Page 164 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

MODERN/MODERNISM/MODERNITY

with the Royal Society, founded in 1662.
. Philosophical modernity began with the Enlightenment, centred on
the eighteenth-century philosophers of France.
. Political modernity began with the transfer of sovereignty from
monarch to people. After an interrupted English experiment
(1645–1660), it was inaugurated successfully, i.e. continuously, in
the American (1776) and French (1789) Revolutions.
. Industrial modernity began with the Industrial Revolution,
associated with the ‘steam age’ and manufacturing pioneered in
England from about 1780 to 1830.
. Cultural modernity came of age in the nineteenth century, when all
these influences were fused and generalised internationally, with the
great metropolitan cities, rapid communication systems, industrial
workforces, popular entertainments and the beginnings of media,
tourism, department stores and mechanised warfare. Here was
where New York began to outshine its European antecedents.

Modernism as an artistic or literary movement was associated with the
intellectual and artistic reaction to the last of the developments noted
above; it was influential at the turn of the twentieth century.
There was also, perhaps more importantly, a ‘small-m’ modernism
that turned the historical amalgam of modernity (as above) into a kind
of manifesto. This was modernism as the pursuit of modern ideals –
reason, truth, progress, science, secularism, popular sovereignty, open
society, technology and communication. Such an ideology of modern-
ism contrasted with the condition of modernity by its partisanship, and
it tended to become more pronounced the more it felt itself
threatened. Threats to modernism of this sort came from three
directions:

. pre-modern thought – magical systems, traditional authority,
private realities;
. modernity’s own ‘dark side’ – the horrors that reason and science
could unleash, from the Holocaust to Hiroshima, Apartheid to
colonialism, exploitation by market, gender, race, class, etc.
. postmodernism – ‘high’ modernists saw‘postmodern’ develop-
ments as undermining truth and reason in the name of relativism
and irrealism, displacing the hope of progress in the rush for
identity, which was seen as retribalising modern societies.

See also: Culture wars, Meaning, Postmodern/postmodernism/
postmodernity

149