Modernist Visions and Contemporary Modernities

My paper argues that the nexus between history and the subject is central to modernity. I suggest that the modernist vision is one of the autonomous constituting of society and that this social imaginary informs modern oppositions to heteronomous social relations. It is with reference to this social imaginary that sociological theory has, in my opinion, sought to comprehend processes of social reflexivity and the possibilities for society to act upon itself. In particular, the modernist vision involves an extension of the idea of autonomy beyond the institutional domain of the political order and an appreciation of its social grounding. Significantly, modern perceptions of the limits to autonomy are based on the assumption that society derives from the action of subjects and that social relations of domination are amenable to change. However, as Castoriadis contends, modernity has been shaped by another imaginary, that of the rational domination and control of nature and society. The presumption that these two modern social imaginaries are interrelated and reinforcing has tended to be undermined by processes of social modernization. Jürgen Habermas once described comparable processes as resulting in modernity being ‘at variance with itself’. I suggest that modernity remains a critical diagnostic category concerned with disclosing the immanent potentials of the present development of society and the distortion of these potentials. My analysis seeks to demonstrate this through an analysis of the changes in theoretical conceptions of the tensions and contradictions that pervade modernity and its dominant institutions, focusing especially on depictions of contemporary conflicts and dynamics of transformation. It concludes that influential perspectives, like those of multiple modernities and successive modernities, can be demarcated in terms of their interpretations of notions of collective self-determination and that this reveals differences in their conceptions of the relationship between history and the subject.