Tangles and textures: unraveling modernity

Abstract

This essay unravels the terms, tangles, and textures of modernity by bringing together a range of critical concerns. Beginning with a discussion of how my wider work has articulated issues of modernity, it explores the entanglements between modernity, modernism, and modernization. Here, my notion of “subjects of modernity” helps to understand the concept-entity of modernity as entailing principally contradictory, contingent, and contested processes of authority and alterity. Next, building on these considerations, I engage critically yet affirmatively with two influential understandings of Western modernity. Finally, the article considers what is at stake today in careful engagements with modernity not only by seizing upon two sets of scandals that characterize contemporary worlds, but by outlining what I have called a “history without warranty”.