Modernity as a Narrative Effect

Abstract

The article offers a semantic examination of three ways in which modernity has been conceptualized and problematized: first, a broadly Kantian account; second, an epistemological account that treats modernity as a discursive formation of a particular kind; and third, a postmodernist account associated with historicism, the search for historical truth, and the interpretation of modern history as a discursive effect. The article argues that, in this context, modernity comes to function as the narrative effect of a certain kind of discourse – one that seeks neither to elaborate an ontology of thought nor to establish an epistemology of history. From the standpoint of a pantextualist view of reality and of the possibilities of knowing it, such a move appears entirely justified, since, from this perspective, Enlightenment modernity itself was no different from this kind of semi-consciously produced modernity. At the same time, this position still leaves room for a distinctly modern optimism, tied to the claim that reason can exercise control over modernity and project the future. The common-sense objection – that such constructions are merely ideal formations with no referent in reality – must therefore be met by a critique of common sense itself, understood as a discursive moment shaped by the currently accepted forms through which truth is legitimated. The crucial point is to resist the temptation to produce a new metaphysics by revising subject-object relations, the phenomenology of perception, or the hermeneutics of history. Modernity in this sense – modernity as a moment of intellectual production – may be understood as an attempt to revive an image that emerged half a century ago among structuralist thinkers who anticipated a rapid revolution in thought. Once stripped of the excesses of its time, of the rhetoric of political economy, and of an overly critical pathos, this construct nevertheless continues to prove viable.