Studying Jurgen Habermas’s Essay: “Modernity-An Incomplete Project”

                                                A Term Paper

Submitted for presentation to P.G Dept. of English

Utkal University Bhubaneswar

                                                                 For

                   Partial fulfillment of course work leading to PhD programme.

Submitted By:                                                                                Mentor:

Biswa Ranjan sahoo                                       Prof. Himansu Sekhar Mohapatra

PhD Course work Student     

Utkal University Bhubaneswar

On the eve of getting Theodor W. Adorno prize, in 1980 Jurgen Habermas delivered a lecture and the essay is an outcome of that. The essay highlights how ‘modernity’ as a project fails. He has taken many aspects like; aesthetic modernity, cultural and societal modernization, the project Enlightenment and negating culture, to present them in different sections of the essay. These aspects of his experiment over modernity have been rounded up by a suitable alternative. He attempted to show how modernism as a project grew and ultimately rejected. I will describe the above aspects one by one from my idea of his essay.

To Habermas, with the advent of post-modernity, we are forced to revaluate the modernity. Modernity connotes newness, a transition from the old to the new. One cannot confine it to an age, rather it is an epoch formed from an outright rejection of antiquity or from a renewed relation to the ancient. The most recent modernism, as observed by Habermas, makes an abstract opposition between tradition and present. Modern age is characterized by the advent of a new style. The emphatically modern document no longer borrows this power of being a classic from the authority of a past epoch; instead, a modern work becomes a classic because it has once been authentically modern. Hence modernism has a secret tie with classicism. “Of course whatever can survive time has always been considered classic.”  

The Discipline of Aesthetic Modernity

In Ezra Pound's words aesthetic modernity relies upon the quest to 'make it new'. For Habermas, modernism arises out of 'modernity', the condition of the new which lines the constantly changing path to the future. To quote Habermas, “Aesthetic modernism is characterized by attitudes which find common focus in a changed consciousness of time”, the time consciousness is expressed through metaphors of avant-garde, which is reflected in their venture to unknown landscape. This time consciousness of avant-gardes carry the touch of history but they use past in a very different way by objectifying scholarship of historicism. The creative activities done by the avant-gardes are nothing but posthisoricist attitude of recreating past. So the originality was diminishing. For Octavio Paz, “avant-garde of 1967 repeats the deeds and gestures of those of 1917”. The impulse of modernity is exhausted and yet to die. For Habermas ‘modernism is dominant but dead’. Hence the modernists became neoconservatist.  Daniel Bell's view is that Western societies are experiencing, in the guise of postmodernism, a split between culture and society. So concept of preserving modernism is the religious revival. This preserving is described in the next section.

 Cultural Modernity and Societal Modernization

For cultural modernity and societal modernization, the modernists became neoconservatist whose doctrine blurs the relation between the welcomed processes of societal modernization on the one hand, and the lamented cultural development on the other. But quite contrarily, their ideology gave birth to all aporias- difficulties, logical impasse and doubt. Societal modernization has modernized economy and society with capitalist mode of production, while cultural modernization has created differentiation of cultural value domains-science, morality and art.  Habermas disproves the old conservatives ‘attempt to escape into the nostalgia for premodernity to the neo-conservatives’.  But they attempt to impart religious faith through the awakening of substantive reason and young conservationist attempt to jump into post-modernity, claiming that the solutions to the problems of modernity can be searched within it. Therefore, there is no reason to find an escape from it. Habermas accepts that modernity has its discontents and he also accepts that the division of ‘life-world’ has separated ones ethics, aesthetics and cognition. The communicative rationality can link these faculties which assumes, language has potential for the emancipator charge. Instead of one-sided, instrumental reason; based on domination over others, Habermas’s reason is non-dominating and non-instrumental. Only such type of communicative rationality can limit the doom of the modern world.  For this, aesthetic should be given a new role-a role that can help to heal the division by drawing art near to the everyday praxis. 

The Project of Enlightenment

Modernism, he says, is a goal of Enlightenment, to enrich the ‘life world’ through reason. The Enlightenment is the point at which a new role for art was devised. Increased attention to objective science, universal law and morality and autonomous art would lead the way towards an improved world. Habermas talks of Max Weber’s separation of religion and metaphysics into three independent spheres: Science, morality and art. This division, Habermas says, ultimately gave space to three dimensions of culture, truth, morality and beauty, knowledge, justice and taste. Eventually, the project of Enlightenment aimed to develop these three aspects objective science, universal morality and low and autonomous art. In addition, it hoped to free these domains from their own mysterious and obscure traps, and to utilize this specialized culture for the enrichment of everyday life. But unfortunately, in the twentieth century, this division-science, morality and art have come to debase the autonomy itself and have created the problem. So it has attempted to negate the culture.

The false programs of Negation of Culture

The development of art in the 19th century encountered aestheticism i.e. art for art’s sake. Consequently, instead of colour, lines, sounds and movement the media of expression and techniques of production themselves became the aesthetic object. This process of alienating art and life continued in the 20th century too. The more art is alienated from life the more surrealist explosives forced a reconciliation art and life. But, these attempts to remove the distinction between art and life, artifact and object, appearance and reality, became spontaneous and nonsense experiments. These attempts, though, have brought art closer to life, but unfortunately, have strengthened the structures, which the art is required to dissolve. If art wishes to complete the modernity project it must refrain from increasingly extravagant attempts. For this the art should be a framework that legitimizes by making it obscure to the point where the observer sees nothing to be gained. To quote Terry Eagleton, "Art is at once precious and worthless", and it has a social role that diminishes with increased theoretical complication. For Habermas the modernity project remains unfulfilled because art wrongly assumed its existence. It was central to the life of the masses and its innovation had consequence outside the cultural arena.

Alternatives

Habermas concedes that modernity has thus failed. However he refuses to abandon the project. Rather he insists on learning from the mistakes of those extravagant programs, which tried to negate modernity. So, the project of modernity should be continued to establish a connection between modern culture and everyday life. He says: the project of modernity has not yet to be fulfilled. And the reception of art is only one of at least three of its aspects. The project aims at a differentiated reigning of modern culture with an everyday praxis that still depends on heritages, but would be impoverished through more traditionalism.

Thus, Habermas expects to have established this kind of linkage, but conversely for the near future he does not see very a strong possibility of such connection.