narrative, i.e., Globalization.
The grand metanarratives
of modernity were the product of a theoretical enterprise, i.e., the will to be
part of a system, and as such pertained to the sphere of knowledge.
Globalization, by contrast, is the subsequent result of a technological
revolution, i.e., the practical effects of the will to be interconnected, and
thus pertains to the sphere of information.
Whereas the industrial
society had modern culture and the postindustrial society had postmodern
culture as their conceptual twins, a globalized society corresponds to a type
of culture that I have referred to for some time as transmodern[3].
Modernity,
Postmodernity, Transmodernity would form the dialectic triad that, in more of
less Hegelian manner, completes a process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
The phenomenon of
globalization cannot be reduced today to simply the beginning of the
“world-wide capitalist system” that some scholars, e.g., Wallerstein, take as
far back as the 15th century and the rise of capitalism. Following
the so-called “end of politics” or “the end of the social” we can now see how
both sectors overlap once again and do so beyond the paradigm of the nation
state.
In order to offer a
valid characterization it seems imperative to follow Ulrich Beck’s[4]
distinction between globalism, globality
and globalization. By globalism he understands the “conception
according to which the world market gets rid of or replaces political tasks,
i.e., the ideology of domination by the world market or the ideology of
liberalism”[5]. The notion
of globality refers to the
realization that we live in a “global society” where closed spaces no longer
exist. Such globality appears irreversible precisely because it comes as a
response to profound yet multifaceted developments of economic, political,
social, cultural and ecological globalization. In this manner, globalization links, responds to and
designates all those “processes by virtue of which sovereign nation states
become enmeshed and arranged in a particular order through transnational
agencies and their respective openings towards diverse forms of power,
orientation, identity and structural set-up”[6].
All these developments
create a framework that, although certainly not new, is structured in
increasingly coherent and solid manner and characterized by general features
such as the world market, globalized culture, the constant development of new
communication technologies, the information society, postinternational and
polycentric world politics, world-wide involvement in armed conflicts across
cultures, environmental atrocities and the issue of poverty. The constant
presence of flux and connectivity forms an emerging process of Totality that,
rather than hierarchical or pyramidal, follows a network-like model devoid of
clear organization or any hegemonic center. While the strengthening of the
nation state fueled modernity and while the postindustrial society stood for an
on-going attempt to give meaning to international organizations in an effort to
extend the modern political model of a renewed diverse social contract,
globalization shows the limitations of a strictly political model and
integrates the implicated financial agencies, NGOs and mediators without even
raising or making palatable the idea of a world government still based on vague
democratic principles or the observance of shared norms such as Human Rights.
It is these very formal
declarations, such as the ones cited with respect to Human Rights, that are
indicative today of a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, they linger on as
empty shells of an outdated spirit of enlightenment while claiming on the other
hand to be ideals designed to regulate a new republican “cosmopolitan” spirit
or ostensibly work as light
mechanisms to mobilize NGOs that seem to have simply occupied the place of what
once used to be the revolutionary working class. In any case, beyond the nation
state and due to the very decline of the latter, their universalistic stance is
equally compromised by a decline in competencies allocated to the control
organs that ensure their compliance.
What R. Robertson refers
to as the Glocal, i.e., the
prevalence of the global and local levels along with the concomitant decline of
traditional territorial spaces, designates a new form of geopolitics in which
the very space that gave rise to Modernity seems stripped of its leading role
in history and deprived of its support base formerly provided by an entire
political, ethical, social and identificational model. With the end of what
Agnew & Corbridge have termed the “domination of space by the state” we
have now entered a “space of flux” (cf., Castells) that once and for all puts
an end to the modernist paradigm.
Political and ethical
theory now seems outdated, as it churns out neatly boxed and inadequate
concepts in a futile attempt to rationalize phenomena that fail to correspond
to frameworks designed for a world different from our current. Our mode of
thinking should become, just as our social reality, “transborder”, fluid,
interconnected and unstable. A risk-type thinking for a global risk society.
Following the national comes the postnational and, at a later stage, the
transnational. Trans is the prefix
that should guide the new digital form of Reason in a reality that is virtual
and fluctuating.
What Rosenau[7]
refers to as “polycentric world politics” is characterized according to Beck[8]
by the rise of the following phenomena:
- Transnational organizations, ranging from the World Bank to
multinational corporations, from NGOs to the Mafia…
- Transnational problems, including the monetary crisis, climate
change, drugs, AIDS, ethnic conflicts, etc.
- Transnational occurrences, among them wars, sports contests, mass
culture events, solidarity marches, etc.
- Transnational communities based on religion, generation-specific
lifestyles, environmental action, racial identities, etc.
- Transnational structures as they relate to work, culture, finance,
etc.
Globalization shows that these
developments take place in many places at the same time and are nor merely echoes
or reverberations. This simultaneity is due to the very fact that we are
interconnected. The local thus becomes translocal.
The possibility of events taking
place in real time creates a fate of Laplacian eternity that is dynamic rather
than static and thrives on permanent speed. Reality becomes constant transformation. Its actual conditions
are transcended to become part of an
interconnected whole that is infinitely readjusted on a global level. In the
end, the Total does not bring us back to a religious or supernatural power, nor
to the noumenal kingdom of Metaphysics or Absolute Logic. The transcendental
that used to be beyond and yet close to empirical reality has now become the
hyperreal empirical reality itself, i.e., virtual
transcendency.
Culture
has ceased to be the universal matrix to smooth out differences, yet nor does
it express a certain Volksgeist.
Through postcolonial critique postmodern society intended to put an end to this
type of condescending universalism of
“dead or old white men” and set out to embrace multiculturalism. On the
latter, a globalized information society provides us with a true perspective of
neither post nor multi, but transcultural
by way of dialectical synthesis, as it is impacted by both cosmopolitan and the
most minute local currents.
We
refer to the information society as a “society of knowledge”, and this implies
a subtle epistemological shift. For centuries knowing meant to uncover and to reach
into the depths of things – it is for this very reason that the truth was
understood in platonic terms as Alethia.
We had to focus less on appearances to get to the essence of things, go beyond
phenomena to discover the noumenal, to find the numbers and logic underlying
the real world – this was the formula that would grant us access to the
necessary process of inductive-deductive thinking. Nowadays, by contrast,
proper knowledge is defined more in terms of transmissibility rather than the old criterion of adequatio (intellectus ad rem). Ours is a society of knowledge in the sense
that it is built and transformed according to the quantity of knowledge that it
can transmit. Whatever cannot be
transmitted simply does not count. All of us are in a position to claim
leadership amongst the most privileged to the degree that we successfully
become software providers, recycle,
utilize, send out and apply information. Being interactive means to master the
codes of transmissibility, to be
successful and draw benefits from it. Whereas the added value in the industrial
society was generated by the work force, in today’s digital society it rests on
the input of transmissibility.
We
are now in the era of transformation
in which water-tight boxes no longer make sense and everything functions as
long as it is interconnected, is based on team work or capable of reinventing
itself according to new demands or applications. The industrial society
propagated serial production and mass consumption as its criteria of profitability,
whereas today’s basic products must be customized to individual needs, be it in
furniture design, computer programming or cable television. And this change not
only affects the manufacturing industry: the very shape and size of nature
itself can now be designed – the dawn of a transgenic
age fills us with both hopes and fears. And even the body reaches out to unite
the biological and mechanical: chips, implants, assisted reproduction, cloning,
technological gadgets developed to extend our senses ranging from cellular
phones to wrist-size Personal Assistant computers. The cyborg model embraces the metaphor of a mutating transhuman body, just as transsexuality has dislodged and paved
the way for a vast array of possible genders, desires and identity beyond the
dichotomy of masculine and feminine.
Jean
Baudrillard has described in exquisite terms the entire scenario surrounding trans. In his view, “we are all
transsexuals in the sense that the sexed body is bound today to an artificial
destiny”[9].
The social turns into its very own mediate “mise en scène”: “We have now
entered transpolitics, i.e., the
ground zero of politics, which is also that of its reproduction and indefinite
simulation”[10]. The
doubling of things through advertisement, the media and images gives rise to a transaesthetics, an eclectic vertigo of form. “The system operates
through the aesthetic added value of the sign rather than the added value of
merchandise”[11].
If
glasnost (transparency) marked the fall of perestroika, the decline of the Soviet regime and the end of cold
war politics, the same metaphor of transparency today stands for a world that
aims to be its own image, and longs for instant presence on television
monitors, a translucid and transferable hologram.
It
is a transactional world, the
legitimacy of which does not rest on authority but on contract and negotiation
in the political, financial and social spheres, a criterion that guarantees
both its democratic nature and its economic thrust.
This is not simply a matter of playing with words, of
randomly assigning a prefix without further implications. The oppressive
presence of these changes in the very qualifying notions with which we claim to
describe our present world is a serious reminder of a different type of epistemological
configuration, of a series of epistemic shifts that give rise to a new
paradigm. We try hard to think in modern notions in political and ethical
matters, we echo postmodern positions in cultural and aesthetic questions, and
we reflect upon globalization with the perplexity of jumping back and forth
between two paradigms that have lost their momentum. Reality is forever changed
and calls for a transmodern type of thinking. In order to comprehend what is
really taking place around us, it is imperative to look at Globalization from
the paradigm of Transmodernity.
Transmodernity presents itself to us as a type of
dialectic synthesis of the modern thesis and the postmodern antithesis, and in
certainly the light, hybrid and virtual
form typical of these periods. Ironically, with respect to Hegelian aims it
does not constitute an increase in the Absolute but rather its omnipresent
depletion; it is not true reality but real virtuality; it abandons the
pyramidal and arborescent structure of the System and adopts a interconnected
model of self-multiplying overgrowth. Evidently globality is not the Spirit,
nor is Absolute Reason the only type of thinking, but it is precisely the
synthesis that, to count as such, needs to combine the positive momentum of the
modern with the emptiness of the Postmodern, the longing for unity of the
former and the fragmentation of the latter. We are left with a totalizing sum
of contingencies oblivious to its underlying base and definition, turning into
proliferating crystallography.
The following list of
features characterizing each of the three moments may help us to clarify the
process, even though it inevitably implies simplifying and categorizing a much
more complex continuum:
Reality Simulacrum Virtuality
Presence Absence Telepresence
Homogeneity Heterogeneity Diversity
Centrality Dissemination Network
Temporality End of History Instantaneity
Reason Deconstruction Pensée unique
Knowledge Skeptical Information
antifundamentalism
National Postnational Transnational
Global Local Glocal
Imperialism Postcolonialism Transethnic
Cosmopolitanism
Culture Multiculture Transculture
Telos Game Strategy
Hierarchy Anarchy Integrated
Chaos
Innovation Security Risk
Society
Industrial
Economy Postindustrial Economy New Economy
Territory Extraterritoriality
Transborder Ubiquity
City Suburbia Megalopolis
Race/Class Individual Chat
Public Private Obscenity
of Intimacy
Effort Hedonism Joint
Individualism
Spirit Body Cyborg
Atom Quantum Bit
Sex Eroticism Cybersex
Masculine Feminine Transsexual
High
Culture Mass Culture Customized Mass Culture
Vanguard Postvanguard Transvanguard
Orality Writing Monitor
Work Text Hypertext
Narrative Visual Multimedia
Cinema Television Computer
Press Massmedia Internet
Gutenberg
Galaxy McLuhan Galaxy Microsoft Galaxy
Progress/Future Past Revival Final Fantasy
A brief look at the three columns shows that the first is
dominated by clearly defined principles that are guided by cohesion, unity,
affirmation and substantiated arguments. The second column is generally made up
of their antithesis, i.e., disintegration, multiplicity, negation and
unsupported claims. The third tends to preserve the defining impetus of the
first yet is devoid of its underlying base: by integrating its negation the
third moment reaches a type of specular closure.
Let us now take a closer look at the triads:
Modernity was based on the legacy of reality and aspired
after its transformation. The semeiosphere that fueled postmodern theory then
transformed it into different types of discourse, whereby the signifier, far
removed from its referent, finds its signified in the kingdom of meanings, in eidetic
construction work, and thus it is not surprising that there it encounters
simulacra rather than realities. This path towards self-destruction, however,
then experiences an unexpected turn in the vision of transmodernity. The real
and the unreal are no longer opposed, as a new concept of reality emerges, one
that is no longer bound to the material world but turns into fiction because of
it. Reality and existence are no longer synonymous – it is a type of reality
that continues to “be” even when it may not “exist” and does not comply with
the simple status of simulacrum,
i.e., the virtual is the true reality.
The notion of presence therefore becomes modified in the
process. The modern subject is an active agent that impacts on developments by
physically taking part in them, be it in the material transformation of
merchandise, in transportation, travels or wars. The invention of the
telegraph, telephone etc. then paves the way for the first attempts at agency
across distance. Postmodern society finds itself drowning in a vast array of
media, but the distance between the sender and receiver still causes a delay
across time and space, the receiver becomes overwhelmed by ever new ways of
transmitting ever more information while communication becomes removed from the
facts. In this manner the individual feels like a passive receptacle for events
beyond her control. The dawn of interactive technologies put an end to this
passivity and this sense of absence. In the transmodern society the subject
receives information and acts accordingly, it can interfere in real time in
on-going events, be it by e-mail communication, by participating in a group
project, by carrying out financial transactions or by expressing her opinion
live on television programs. Because of effective telepresence the subject
actually takes part in events that are far away.
The discourse of Modernity sought to establish the Self,
i.e., it centered upon issues of identity and definition for questions
concerning nations as well as culture or science. Since the beginning of
innovation knowledge was based on the integration of the Other into the Self,
the legitimacy of which rested upon homogeneity. The postmodern critique then
saw the rise of the Other, i.e., in different types of counter-discourse,
margins, in everything that had erroneously been subsumed under a poorly
differentiated homogeneity, including ethnic groups, minority cultures, women,
homosexuals, etc. In short, it reached out to the extraordinary, the
unclassifiable, or heterogeneity as both a form of attack and opening. Yet this
heterogeneity seemed scattered, irreconcilable and thus loaded with negative
potential, self-centered as it was on unifying the myriad tendencies it
embraced. At present, by way of the new information technologies, minority
groups are at times more active and present on the net than certain more
traditional segments of society, ranging from agit-prop and international movements to the creation of libraries
for documentation and broadcasting. On the other hand, however, the efforts and
attacks launched in the preceding phase have given rise to an air of normality
and assimilation even in areas as incongruous as specialized research groups,
publicly subsidized minority groups, particular civil rights movements or fora
in which exoticism is commercially exploited. Thus there are no divisions and
no denials, but rather a type of tolerance and dislike, formal acceptance of
what counts as politically correct, which in particular cases, however, may
begin to bring about a shift in positions. Thanks to a more or less
programmatic discourse, nowadays this type of support for cultural biodiversity
has achieved a real and accessible type of visibility.
We can find the outlined tendencies in the theoretical
premises underlying the type of thinking in each phase. Hegel defined the
System according to the mere Aggregate,
and naturally his entire writing focuses on the objective of reaching this
systematic Total. Deleuze opposed the rhizome to the tree-like structure and
opted for the former. We can witness here the break between a type of thinking
that leans towards the center, a sense of order and a common origin underlying
all subsequent offshoots, and another type of thinking that supports a
liberating kind of dissemination. Everything Post was a serious attempt to blow up this neuralgic center into
series, fragments, lines, into an ever-expanding gnoseological universe that
does not reject chaos but conceives of an equilibrium in the form of
self-defeating entropy. This type of dissemination, however, is nowadays joined
by a metaphor through which the inevitably centrifugal forces become
dynamically enmeshed in a never-ending net of interconnections. There is no
center and no system of order, and yet the net somehow offers an unstable form
of coherence and an image of the world that does not betray or oppose itself to
the dynamic momentum of dispersion.
Modernity finds itself
inseparably tied to the idea of time due to its own characteristics of
innovation and progress, a historic temporality that in enlightened ways seeks
the ever better or, in Hegelian ways, the fulfillment of the Absolute Spirit.
Industrialization, the machine age, revolutions, social utopia, etc. all
intended to reach a progressive leap forward in history. It is this very
optimism that begins to falter with the crisis surrounding the Grand Narratives
of emancipation; it seems as if there were no more utopia awaiting us in the
future and it has been criticized with what deadly force they have been trying to
capture everything in practical terms. The crumbling of Real Socialism shows us
that the only alternative lies in a market-based society succeeding
itself. This puts an end to the
optimism and the epic atmosphere and the moment has come for the famous attacks
by Fukuyama celebrating the End of History. Yet more so than the end of all
times, the current technological boom surprises us because of the epistemic
force with which it takes place. Time is no longer a flow, projection or hope;
it accelerates at overwhelming speed, becomes compressed and plays itself out;
it is the achievement of instantaneity. Everything takes place before us and,
at the same time, at the dizzying speed of optic fiber. The transmodern world
is not one in progress, nor is it beyond history, it is an instantaneous world,
in which time reaches the breathtaking speed of an eternally updated present.
The before and after, the causal chain of events or their synchronicity also become affected, as the order of
events is determined by the speed of their transmission, i.e., less important
news or events in poorly connected places arrive later or never, in which case
they simply do not exist. Whatever is regarded as less relevant will be
perceived as consecutive, and circumstances far removed in time, if presented
together, will form a present-day Total.
Reason played undoubtedly the leading role in the
spirit of Enlightenment. Beyond mere terminological nuances we are referring to
its underlying impulse to explain the world and to have faith in its
opportunities, which, once actualized and implemented, would progressively lead
to better social and ethical conditions. Yet the 20th century was
one plagued by suspicion and self-criticism that undermined this powerful and
optimistic type of thinking. If ultimately behind Reason we encountered little
more than a thirst for power, ideological manipulation or obscure unconscious
drives, the only thing left to do was to openly exercise its deconstruction, to
tear down this domineering logocentrism that had planned a major conspiracy
hidden behind the paraphernalia of grandiose concepts such as Truth, Justice
and Morals, to uncover this mendacious nominalism and be left with the signs in
a postmetaphysical type of thinking, half way between nostalgia and the
euphoria of dissemination. Syntheses do not always have positive aims, but may
sometimes display the most repulsive of preceding moments or a return to the
nebulous disarray of their confusion. Without pomp and glory the proclaimed
individuality of thought appears to us with the same arrogance that we
previously observed in the Reason of Enlightenment by rejecting any possible
alternatives and with the same instrumental tenor found in pragmatic types of
discourse. Rejected or arrogant it may be, but it displays this very consensus
fueled by the decline in alternative theories; it is a political interlingua of
an international or financial organism. We would have to adjust the contrast
significantly in order to discern any differences between the various possible
ideological positions.
If the
ideal of knowledge corresponds to Reason, its criticism goes hand-in-hand with
a skeptical type of antifundamentalism. The past decades have thrived on
relativism, contextualism and culturalism… Irony has been the weapon used to
prevent the return of preceding times and also served as the means to create a
new form of aesthetics through a distanced kind of repetition. Yet we could not
help but to say and convey all of this with considerable fuss and through the
machinery of all the technological resources available to us. This fury of the
message and this compulsive urge to communicate have coincided almost
unexpectedly with ever more sophisticated media bringing about a type of
digital noosphere, the information society, in which everything, facts,
business and we ourselves, are reduced to packages of transferable data.
Information does not require a metaphysical base, its legitimacy does not rest
upon a prior cause, but on its own operative functioning. One more step and the
synthesis is achieved: Let us refer to this flow of communicative streams as
the “society of knowledge” and resolve in one stroke all the problems of more
than twenty centuries of metaphysics. From academia on to the assembly plant,
from substance towards hardware, and
from the monk in the library to the new management
man.
Modernity represented the consolidation of nation states
as territorial powers and the definition of their collective identities; all social
practices, such as culture, language, economy, history and self-image go back
to an internal homogeneity that is controlled by the state. This sovereignty
has gradually declined in favor of a greater focus on international relations,
which cease to be the mere stage for diplomacy, political alliances and trade
directed by nation states and increasingly gain a momentum of their own giving
rise to a postnational and postinternational form of politics and guided in
greater ways by international organizations, social movements and transnational
corporations. The transnational is not simply a negation of the Post, but a very recent situation, in
which national agents find themselves overcome and overpowered, as previously
mentioned, by transnational organizations, problems, events, communities and
structures.
The modern state corresponds to a simple perspective of
the world, i.e., a universalistic longing with respect to its culture and an
imperialist approach with respect to its political expansion, thus seeking to
consolidate its territory and to become projected beyond it. This simple world
perspective was subject to serious criticism in postmodern theory. The
momentary attraction of the local becomes subsumed under this emerging Total
that comprises the specific, i.e., the Glocal.
Postcolonialism
goes beyond the drive towards independence among formerly colonized countries;
it represents a crisis of legitimacy affecting all forms of expansionism that
seeks to combine the spirit of investment with the exploitation of dependent
territories and their modernization on the basis of a culture that is allegedly
not marked. It denounces economic and cultural policies that are carried out,
however, in a world in which discrete national identities can no longer be
recovered, as population movements have created an interracial blend in both
the colonizing and colonized countries generating at the same time transethnic
communities at the centers of clearly defined territories as well as
transterritorial ethnic communities. Transmodernity thus restores the modern
ideal of cosmopolitanism, but not on the basis of a clear-cut universality of
specific differences as imagined by the spirit of Enlightenment, but precisely
by spreading these differences beyond their traditional location it achieves a
full synthesis, i.e., a transethnic type of cosmopolitanism.
Culture no
longer claims to be a melting pot for displaced universal values, nor a shining
Volksgeist. What we refer to as
multiculturalism, however, is also turning into a transitory phase in which the
developed countries observe the extent to which they have lost the purity of
their national cultures and, between denial and the fervor of political
correctness, acknowledge, not without tensions, the heterogeneous make-up of
their respective populations. One step further, and this centripetal momentum
of unifying national minorities at the centers of the state is once again
affected by the consequences of interconnected rediffusion. The ethnic is not
the area of study for modern anthropology, nor is it the place for minorities
to voice their demands. The market seizes and builds upon Difference in a true
“bazaar of cultures”, in which local identities become uprooted while they are
also unexpectedly propagated thanks to marketing, in which essence turns into
design, and lifestyles or gastronomy become products made for consumption,
e.g., we dine at Lebanese restaurants, buy Japanese futons, decorate our walls
with African designs, listen to Celtic music or watch movies made in Hollywood.
Here and there fragments of cultures become jointed in hybrid disarray. This is
not multiculture, but transculture.
Modernity
was the era of objectives, projects, future, goals, achievement, horizon of
wealth and emancipation, utopia of progress and fulfillment. Following its
crisis, we thought of knowledge in terms of language games, and from a certain
hedonistic yuppie perspective saw life itself as a game. A return to
childishness paved the way for us to be frolic without purpose, and, in
addition, it was onto these random combinations without future that the
liberating heterotopia were projected. We play with stocks in the same way that
we play war (the Gulf War exemplified this suspension of reality that resembles
a video game). The joining of this drive towards combination and the
achievement of particular goals is called strategy. We seek efficiency without
the grand discourse and seek areas of control without the legitimacy of power.
As strategic subjects we no longer long for a transcendental ego, nor for a
simple mask, but rather seek the construction of multiple and operative
identities. We no longer desire eternal peace for tomorrow, but rather an
unstable and calculated equilibrium, turbulence under control. Beyond the
hierarchy for which we cannot find divine legitimacy and beyond the anarchy,
the festive ingenuity of which we steer away from, the integrated chaos
represents our very own desideratum.
Innovation
was, as I previously pointed out, the very driving force of modernity. This
rather naïve faith in scientific and technological progress was tested for good
in the form of the nuclear mushroom in Hiroshima. From that moment on, states
categorically decided that they needed to control research, theirs and of
others, and to establish alliances to stop a world from spinning out of control
capable of self-destruction. In the sobering up period of modernization,
security ideals were postulated, whereby nothing, neither the delirium of
science, nor the ideals of revolution, should upset a world that in order to be
trivial needed to be stable. Nowadays, however, the concept of a “risk society”
designates a new global and emotive paradigm. Risk in the positive sense that
solely bold entrepreneurial leadership could generate wealth, e.g., by way of
innovation that cannot be inferred from a common source, and that professional
progress does not hinge upon original skills, but on the ability to adapt to
new methods and the discovery of new applications. Yet risk also in the sense
of facing a global environmental threat and the constant effects of recent
developments in areas such as politics, industry, the exploitation of resources
or strategic affairs.
The industrial revolution marked the beginning of the
modern era: the machine age, serial production, the specialization of manual
labor, the expansion of capital and the organization of large numbers of
workers in trade unions, the exodus from rural to urban areas, dramatic changes
in the traditional forms of community life, etc. The postindustrial society
claimed to display higher levels or productivity and accumulation of wealth
driven by an internal dynamic force that blurred notions of social class, the
division between public and private spheres, the forms of knowledge and their transmission,
the domination of the tertiary sector over the secondary, the over-all rise of
the consumer society and new areas of social conflict. The current
technological paradigm based on information technologies subsumes the
industrial logic and integrates information and knowledge into areas of
production and into the circulation of capital. This gives rise to a new
economy that is global and based on information, or, in Manuel Castells´ words:
“economía cuyos componentes nucleares tienen la capacidad institucional,
organizativa y tecnológica de funcionar como una unidad en tiempo real, o en un
tiempo establecido, a escala planetaria”[12]
[“an economy with key components institutionally, organizationally and
technologically capable of operating as a single unit in real time, or in any
given time, at a world-wide level”]. Effective financial globalization coupled
with the deregulation of markets and the liberalization of trade, based on
state-of-the-art telecommunication and subject to the risky effects of speculations
with financial funds.
All these developments locate us far away from modern
understandings of city and space. While the presence of the yuppie in suburbia and, in the
economically opposite case, the mushrooming of bedroom communities were the main
characteristics of urban renewal, the notion of extraterritoriality gave rise
to positive cultural metaphors. Yet the globalized society no longer contents
itself with the dichotomy of the center and its margins, but instead thrives on
a network of interconnected megalopoles indicative at any rate of a ubiquitous
transborder space.
The outlined changes undoubtedly also affect social
relations, giving rise to a new type of life, of meeting, feeling and
communicating with the Other, a new emotive horizon, in which we acknowledge
the mundane but story the extraordinary. The social agents that built modernity
were driven by the individual but believed in the collective, i.e., people,
class, citizenship, etc. and articulated ways of integrating a desirable
political project. Postmodernity cast a skeptical shadow over faith in progress
or in the opportunities created by revolution. From this emerges the
individual, but this time secluded in the private sphere, in a domestic type of
hedonism, far removed from the fervor of the public arena and the epic of
effort as the key to ethics. We are currently witnessing a significant change,
whereby the selfish Self of merely a decade ago begins a process of
self-questioning and creates innovative forms of social interaction. We see the
rise of a new type of connected isolation. Glued to their computer monitors,
isolated Selves create an entire network of personal and intimate relations and
do so out of pleasure or even as a virtual mobilization strategy. Chat channels have largely taken the
place of traditional types of group formation, as they preserve the privacy of
the individual while embracing ever expanding forms of social interaction
unimaginable until recently. This is not a case of modern activity, nor of postmodern
depletion, but rather the static connectivity of transmodernity.
It is this configuration
of the Self by way of the monitor that allows for an overwhelming and yet
protected kind of visibility. Protected by this very distance and instantaneity
the personal turns into spectacle, ranging from television programs such as Big Brother to nude images on the
Internet. We can witness an obscene form of intimacy that, by turning into a
transmitted image of itself, seeks to recover a sense of reality, as the latter
is based less on facts and more on their representation. The rejection of
traditional forms of political action and partisan politics drives individuals
towards new ways of getting ethically involved in world events; this is how a
new solidarity- type of individualism is born, one that is aware of being part
of issues related to the environment, poverty, natural catastrophes or the
effects of war.
Even the
physical world has seen transformations. Material reality, its final formation,
atom, mass, power, space, time, etc. were all concepts that brought order to a
Newtonian universe. The theory of relativity and quantum mechanics then
followed suit: waves, chords, uncertainty, gravitational lines, the
temporalization of space, etc., an entire fuzzy logic that brought physics to
the edge of metaphysics. The digital society moves away from speculation and
synthesizes the actual and ethereal. Reality is no longer found in the movement
of aggregates of atoms (objects), but rather in the movement of packages of
bites, quanta of information transmitted in real time. Space is no longer the
site of transformation, nor the alleged place of secularization multiplied in n dimensions; it becomes irrelevant and
ceases to exist, as a limit never reached before, the speed of light, takes on
the form of everyday instantaneity.
The
spirit, soul, reason, the subjective, objective and absolute was the main
protagonist of modernity, although progressively undermined by scientific materialism,
it became a mere metaphor of itself as a dynamic driving force and shared form
of rationality. Behind it all we are left with the body, fragmented, joyful,
lustful, a form of moral subversion and doomed flesh. Nowadays the remaining
organic matter seems more like a primitive burden, the mind plays with its
transformation and turns it into a guinea pig for genetic engineering or
expands it with technological prostheses. We are all mutants connected to the
net, cyborgs that proclaim the era of
the postcorporal and the transhuman.
In
similar ways, sexuality, the standardized, reproductive weapon of submission or
political liberation, gave way to eroticism, which dismantled gender and
stereotypes with seductive artifice. The threat of AIDS opened up new aseptic
sites of pleasure. We approach the flesh with the same precautions as those
against biblical threats, which thus accounts for the visual, prophylactic
perversion of cybersex.
Modernity
was furthermore fueled by the notion of masculinity. The male species had
access to public spaces and forms of political representation, whereas women
were relegated to domestic bliss. The crisis of grand narratives also affected
the patriarchal logic. Along with the integration of women into public spheres,
discussion centered on a feminization of culture, as debatable as that may be.
Yet in times of cybertechnology the
feminine body is too often associated with the domination of nature; it is in
other words excessively carnal. Design refashions nature, biology becomes a
branch of engineering; we refuse to have our anatomy determine our personal
preferences, and thus the icon of modern-day artistry is exemplified by the
transsexual.
Cyberculture likewise shows signs of transformation with
respect to the two preceding phases that we have analyzed. High culture
responded to hierarchical and elitist criteria, the gradual expansion of
education to the least privileged classes generated a highly politicized
popular counter culture, Marxism largely helped to uncover the ideological
manipulations of discourse and also fought to make knowledge accessible to all,
yet it was only the postindustrial society that first displayed a need for a
culture of mass consumption, which intellectuals, as we know, have either
demonized or defended. While high culture offered restricted access, and mass
culture intended to capitalize on ever greater modes of consumption, we would
expect this technological expansion, once tools of transmission become
affordable to all, to become customized to consumer needs. Mass culture, yes,
but individually tailored, a la carte, cable television, special interest
publications based on race, professional background, sexual orientation, a
market integration of the exotic and the marginalized. An open form of
standardization that allows for the integration of différance.
What is not needed, however, is a radical avant-garde
type of innovation. It seems appropriate here to trace the key features of both
post and trans avant-garde, whereby the former is characterized by denial,
depletion, kitsch, a culture of
imitation, a critical approach towards art work and the role of museums, a
destructive form of irony, and the latter, present phase by reconstructive
irony, pastiche, hybridization, intertextuality, transgender, etc., in which net art and, more generally, new
technological means gradually regain a dynamic momentum of innovation and
change akin to those of former avant-garde periods. Once again, trans becomes our prefix of choice.
The oral, the work of art and the narrative gave way in
postmodern culture to a reappraisal of the written, the textual and the visual.
Once again, the transmodern society carries out a synthesis that moves ahead to
embrace both aspects, both transcendent in qualitative terms. The monitor
subsumes both the oral and written, becoming increasingly interactive in real
time while fostering greater cyber-literacy. It is in textual form rather than
through images that interaction is updated. Yet it is a type of textuality
without reference to the author or ties to the system, nor does it constitute a
mere medley of signifiers beyond the intentions of the subject. The latter
cuts, pastes, sends out and otherwise interferes in the series of discourse,
whereby it is her own multiple and distinct intentionality that creates a
proliferating maelström.
One single process streamlines the media, e.g., cinema,
television, computer, etc. The internet will be the synthesis of the former
print media and current forms of mass communication in a type of order that,
according to the phases outlined earlier, would successively include the
Gutenberg Galaxy, the McLuhan Galaxy and finally the Microsoft Galaxy. We thus
return to the uncertainty of looking ahead into the future, a vision of
tomorrow tired of the tiresome wave of revivals,
plagued by cosmic heroes, threats of extinction and epics of glory, posthuman
mutants dressed up as transnational executives, a Final Fantasy for which every day we invent the ingredients, eager as
we are to go beyond our limits, but also anxious and delirious, because
everything happens too fast, huge fragments of remaining misery leave blood
stains on a deceivingly glossy universe, where bites fly through space like
bullets and we have yet to resolve the human dimension of justice.
Globalization is the all-embracing Total, the chaotic and
dynamic fulfillment of the dialectical imperative, the new paradigm that I have
proposed to refer to as Transmodernity.
Yet underneath this
Total the challenging task of thinking and the urgent need for action still
remain.
© Rosa María Rodríguez
Magda
Rosa María Rodrígue
Magda is a philosopher born and raised in Valencia City (Valencia). Among her
many books in the Spanish language, Transmodernidad (Transmodernity,
Barcelona, 2004), El placer del simulacro (Barcelona, 2004) and La
sonrisa de Saturno. Hacia una teoría transmoderna (Saturno’s Smile. Towards a
Transmodern Theory, Barcelona, 1989).
[1] Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundiss, § 552.
[2] WELLMER, Albrecht, Foreword to Endspiele: Die universöhnhliche Moderne (Spanish translation: Finales de partida: la modernidad irreconciliable, Ciutat de València-Madrid, Universitat de València-Cátedra,1996, pp. 35-36).
[3] Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María, La sonrisa de Saturno. Hacia una teoría transmoderna, Barcelona,Anthropos,1989.
[4] Was is Globalisierung? Irrtümer des Globalismus- Antworten auf Globalisierung (Spanish translation:¿Qué es la globalizacción?, Barcelona, Paidós, 1998).
[5] Op.cit., p. 27.
[6] Op.cit., p. 29.
[7] Turbulence in World
Politics, Brighton,
1990.
[8] Op.cit., p. 63.
[9] La Transparence del Mal, París, Galilée, 1990, p.28.
[10] Idem, p. 19.
[11] Idem, p. 25.
[12] The Information Age: Economy,Society and Culture,(Spanish translation:La era de la información. Vol.1. La sociedad digital, Madrid, Alianza, 2000, p. 137).