Abstract
Why is there no sociology of modernity? Nor even a philosophy of modernity, with the exception of Hegel and Nietzsche? Too distant to be current or to establish the figure of the present.
All recent studies have carefully avoided engaging in theoretical elaboration, without even venturing a short- or medium-term projection of the idea of modernity. Or, rather, of its crisis.
Therefore, one cannot but agree with Andreas Reckwitz and Hartmut Rosa, authors of Late Modernity in Crisis, on the absence of studies in this sense, but especially on the absence of any theory.
But there is a way and a way to make theories. Reckwitz distinguishes two types: theoreticism and experimentalism. In the first case, the ‘theoreticist’ or pure-theory approach, which has dominated the scientific world for centuries, we find that every theorizing is a ‘system’ that opposes others, trying to impose its partial vision, in a kind of struggle between different systems. A struggle that leads to no result, except to demolish the antagonistic theories.
Instead Reckwitz, following Richard Rorty, points to a type of experimental theory, to be used as an instrument of change. From this perspective, one can view other theories, no longer as adversaries to be fought, but as useful allies from which to draw inspiration and support. For we need more tools than words to overcome the crisis of late modernity.
Faced with this lack of theories, Zygmunt Bauman, the greatest thinker on the discomfort of modernity, has taken precautions (in the name of an avalutative sociology) by observing the present and its problems. His liquid modernity is a snapshot of the real world as it appears among a thousand contrasts, contradictions, risks, and epochal changes. Or perhaps as it appeared between the end of the 20th century and the early years of the third millennium, because change is so rapid and we are all so deeply involved in ever faster socio-economic development that it is hard to recognize ourselves in that liquid vision anymore. Small in-progress adjustments and major historical upheavals (think of the pandemic and the escalation of violence in Ukraine and the Middle East) to observe how this ever-changing reality needs not only timely observations (to understand where we are), but also theorizing and design constructions (to understand where we are going).
In short, many diagnoses and no prognoses.
Indeed, it must be observed that, all of a sudden, we were faced with a programmatic vacuum without reliable perspectives, but full of objective analyses of the critical issues available, which, however, do not go beyond denouncing and warning of dangers.
For the first time in almost three centuries, that is since its origins, modernity no longer has at its disposal an extraordinary tool on which to rely and that had effectively provided hope and optimism for tomorrow.
This tool is called progress, an engine or lever that allows one to look forward with confidence, in the belief that history guarantees continuous improvement. It is an idea so deeply rooted in Western culture that even movements antagonistic to modernity, as well as revolutionary ideas, including Marxism, while advocating the overthrow of existing economic structures, have not renounced placing progress at the center of their ideologies.
If we look at the parable of the crisis of modernity, we notice that the end of ideologies – featured by Jean-François Lyotard’s post-modernism between the 1970s and 1980s – was followed by a drastic distrust of the idea of progress. As a consequence of the same crisis of modernity, no doubt, but also of the cultural assumptions that inspired a worldview in perpetual evolution. An evolution that surpassed every classicist conception (the future as a deterioration since the golden age of origins) or religious precepts (the future in the hands of divinity, to be accepted with fatalism).
Therefore, progress represented a secular, innovative, and vitalistic solution to immobility, precisely insofar as it was necessary for modernity during its affirmation, useful in getting people to accept individual labor and sacrifice for future benefit.
The loss of the idea of progress is a serious impediment to innovation, so that the prospect we have left of late modernity is close to a kind of ‘social death’: the fear that underlies our unease, the most topical fear looming over our existences.
What Hartmut Rosa calls resonance, that is, the ability to maintain meaningful relationships, is lacking. Resonance includes being in contact with others, exchanging emotions, being able to transform oneselves as a result of an exchange, allowing for a certain amount of uncontrollability. For resonance is never risk-free.
Conversely, without an active life, prey to the alienation induced by passive consumerism, tomorrow’s society (assuming it can still call it a society) would face what Max Weber, already a century ago, feared above all else: a mechanized ossification. In that case, the last men will be reduced to ‘specialists without spirit, hedonists without a heart’, and where, as Helmut Rosa remarks, the specialists without spirit are the producers and the hedonists without a heart the consumers. Both ‘non-entities’ who foolishly believe that ‘they have attained a stage of human kind never before reached’.