[The light of after (Paris 1014). Foto Rb]
My first point is a denial of the idea, which I
find rather strange, that modernity has ended. Genocide and modernity are two
separate items. Genocide is an event of immense proportions, but modernity did
not include only positive values within itself but, from its beginning, also
the darker aspects, both in terms of collective psyche and in terms of social
configuration. The modern totalitarianisms, for example, cannot be explained
with the end of modernity, or should the end of modernity coincide with the
first decades of the 20th century as it is very difficult to say? So
the first point is that modernity contains a negative side, and this has been
stated since Voltaire’s Candide.
What perhaps has decreased in the credulity of
modern human beings, especially in the West of the world, is the idea of
indefinite progress and constant social improvement. Such an assumption was
certainly shaken in the 20th century by two World Wars and by crimes
against humanity committed several times in various places, and in the 21st
century by September 11 and other factors of crisis and death. Having said
that, the idea that we live in a world different from antiquity, and where
ideas of modernization are spread, is still alive.
If, in my opinion, we cannot talk about the end
of modernity, but rather about the problem of the society created through
modernization, what can one make of the concept of post-modernity? This, too,
seems to me a term that does not clarify our situation. Whoever believes in
post-modernity refers to a different phase in the production of goods, after
the empire of the machine and towards the rule of computerized technology,
within the realm of developed electronic and computerized communications, and
in the context of globalization. It is true, in my view, that the period from
the 1980s onwards has produced a new type of modern society that might be
termed as late modernity more successfully that post-modernity.
A different case is that of post-modernism as a
style in literature, cinema and the arts in general. This was an aesthetics of
eclecticism, combination of elitist and mass works, commercialization and
democratization of texts circulated within society, which acquired currency
over the 1980s and 1990s, and therefore it is perhaps correct to keep using it,
in its aesthetic meaning, when referring to architecture, the novel and so on.
[Roberto Bertoni]
