Modernity as Imaginaries in Tension

A broken history

Part of Rundell’s invitation to re-think modernity is his challenge to the unicity of world history, a call to go beyond a single unifying narrative in which everything can be made to fit. Cusanus used to say, concerning a sphere representing God, that its centre could be found everywhere and its periphery nowhere. Something similar can now be said about the idea of universal history which traditionally had a definite centre in Western Europe. Having once ruled strong, this idea now stands perennially open to challenge. In a world that can no longer stake a claim to a definite centre, Rundell argues that major narratives such as Western Europe’s history of state formation, or the understanding of modernity as the unfolding of capitalism, implied the existence of determinate centres of history and linear temporalities. Peoples and things that did not fit were to be treated as accessory or could simply be swept under the rug of anonymity, condemned to oblivion.

Rundell joins those who, for quite some time, have challenged the neatness of these interpretations. There are, on the one hand, those who under the banner of post-colonial studies wish to grant voice to actors they call ‘subaltern’. There are also, on the other hand, the theorists of world systems who mobilise an all- integrating category setting in its right place what was formerly understood as the periphery. Like them, Rundell challenges the kind of history that is written with a capital H; but in doing so he follows neither. For example, he refuses to exclusively focus on colonialism as the single prism to see the modern history of the indigenous peoples from Australia. To do this would have the pernicious effect of rendering indigenous culture once again invisible. Likewise, Rundell’s essay on Oman (Chapter 10) shows that this middle eastern country has its own ‘Thalassic civilisation’, developed through centuries of exchange in its own region. An important point here is that Rundell manages to escape the paradox built into post-colonial narratives which remain over-determined by the idea and the history of ‘The West’, albeit taking it as a negative force. In addition, he is wary of trying to see the world as a unified system that clicks, not only because it does not, but also because of the unavoidable objectivism that this implies. Rundell’s challenge to a unifying history also indicates that European modernity’s very own temporal horizon needs to be examined in its own internal plurality. In line with authors such as Claude Lefort, for whom a modern attitude is already present, for example, in Dante’s Monarchy (Lefort, 1993), Rundell shifts the focus away from an exclusive concern with the French 18th century. He detects a modern sensibility and attitude in temporal locations as diverse as the medieval university going back to the 13th century (Chapter 4), the Renaissance city-states (Chapters 5–6), and also, in the decentralising power structure proposed in the work of the 16th-century writer Johannes Althusius (p. 90), which was to be so influential in the political configuration of the Netherlands.

Multiple imaginaries, many tensions

Together with a challenge to the unicity of history, Rundell also throws a challenge to social evolutionism. Habermas, for example, traces the origin of institutions to the human capacity to communicate linguistically and thinks of their development in terms of socio-cultural evolution or what he calls ‘learning processes’. From Rundell’s perspective, such an approach enters the river downstream. As he puts it: ‘For there to be learning processes there needs to be a disposition to learn at least something’ (p. 28). Learning is a second order process, and so is argumentation. For him, a condition for the possibility of second order processes is the existence of a social creative dimension that generates social phenomena, which in itself is never fully determinate. This dimension is therefore the generator of meaning and of all forms that organise social life, including values, structures and hierarchies. Rundell, following Castoriadis, terms the products of this human dimension a ‘social imaginary horizon’ (p. 28).

The locus classicus in social theory for the notion of creativity is Durkheim’s idea of collective representations (Durkheim, 1995). For Durkheim societies are bound by a series of symbols which they periodically gather to create and recreate through ritual practices. It is through these symbols that individuals understand themselves and their societies. These symbols refer back to the society as a whole and in this sense a circularity of sorts is established. From here one could follow Durkheim in at least two ways that sustain the circularity: symbolic networks could be said to refer to reality in an ongoing ‘feedback loop’, as is the case with functionalism, or they could refer to other symbols, as is the case with structuralism. Rundell, like Castoriadis before him, rejects both of these options as they neglect the possibility of the new, of human creation and of history itself. Instead, the idea of collective representations is shifted into that of ‘social imaginaries’. The difference is substantive: social imaginaries do not refer back to social reality or to other symbols, but instead to an ‘immanent unperceivable’, that is, a blind spot not open to be logically comprehended. This imaginary dimension, this sort of underlying ‘madness’, is the anthropological condition for human creation, that is, for history understood not as a logical concatenation of facts, but as the always possible emergence of the ontologically new.

In this context, social imaginaries are not to be confused with some sort of hermeneutical background to modern social life. Rundell’s reading of Charles Taylor’s work (Chapter 13) is illustrative here. Like Rundell, Taylor also has a notion of social imaginaries. In Taylor’s account, social imaginaries are the taken-for-granted, inarticulate and non-theorisable background that gives meaning to human practices. Transcendence is, for Taylor, a connection to this meaning-giving background which, according to his critique, is threatened by modern secularism. Echoing the romantics as well as Weber, Taylor sees modernity, with its inclination towards a controlling attitude, as eroding our possibility for enchantment. Rundell’s account, in contrast, follows the lead from Castoriadis in seeing social imaginaries not as a meaning-giving background from which we become cut-off in modernity, but instead as the actual sites of ontological imaginary creation which, among other things, produce the forms that make social life, modern or not. As human beings we are indeterminate creatures and we remain so even in the context of the modern dimension of control which only arises in the context of specific imaginaries. In other words, such controlling disposition is itself one of the many possible social forms emerging from our indeterminacy.

Unlike Castoriadis’s imaginaries, though, Rundell’s idea of the imaginary does not bind social creativity to the value of autonomy as a political category, and yet he still understands social creativity as being at the centre of human history. For him, modernity can instead be seen as constituted by a number of different imaginaries that do not necessarily determine it in a one-directional way. There is no necessary learning process, and there is also no necessary process of secularisation or emptying out of meaning either, even if any of these can actually happen in a given place and in a given period. These imaginaries might or might not be in tension with one another at a given time, and there is no necessary historical sequence to their development. As expressed above, history remains wide open. These imaginaries interact and intersect but do not click, do not add up, are out of joint. Modernity is not a totality and cannot be understood in terms of one. Rundell chooses to highlight five different imaginaries which we will address to some extent below: sovereignty, public sphere and democratisation, expressivism, monetarisation, and technological functionalisation. These imaginaries exist for us only through the things and institutions that they originate and also, one must add, through the instability and contingency of these things and these institutions. Modern social imaginaries remain differentiated but not hermetic towards their outside. They are historical, which is to say, they change, and no single imaginary can ever be an umbrella that subsumes the whole of modernity, as it is the tensions between imaginaries which give modernity its meaning. This is despite the most pessimistic and the most optimistic narratives, the utopias and dystopias in which either monetarisation or technological functionalisation appear to absolutely colonise the world (p. 36). This plurality of imaginaries also indicates that there is a multiplicity of possible tensions, and hence, we need to talk not of modernity but of modernities in the plural. The idea of multiple modernities, which in the work of other theorists might refer to area studies or the study of civilisations, in Rundell’s work is mobilised to address also the internal plurality of a discreet civilisation.

Not everything is politics

Rundell adopts the distinction, more familiar in French political philosophy, between ‘explicit power’, ‘the political’ and ‘politics’ (p. 99). Explicit power is understood by him, in a way reminiscent of both Foucault and Elias, as a relational or figurational form as opposed to a simple deployment of force on the part of rulers. This relationality can be symmetrical or asymmetrical and it can also be present in state and non-state forms. More importantly, it is functional: it legislates, it makes decisions, it settles disputes. ‘The political’, on the other hand, sets the specific way for the deployment of explicit power. As is well known, for Weber the primary social institution of the political is the state. It obtains its legitimacy from the monopolisation of both violence and cultural codes. For Rundell the modern invention of ‘politics’ changes this. ‘Politics’ here is understood as the combination of three elements which set limits to the political and render its legitimation contingent. These elements are: first, self-institution, which refers here not to a foundational act but to a form of acting that does not seek a guarantee on an extra-social point of certainty. The other two are circulation of power and reflexivity. Democratisation is a centrifugal force that makes power circulate by diluting it into a multitude of cities and federalised institutions. For Rundell the ‘democratic imaginary’ of modern politics or ‘the democratic invention’, as Lefort (1994) calls it, is not so concerned with the problem of integration and control so central to classical sociology and political thought but is more concerned with the consciousness of contingency and the openness of modernity together with the ever present temptation to close the space of indeterminacy. In this context, democracy is also not about individualisation and market control, as it is in the liberal program. Democracy is, instead, about interdependence.

Political modernity is, therefore, constituted by a tension between two imaginaries: on the one hand, that of juridical sovereignty, with its emphasis on the administrative power of the nation-state including its bureaucratic and surveillance apparatuses, which represents a centripetal force in terms of power concentration. On the other hand, the modern imaginary of politics, which includes both democratisation and the emergence and pluralisation of public spheres. The tension between juridical sovereignty and democratisation cannot be simply ‘solved’ with the elimination of either the state or the market. This tension is also not reducible to a dystopian account that foretells a necessary end in the fully controlled society. And yet this does not mean either that the temptation of absolute control will necessarily disappear at some point. Such a temptation is at the core of the other great modern form of the political, which comes into its own by radicalising the imaginary of juridical sovereignty: totalitarianism. The tension between juridical sovereignty and democratisation is one of the tensions in which we moderns are caught, which we have to negotiate and that can produce many different and very particular stories. As opposed to a single voice, modernity offers a polyphony and in many respects a cacophony. Not consensus, but what Rundell terms dissonance: ‘Dissonance assumes the multiple existences of independent voices. It is a reflexive discordance in which the other coexists in the same space, without interference and with its own distinct and different voice’ (p. 36)

For Rundell, political modernity is a fertile ground for the emergence of the public sphere, but the public sphere cannot be reduced to modern politics. In this sense, the public sphere is not co-terminus with democratisation, neither conceptually nor historically. Here, Rundell takes distance from Habermas’s later conception of the public sphere, and that of the theorists of so-called radical democracy. Rundell does not see the public sphere as being necessarily defined by deliberation or argumentation, and definitely not by agonistic exchanges, as it has become common to think in the wake of Arendt. It does refer instead to ‘spaces of openness and reflexive and contemplative coexistence that are not incorporated into the vicissitudes of power, including its democratic version’ (p. 36). For Rundell, to reduce the public sphere to its political version is to neglect a myriad of possible public spheres, such as those of comedy or visual arts, which set us at a distance from the usual rhythms of everyday life and allow the deployment of expressivity. To be part of a public sphere does not necessarily mean to engage in political argumentation. Instead, it refers to the possibility of being in a space of contingent involvement with an object or an experience.

Furthermore, for Rundell, the idea of the public sphere in modernity is an imaginary linked to the value of modern reflexivity. Reflexivity is a process of social creativity with an institutional setting and with a specific space, and it is one that can be explored historically. To clarify this, Rundell turns to the later Durkheim, but not to the Durkheim in which most read a homology between religion and politics. The Durkheim to which he turns is the one of the evolution of education in France (Durkheim, 1977). For Rundell, this text provides a window not onto the question of social integration, which is bracketed, but onto the emergence of modern reflexivity in the periods between the early Renaissance and the Reformation. It is in the context of the medieval university that two important elements emerge: a culture of detachment that allows for distance from what is established, and a culture of questioning the representations given by society (Chapter 4). In other words, reflexivity refers to the gap between individual perspectives and collective representations. Societies can direct their enormous creative capacities in order to close this gap or, on the contrary, let the space remain open for multiple perspectives to ferment into what could be new collective representations. This possibility understood as a value in itself is a central imaginary of the modern world.

Rundell by no means diminishes the importance of the nation-state in political modernity. However, he understands that the plurality of modern social imaginaries brings with it a plurality of ways of being modern, and that these cannot be understood simply by taking the nation-state as the single departure point. Rundell therefore reactivates the notion of civilisation in order to gain a broader scope, and he does so in his own way. In contrast to, for example, Norbert Elias (2000), civilisation here does not refer to the twin processes of the development of manners and of state formation. It does not refer, either, to evolutionary processes of differentiation. The problem with such conceptions is that they tend to privilege certain imaginaries of European modernity and, at the same time, generate a blindness to the complexity of other social imaginaries from Europe itself and from elsewhere. Following Durkheim and Mauss’s little known writings on civilisation, Rundell attempts to recast civilisation as the space of symbolising activity: a ‘civilising process is constituted through patterns of collective creations and interpretations that are created and represented in symbolic form’ (p. 150). Here, civilisation does not refer to specific territorial units, since it is not a political but a cultural category. Political and symbolic frontiers remain in tension.

The importance of recasting civilisation becomes clear in Rundell’s account of Australian indigenous modernity (Chapter 9). In it, he details the process through which the British, armed with a myopic understanding of civilisation that only reflected their own institutions and relations, unleashed a dynamic that made indigenous civilisation invisible to their eyes. They rendered themselves unable to see an entire shared imaginary comprising social significations, forms of territoriality and longue durée histories, all of which were buried under the juridical figure of terra nullius. The initial encounter exposed a dramatic gap between Europeans and indigenous civilisations. The response to such oversized experience of contingency was attempted control and manipulation happening in a number of stages which Rundell calls a bestiarium. However, the employment of technical-administrative codes only tells part of this story. For Rundell, the relational form that was central to this process is not power but cruelty – the latter understood as a relationship of self-enclosure which is heteronomous and also reflexive. Aside from the colonial invisibilisation of indigenous peoples in ‘new world’ societies, cruelty is also the relational form present, for example, in the Nazi-holocaustal society, in the Soviet societies of totalised control, and in the legal system of slavery. Although not one of Rundell’s sources, one is reminded here of Tzvetan Todorov – an author with whom Rundell shares a theoretical sensibility – and specifically his book The Conquest of America (1992), which deals with the way cruelty was mobilised during the Spanish conquest. By recasting the notion of civilisation, Rundell shows not only that indigenous peoples had a rich civilisation of their own but, more importantly, that it did not disappear. Indigenous civilisation continues to be in the making up to the present, now incorporating their relationship with European imaginaries and generating their own indigenous modernities.

Strange subjects

The image of the stranger has so far mostly been employed to denote the sociological distinction between insiders and outsiders. For Georg Simmel strangers are newcomers in relation to those who are already well-known in a place. This is an image that turns newcomers into an abstract type defined by whatever characteristics make them different from their hosts, and according to these, they can be stereotyped and discriminated against. Here, the condition of the outsider becomes almost ontological. Agnes Heller gives a more philosophical twist to this category. For her, Strangers are defined as such in relation to their distance from home. They can be parvenus or illegal workers. Crucially, there is in modernity a specific category, which refers, for Heller, to the existential condition of those who have no home to return to. She calls them ‘absolute strangers’, and their lives are riddled with the conflicts of an always incomplete assimilation.

In close step with Heller, Rundell understands the condition of the stranger in rather different terms to those of Simmel. He draws a distinction between strangers and outsiders (p. 178). For him, familiarity or lack thereof is not what determines being a stranger. He steers clear from giving a quasi-ontological weight to such sociological distinction. Instead, being a stranger is for him part and parcel of the human condition in modernity, and it goes together with a form of life that embraces the indeterminacy of our lives, now pervaded with mobility and abstraction. The modern person has no home fixed at birth, and even when some stability is reached there are never definitive warrants. Our lives are mediated by abstract forms or, as Rundell prefers to call them, ‘social imaginaries’, which become manifest as social roles, money, territorial entities such as the state, institutional procedures, and types of personal relationships such as love and friendship. As denizens of modernity we are all strangers (Chapter 3). This is why Rundell speaks not just of strangers but of contingent strangers as our existential condition. Since the contingent stranger has no home to return to, their home is the absolute present. This image of moderns as strangers keeps Rundell at a distance from the nostalgic yearning for a lost community that one finds in a Robert Putnam or a Robert Bellah. Instead of an alienation narrative, what comes to the fore, again and again, is the possibility of finding a home in the value perspective of modern freedom not only with the possibilities for reflexivity and the embrace of new social forms, but also with very modern ways of searching for transcendence.

The subjective experience of being strangers and of the tensions between modern imaginaries is interpreted by some in terms of a crisis of enchantment. It is in this sense that Charles Taylor, for example, understands the modern attitude of distancing – which for Rundell is central to reflexivity – as producing a ‘buffered self’, disengaged and objectivistic. This modern self lacks the ‘porosity’ that would allow mystery and enchantment to give meaning to one’s life. Taylor does recognise the possibility of a kind of porosity in modernity but, for him, it is linked to the redemptive attempt, inaugurated by Rousseau’s idea of the ‘general will’, to the symbolic fusion of self, politics and nation. This is, indeed, nothing but the re-sacralisation of a principle of transcendence. This modern porosity is redemptive and can include a call to violence and suffering. The higher purpose is, in the meantime, linked to the technical means to achieve it in a way that demands complete self-transparency. The most virtuous create a code which allows them to tell the corrupt from the pure. Leninism is a further development of this type of modern porosity in which the party replaces the popular will. Taylor responds to both of these possibilities, the buffered alienated self and the porous ‘Jacobinist’ one, with a counter-paradigm based on the idea of new conversions, thus taking up the legacy of modern romanticism. The religious heritage can be modernised with a renewal of the idea of conversion without returning to Augustinian suffering, but instead recreating the possibility of re-encountering mystery in the seemingly mundane happenings of the everyday, that is, the romantic ideal of life brought together with the work of Michel de Certeau.

Rundell questions the linearity implied in this idea of a modern crisis of selfhood. His own position, in contrast, begins from the perspective of anthropological indeterminacy: firstly, we are meaning generating creatures regardless of our historical context. Secondly, we need society, we stand in figurational fields or social imaginaries. Thirdly, subjectivity and inter-subjectivity are made problematic by the fact that we come into the world as beings who are initially ‘unfit for life’ (p. 226). Rundell rejects a quick and fast subscription to the paradigm of inter-subjectivity. As meaning generating creatures, we might or might not create practical reason. It is as such that we can self-limit by taking responsibility towards the other, and in doing so, orient ourselves to the future. This is not about control of the situation, but about openness to the unknown with others. This openness is not a necessary part of our make-up as subjects, and neither is reciprocity for that matter. As mentioned above, cruelty is also a possibility. Furthermore, it is also possible, and sometimes desirable, for us to simply let others be without any interference (p. 247).

Rundell’s problematisation of subjectivity and intersubjectivity is clearer in his exploration of the love relationship. In tune with a supposed modern crisis of meaning, love is commonly seen as a crisis zone, commodified and empty. Rundell wants to bring in the complexity he sees as missing from this picture. In his account, the creation of love is a form of opening of the psyche to the outside involving not just others, but a specific other, who is viewed with particularity and intensity. Love is a form of self-alteration that pushes out, and the opening it creates needs to be concretised as a relationship. Since the beloved is a stranger, a bridge has to be crossed. If the setting is forbidden or unknown a misunderstanding can occur. Exclusivity can also generate ressentiment. Love is therefore, firstly, an imaginary state with its own form of intensification. Secondly, a form of intersubjectivity with its own modulations and temporalities, and thirdly, a cultural complex. As a social imaginary it is instituted as a set of practices that can be communicated by the participants. The erotic social imaginary reflects a transformation of modernity on two fronts: the change in the idea of love itself, in which sex, family and love become dedifferentiated; and the recognition of human beings qua subjects. From this perspective, the crisis of love and the death of love can be understood as tropes that attempt to describe love in its post-metaphysical condition, at a time in which the Romantic attempt at reconciling humans and their indeterminate nature through love is given up. However, these tropes are misleading if we accept that the love with which we live in our everyday is an expression of our indeterminacy, of our internal chaos, and it is also an involvement that grows out of the tensions between contingent strangers.

Final remarks

This book offers a great deal, and yet, one is left intrigued by a couple of things hinted at, but not fully delivered. Modernity is more often than not interpreted by social theorists through one-dimensional stories which echo the prejudices and opinions of the non-theorist. A common narrative sees modernity as unbridled capitalism marching forth, commodifying everything with its levelling power deployed through markets and money exchanges. Often, modernity is also seen, through the magnifying glass of technological domination, as a world of absolute surveillance, control and manipulation. There seems to be no lack of appetite for an ever-growing genre of dystopian literature whose temporal horizon has now moved from the future into the heart of our present. In a number of places in this volume, Rundell signals both monetarisation and technological functionalisation as central imaginaries of modernity; at the same time, he insinuates challenges to the one-dimensionalising pull of narratives spun out of the tensions they produce. Despite all this, he has chosen not to include more extended accounts of these two imaginaries here. Perhaps there is a wish to shift the focus away from their overbearing presence, but one hopes, all the same, that this will be material for books to come. All in all, this volume remains a testament to the fact that understanding modernity is a complex and very demanding exercise. Pretending that it can be made simple is to have missed the point already.