"Modernity & identity"

[Jukka Laari <jlaari@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings,

just started this book: "Modernity & identity", ed. by Scott Lash &
Jonathan Friedman (Oxford, UK & Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell 1992).

Ralph, you've mentioned your interest in individual experience and such.
Now in that book seems to be something on your themes. (I won't read the
whole book, there's nearly 400 pages, instead I just look what articles
there are for me, so I don't promise even short/compressed referate of
it.)

In Introduction the editors tell that in the book there's an effort to
take a 'third road' concerning issues of modernity & identity. Not
postmodernism, nor classic high modernism (for example J. Habermas), but
'low modernism' of Marshall Berman (his book "All that is solid" was
hot one in early 1980's), of Georg Simmel...

And what about identity? Well, editors write:

"As opposed to (..) orthodoxies of the last decade or two, the language
of the analysts throughout this book is the language of subjectivity, the
language of (individual and collective) identity."

"It is helpful to think of identity in terms of the cultural and social
content of the Kantian subject; in terms of cognitive, moral and
aesthetic judgement; and in terms of Kant's distinction between all
three forms of judgement, on the one hand, and perception - with which we
intuit objects through categories of time and space - on the other."

Pre-modern identity is "understood as externally (or in Kant's sense
'heteronomously') determined."

In modernity, too, this heteronomous identity persists. "But also in
modernity, with the demise of God and Caesar, social space opens up the
way for an autonomous definition of identity." We are fated to be 'free'.

The point of psychoanalysis in this context?

"High modernist subjectivity seems furthermore to privilege the cognitive
and moral over the aesthetic and the libidinal, the ego over the id, the
visual over the touch, and discursive over figural communication."

So there is corner for psychoanalytic theories in modern social and
cultural theory:

It's the libidinal component that invests Kantian "parameters with
energy provides them with a dynamic force capable of engaging subject.
This has been underscored by several contributors to this book, and
takes us beyond the Kantian framework into issues of relations between
everyday life on the one hand and the constitution of the self on the
other."

In one posting you asked what people are looking for when discussing
subjectivity. I think that the answer is clear now. It's a question of
understanding how and why we experience the way we do (of course there's
more to this than that). There's no short way to this understanding.

Partly it's a question of how we invest into these modes of perception,
into these objects that fill our Lebenswelt (world of lived experience),
that we have at the moment.

Partly it's a question of those cultural interpretative rules, that we
use in order to make world/environment in general meaningless to us, and
of how we internalize those rules in a way, that they don't look like
rules but like natural, 'given', rational capabilities or kind of
faculties of ours.

Besides, there's a question of that modern freedom of ours, from where it
can be be found, under what disquise.

And there surely are several other traits to these questions. After all,
we are dealing with the most complex issues one can pose, I believe.

The powerful, strong side of marxism has always been the capability to
trace developmental phenomena, historical processes, and to relate
societal causes to these general processes.

The weakness has been with kind of structural issues. Too commonly
answer to several 'structuralist' theories has been something like that:
'It's synchronic, formal, empty, ahistorical.' And that's it. No
questions of whether it could give anything.

In recent discussions (during couple of last decades) people have tried
to learn something. To integrate something of these 'synchronic'
theories into more broader marxist, historical views, namely that
'syncronicity'.

Why? In order to understand general processes better. In order to
explain drastic changes, which seem to be incomprehensible at first
sight. Simply: In order to understand better how things happen.

It's pretty hard to cause a change (not to mention a revolution), if one
doesn't understand the object, how it works, why it works the way it
does... And there's lot learn.

> -- I think the book was THE SUBLIME OBJECT OF IDEOLOGY -- and it
> struck me as useless bullshit.  Why is Zizek important?

Because he's one of those who are banging their heads against the
wall of questions I tried to characterize. (I forgive him his weak mode
of presentation because of kicks I've got.)

Jukka Laari


     --- from list marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---

     ------------------