Dissertation for Master of Art in International Performance Research
War Machine of Performance
Bodies and Alter-Modernities
Under the Supervision of: Prof. Sruti Bala (University of Amsterdam)
and Prof. James Harding (University of Warwick)
University of Amsertdam (UvA) and University of Warwick
Abstract
The following research project will examine the alter-modernities expressed and produced through the performative war machine of alterglobalization movement. Starting from the introduction of the first cycle of alterglobalization movement from 1994 to 2003, the research will discuss the performative feature of contemporary global resistance movements and introduce performativization, a re-considered version of Gilles Deleuze’s method of dramatization, as its principal methodology. Continuing with a discussion on the concept of Modernity (with capital M), the research will examine the Eurocentric character of Modernity and modernization, the negative force of anti-modernity, and the constituent characteristics of alter-modernities. Applying Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic perspective, the characteristics of possible machinic assemblages between radical performance art and revolutionary machines will be discussed; assemblages which reveal the alter-modernities produced through them. To chart the alter-modernities, the following research will make use of Foucauldian method of diagrammatic analysis and refer to four principal movements in alter-modernities: Exodus, Commencing the Performative War Machine, Autonomous Self-organization and Reclaiming the Common. The analysis would traverse a constellation of case studies: (1) different Global Action Days (Seattle 99, Quebec 2001, and Geneva 2001), and Mayday Parades (starting from 2001); (2) different activist/artist networks involved in these actions such as the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (AAA), No
Borders/No Nations, Tute Bianchi, CIRCA, and RTS; and finally, (3) different performance
art groups involved in the actions and networks such as PublixTheatreCaravan, Hawaiian
alterglobalization movement, one can see which new forms of resistance and which new concepts out of the Idea of the political have been performativized and how.
Keywords: Alter-modernities, Performativization, Alterglobalization Movement, The Machinic, Contemporary Social Movements
Acknowledgment
This project would not have been possible without the support of many people. Special thanks to Professor Sruti Bala and Professor James Harding, my supervisors, who patiently helped me to make some sense out of the confusion. Many thanks to MAIPR students and staff, for creating a community in which all ideas of the following dissertation have been produced collectively. Thanks to Erasmus Mundus Association for awarding me a scholarship, providing me with the financial means necessary to complete this project. And finally, thanks to all my past and future comrades in struggles for a better world.
CONTENT
CONTENT IV
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1
1.1 Toward a World of Many Worlds 1
1.2 The Performative Turn in Radical Politics 8 1.3 Methodology: Dramatization/Performativization 11
CHAPTER TWO: BEYOND RESISTING MODERNITY 23
2.1 Modernity, Modernization and Modernism 24
2.1.1 Modernity 24
2.1.2 Modernization 27
2.1.3 From The Modernist Critique to Anti-Modernity 32
2.2 Altermodernity 41
CHAPTER THREE: THE MACHINIC PERSPECTIVE 53
3.1 The History of Machine 53
3.2 The Sudden Topicality of Machines: Movements Performativized the Machinic 63 CHAPTER FOUR: CHARTING A REALITY TO-COME: FOUR MOVEMENTS
OF ALTER-MODERNITIES 71
4.1 Movement One: Exodus 71
4.1.1 The Machinic Exodus 71
4.1.2 The Exodus of Performance Machines 75
4.1.2.1 The Desiring Performance Machines 75
4.1.2.2 Territory of Theatre and Performance 77
4.1.2.3 The Exodus from the Territory 81
4.1.3 Refusal of representation 85
4.2 Movement Two: Commencing the Performative War Machine 92
4.2.1 What Does a War Machine do? 92
4.2.2 A Brief History of Different Performative War Machines in Alterglobalization Movements 96 4.3 Movement Three: Autonomous self-organization 103
4.4 Movement Four: Reclaiming the Common 111
CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION 127
5.1 New Forms Created 129
5.2 New Concepts Performativized 130
NOTES 133
War Machine of Performance: Bodies and Alter-modernities
Iman Ganji
Chapter One: Introduction
1.1 Toward a World of Many Worlds
“Our resistance will be as transnational as capital”; that was the slogan of the first global street party, called for by London Reclaim the Streets (RTS), on 16 May 1998: a party happened all over the world, in the streets of more than 30 cities. That event was the first visible beginning of a global cycle of resistance, rebellion and constituent power of multitudes which lasted at least until the 2003 war against Iraq. A visible beginning, since in May 98, for the first time, “globalized” capital was made to recognize the dissenters, to see them rallying in the street and to hear them shouting out of joy and anger, 30 years after the famous May 68; the first time mass media had to -- though in a deformed way as always -- cover the story of global dreamers in the decade of capitalism’s victories, in the happy
nineties; the first time the war machine of performance was mobilized by plugging
performance art machine into the revolutionary machine in order to exercise a politics beyond every traditional unionist or party politics, which traversed economic, ecological, racist, sexist and artistic/aesthetic issues in a global scale.
The movement was about resisting the unequal globalization. Two years before that, the Second Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism happened in Spain, inspired by Zapatista’s call for a global resistance network. The first meeting after the call happened in
Chiapas (1995). One year later, around 3000 activists from 50 different countries went to Spain and formed the People’s Global Action (PGA). PGA organized the global action days in the following years in a very novel way, because PGA was neither a party, nor a formal organization, but a network. “While the PGA does not define itself as an organization, it holds a distinctive organizational philosophy based on decentralization and autonomy. It has no head office, no central funds, no membership, and no representatives” (Notes from Nowhere 2003, 96). This network of multitudes from all over the world organized the first global action day which was just described in the first paragraph, to resist the corporative globalization and protest against its inequalities. May 98 was a perfect timing: a month in which both the G8 and the WTO had meetings -- the former in Birmingham, United Kingdom and the latter in Geneva, Italy. The WTO’s Second Ministeral meeting was aimed to discuss rules which were called Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI); a pack of rules which could deregulate the foreign investment and oblige the less developed countries to violate the rights of their people, mostly workers and farmers, to absorb more foreign investment. G8 was the summit of all developed countries, the top powers of world, which would benefit from these corporate-friendly rules. But in this first global day action, through the massive street protests and NGOs’ active interventions, MAI was defeated and never passed. In Birmingham, RTS threw a street party in the center of the city with 6000 people dressed as clowns and blocked the whole functioning of the city, while 75000 more protestors formed a human chain around the summit building. In Geneva, 10000 marched through the city and big, sometimes violent clashes happened (Notes from Nowhere 2003, 104). That was the first public appearance of a new collective subject, protested with theatrical costumes and props, dressed as clowns or comic book characters, singing or
playing music, dancing and partying in the middle of huge streets, performing the very joyful nature of protesting against what they saw as a cold-blooded, irresponsible, unequal, and sad “corporative globalization”.
Because of its very novel organizational nature and their spectacular use of performance art and theatrical tools, the events on May 98 baffled authorities, main stream media and even traditional leftist parties. “‘Who ARE these guys?’ wondered the Financial Times after the defeat of the MAI” (ibid, 66). Even some years later, after other events in Seatle (99), Washington (2000), Quebec (2001) and Genoa (2001), the confusion didn’t disappear. The spokesman of Europe’s Transnational Police Agency (Europol) said: “We don’t consider them terrorists.... We’re not yet sure how to even label them” (ibid). An activist describes this confusion as follows:
British political commentator Hugo Young attacked the ‘herbivores’ behind anti-capitalist protests for making ‘a virtue out of being disorganized’, while the head of the World Wildlife Fund referred to us in Genoa, as a ‘formless howling mob’”(ibid).
Who were they, indeed? Or what were they? What was this new politics exercised in the street? What were the roots of this performative critique? Why were they so different from traditional leftist actions? Why were so independent from any party, whether radical or not? First of all, there should be a quick refinement on the image mass media have been giving us all these years by defining this movement as anti-globalization. A movement so globally diffused, consisted of activists from Indian farmers, landless Brazilian and Iranian exiles to American anti-racists and West European performers and artists, is not against, at least a
certain meaning of, globalization. It’s true that this movement has been against the unequal globalization led by the so-called Global North corporations and leaders and performed through seemingly international organizations such as WTO and IMF, both infamous because of their imposed structural re-adjustments on poor countries, supporting post-coup d’état dictatorships in their neoliberal imposed policies, and so on. But it’s also true that the world-view of those heterogeneous movements could be summarized in this Zapatista slogan: “a world in which many worlds fit” (Conant):
In fact their proposals focus on alternative but equally global relationships of trade, cultural exchange, and political process—and the movements themselves constructed global networks. The name they proposed for themselves, then, rather than “antiglobalization,” was “alterglobalization” (or altermondialiste, as is common in France). The terminological shift suggests a diagonal line that escapes the confining play of opposites—globalization and antiglobalization— and shifts the emphasis from resistance to alternative (Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth 102).
The current form of the globalization, to which protesters oppose, is said to be the continuation of apartheid, colonialism, and exercise of domination over so-called less
developed countries of the Global South. An ironical performance by Yes Man would shed
light on this point. Yes Man is a performance group of artist-pranksters who “expose the ideology of the WTO by actively promoting the most absurd and inhumane ideas, and rationalizing them by the (il)logic of ‘free’ market fundamentalism” (Notes from Nowhere 2003, 246). In one of their prank performances, Andy, one of the performers, addressed
about 150 specialists in industries, from officials to businessmen and academicians, in a conference held by Tampere’s University of Technology in Finland, 2001. The conference title was “the Textiles of Future” and as always, they talked about the issues of globalization. In part of his lecture, Andy turned toward the subject of slavery only to ironically assert that slavery was wrong from a utilitarian economic point of view. Indeed, he recourses to the fact that today’s method of outsourcing cheap labour from poor countries, a method developed in the course of globalization, is much more efficient in exploiting foreign labour-power.
Let’s see ... A Finnish clothing set costs $50 at the very least. Two meals from McDonald’s cost $10 or so. The cheapest small room probably runs for $250/month. To function well, you have to pay for your slave’s health care – if its country of origin was polluted, this could get very expensive. And of course what with child labour laws, much of the youth market is simply not available. Now leave the same slave back at home – let’s say, Gabon. In Gabon, $10 pays for two weeks of food, not just one day. $250 pays for two years’ housing, not a month’s. $50 pays for a lifetime of budget clothing! Healthcare is likewise much cheaper. On top of it all, youth can be gainfully employed without restriction (The Yes Man 2003, 248).
This is exactly what one can call the continuation of apartheid and colonialism through corporative globalization. The fact that none of the audience members was even slightly embarrassed or disgusted during this performance shows how the current performance of economic globalization constructs its own subjectivities in the social class of business managers.
The current form of globalization is closely tied to the ideas and/or practices which were inherent to modernity and modernization processes. As we saw in Hardt and Negri’s quotation, the activists seek an “alterglobalization” rather than an “antiglobalization”. This difference between “anti” and “alter” will be discussed further in chapter one, but now it’s enough to point out that alterglobalization is conceptually related to altermodernity, just like dominant globalization is related to Modernity itself. The following research will work on the problematic of altermodernities, as they have been expressed by alterglobalization movement, trying to conceptualize them through their performative collective expressions and articulations in the first cycle of alter-globalization movement. To do this, the research will take a machinic perspective proper to the current situation of contemporary capitalism and the resistance against it. This machinic perspective is borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s philosophy and refers to the new social compositions of production and reproduction in Post-Fordism. Through machinic assemblages, the following research shows how radical performance art can attach itself into the broader movements of altermodernities and also how altermodernities are heterogeneous machinic assemblages between different communication factors themselves. In addition, a Foucauldian/Deleuzian notion of Diagram will help us to view the altermodernities in terms of their internal forces and movements. Therefore, four movements will be discussed to chart the altermodernities. These movements (exodus, commencing the performative war machine, autonomous self-organization, and reclaiming the common) are characteristics of a generic movement which aims to propose an alternative to Modernity and its actualizations after 17th century. Through these movements, we will examine how the forms of constituted power, especially state-form, are refused to be accepted, how different deterritorializations happened in the
field of performance, how alternative forms of organizing emerged, and how the binary of the public/the private has been challenged. In addition, we will learn through these movements that the struggles of altermodernities and alterglobalization are rooted in autonomy, self-organization and the common. The research will study different cases from the first cycle of alterglobalization movements around the world according to these movements. The first cycle is considered in this research from 1994 – the year RTS performed its first street party and Zapatista rose against the neoliberal globalization and Mexican state authority – to 2003; a year in which massive protests against war in Iraq – protests which were unprecedented after protests against Vietnam war – remained unheard and made the whole participants of these movements to actively change their strategies according to their previous experiences in those years. The selected cases from this period are: (1) different Global Action Days (Seattle 99, Quebec 2001, and Geneva 2001), and Mayday Parades (starting from 2001); (2) different activist/artist networks involved in these actions such as the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (AAA), No Borders/No Nations,
Tute Bianchi, CIRCA, and RTS; and finally, (3) different performance art groups involved
in the actions and networks such as PublixTheatreCaravan, Hawaiian Diggers, and
Mujeres Creando. These cases have been analyzed through different ways such as inside
stories by activists and organizers, documentaries, newspapers articles, my own experience in different forms of struggles in the fields of militant knowledge-production and web art in Iran (2009) and participation in recent decision-making meetings of Kein Mensch Ist Illegal in Berlin, as well as many theoretical essays and books written about them by artivists themselves or researchers like myself. The principal methodology through which all these discussions would be followed is a rethought version of Deleuze’s dramatization, called
performativization in the following research and will be explained in the third section of
Introduction. In the end of this study, we will be able to recognize that new forms of resistance and struggle, and new concepts of the Idea of the political have been collectively performed and performativized by and during the alterglobalization movements and also these forms and concepts have shaped together different altermodernities in different contexts; altermodernities which could offer a way out of the present, a way back to the
future.
1.2 The Performative Turn in Radical Politics
To define the methodology, one should consider the performative character of all recent alterglobalization movements. One could claim that this performative character, and also the integration of radical performance art into the heart of movement, appeared in 1960s. “The performative turn” was suggested by Erika Fischer-Lichte regarding the new character of art-production as events, particularly after 60s (Fischer-Lichte 22). To give an example of performative turn in radical politics/arts, one could mention the bra-burning
performance of radical feminist movement. It was in September 1968, when Miss America
contest was going to happen, that a group of radical feminists gathered to protest against the already globalized ideal aesthetic image of women promoted by this kind of contests as well as advertisements, fashion and culture industry, which has been always, on one hand closely tied to the profit-making of capitalism, and on the other hand intensifying the patriarchal domination over women by imposing them to wear clothes and accessories desired by masculine gaze; a biopower which actively appropriates and deforms feminine body. To protest, they set up a “Freedom Trash Can” and seemingly put bras, girdles,
falsies, curlers and copies of popular women’s magazine into it and set fire on all of them. Although there is still a big media campaign to prove “the bra burning” never happened in this form – a familiar strategy of mass media to reappropriate the image of a radical action, deviate audience from the main point, and make them pay attention to playful controversies –, the whole performance, as Neala Schleuning writes, “affirmed the power of performance art in political activism” (Schleuning 226). The radical performance art began to make concatenations between art and radical politics, especially by its street practice of institutional critique. One famous example is the direct action performances of “the Black Mask Group” (BMG), and in particular, their 1966 performance against Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). BMG announced that they were going to shut down MoMA in a certain date. On that day, riot police surrounded the museum to keep it safe from the “terrorists”, while the BMG was standing in front them. All of a sudden, one of their members walked across the police to the entrance and attached a “Closed” sign to it. That was the end of the performance (Schleuning 226). They shut the museum down; not only by putting that particular sign that day, but by collectively devalidating the discursive authority of art institutions over art practice in the 60s and 70s with other radical groups and artists of institutional critique. This particular performance linked the street as “the real site of political contestation” (MacKenzie and Porter 67) and performative artistic critique against art institutions. On the other hand, political activists and militants have also been using performative tools. For instance, the Zapatistas militants always appear in public behind masks. It is of course for safety reasons, but this is not the only, or even the most important reason. They always assert that “they were invisible people who had ‘masked
themselves in order to be seen’ [1]”. Iain Mackenzi and Robert Porter explain this Zapatista’s performative device as following:
It is a dramatic technique that reaches back to the beginnings of drama: masking the face precisely to make certain features more visible by excluding others, and to highlight the dynamics between characters by enhancing the forces at work within their emotional, social and political interactions (MacKenzie and Porter 1).
On the other hand, Marcos, the subcommander, the most known unknown figure of Zapatista believes that “anyone can put on a ski mask and say ‘I am Marcos’” (Notes from Nowhere 2003, 64). The call for and toward everyone is another function of this performativity, since performative politics is always necessarily a collective action: it needs bodies to gather, collide and feel each other presence [2].
This performativity of political protests has been intensified in recent years. As Negri and Hardt write:
It is easy to recognize the performative, carnevalesque nature of the various protest movements that have arisen around questions of globalization. Even when they are ferociously combative, the demonstrations are still highly theatrical with giant puppets, costumes, dances, humorous songs, chants, and so forth. The protests, in other words, are also street festivals in which the anger of the protesters coexists with their joy in the carnival (Hardt and Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire 225).
As we see in the above quote, this performative character is closely connected to the idea of carnival. Although it shall be discussed further in the following pages, it should be noted that many scholars and activists point to this carnevalesque nature as a distinctive characteristic of alterglobalization movement. The case of street parties mentioned in the beginning is of course a good example of this feature. But what is the relation between this performativity and altermodernity/alterglobalization we discussed before?
1.3 Methodology: Dramatization/Performativization
To give a possible answer to the question which is presented in the end of previous section, the Deleuzian method of dramatization would be useful. It is true that Deleuze, especially when he writes with Guattari, is against the concept of method and methodology, but one could say there’s still a presence of point of view, or as Deleuze and Guattari would say in “What Is Philosophy?”, of conceptual personas throughout his works (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?).
Deleuze terms this method1 as dramatization in his Nietzsche and Philosophy and defines it as the “only method adequate to Nietzsche's project and to the form of the questions that he puts” (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy 79). Deleuze points out that Nietzsche is concerned with types, not with symptoms, since these types can express the alternative relations of forces which are not reactive, but active and able to transform, and the interpretation that finds these types behind symptoms is what he calls dramatization. Deleuze believes that Nietzsche uses drama to find out the real conceptual different
1 The co-written Book of MacKenzie and Porter (2011) has an extensive discussion on this method and was the main
relations between concepts and to make them appear on the stage to reveal the drama behind them, i.e. the way they are actualized in certain contexts. Deleuze explains this method of interpretation as follows:
Interpretation reveals its complexity when we realize that a new force can only appear and appropriate an object by first of all putting on the mask of the forces which are already in possession of the object (ibid 5).
This explanation has certain similarities to the idea of defamiliarization. What Deleuze describes can be put into these words: one should put on the mask of existing forces on a new force, only in order to bring it to stage to defamiliarize the whole stage and reveal the new perspective by the way of this new force. Otherwise, the new force would remain invisible. The notion of mask would remind us about Zapatista performative self-masking: they put on the mask to be visible, since they defamiliarize the stage of recognition which has not even noticed their existence before that. The project of this research could be defined as something similar: taking the old notions of Modernity, modernization, organization, performance and so on, and making them appear differently on the stage of the political through the actions of the war machine of performance1 in alterglobalization movement. How this should be done will be explain in the following paragraphs and this
1 The concept of war machine will be explained later in chapter four. However, to have a general understanding of this
concept, it is enough to keep in mind that war machine has the following characteristics: it creates, it is nomadic, heterogonous1, a force of absolute deterritorialization, and – as a constituent power -- wipes away the established
constituted Power and at the same time, starts a long process of constitution; war machine is not a (political/aesthetic) project with a certain result, but a never-ending process of becomings. The war machine is the process of becoming alter-, or creating the alter-modernity. Therefore, the war machine of performance simultaneously attacks authorities (State, global institutions) as well as the pre-established territory of theatre and performance and its institutions, or in other words, the cultural and creative industry (ICC). Like a Foucaudian Parrhesia, it’s a critique toward outside and inside at the same time.
needs a further stroll in the notion of dramatization, or if we take Deleuze’s own claim that there’s “a drama beneath every logos” (Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts 103), to find the drama behind this very notion [3].
In a lecture for the French Society of Philosophy (Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts 94-117) as well as in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition), Deleuze describes the method of dramatization. Deleuze distinguishes between three things to describe the method: Ideas, concepts and dramas. Defining these three through these texts would help us to understand dramatization better:
Idea: Idea (with capital I) is another name for the plane of immanence, a transcendental field which “doesn’t refer to an object or belong to a subject” and appears as “a pure a-subjective consciousness” (Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life 25). It is an undifferentiated field which has indeterminacy as its main characteristic. Idea is the Territory, the initial Territory that everything (further territorializations and deterritorializations) is started from that. For Deleuze, however, Ideas do not exist in an ivory tower; on the contrary, they are real problematics in our lived experience. Inspired by Hume, Deleuze never treats Idea as a transcendent platonic pure Form. MacKenzi and Porter elucidate that “Deleuze treats ideas as real problems: as outside of yet productive (rather than inside and regulative) of thought … treating ideas as problems in this sense means that ‘they confront and compel thought in virtue of their positive indeterminacy, an indeterminacy that nevertheless provokes thought to its highest powers of determination’ (MacKenzie and Porter 41). Nonetheless, Ideas need a special
Concept: concept is the product of that special process of determination. Concept is the actualized form of an Idea, but what is important is that concepts should be in differential relations with each other to be understood. In other words, a concept is understandable only if it is placed in the relationship with other concepts, since Idea as the immanent field of real problematics generates them in one plane. Here, concept is not at all equal to its Hegelian conceptualization, as a transcendent form stands above the sensation and course of history, or better rigidified like a stone. On the contrary, Deleuzian concept is an open-ended treatment of an Idea and exists in a horizontal relation with this very Idea, never transcends it. Deleuzian concept, however, has also verticality in relation to the plane of immanence. A concept is always transcendental, but never transcendent. It is still in the same plane of immanence, the plane of virtualities, but also actualized and abstract. Concept is a reterritorialization on the plane of Idea. This is what Deleuze, following Kant – his most beloved enemy --, calls in one of his last texts, “a life …”, transcendental
empiricism (Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life 25). In other words,
concept is never isolated from the plane of lived experience, i.e. Idea.
Dramatization: it is a name for that special process of determination. Dramatization, or what Deleuze would also call individuation, is a process which actualizes the concept from the Idea as a plane of immanence. He defines this process as follows: “Given any concept, we can always discover its drama, and the concept would never be divided or specified in the world of representation without the dramatic dynamisms that thus determine it in a material system beneath all possible
representation” (Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts 98) or in other place, he writes “the role of dramas is to specify concepts by incarnating the differential relations and singularities of an Idea” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 218). To understand this process, an example from chemistry would be helpful. Consider a solution of salt and water as an Idea. The crystals which would be made out of this solution during the vaporization of water, which solution already contains them virtually in itself, are like concepts which are now “specified in the world of representation” and determined. The process of crystallization that actualizes each crystal and extracts them from the solution is dramatization or individuation process. To be even more exact, one should also differentiate between dramatization and individuation, since dramatization is the a posteriori process which “recovers” the first process of individuation happened and conditioned the concepts. To put in another way, “the dramatization of concepts, on this view, is the process by which one ‘recovers’ the events that conditioned their emergence” (MacKenzie and Porter 67). However, dramatization is always a practical activity. For Deleuze, this practical activity can be the activity of writing, philosophizing, and creating concepts itself, but not of course limited to this. This inter-relations between Ideas, concepts and dramas makes an ontological claim for Deleuze. “The world is an egg, but the egg itself is a theatre: a staged theatre in which the roles dominates the actors and the Ideas dominates the spaces” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 216).
So, how is this method helpful in the following research? The answer lies in the critical nature of dramatization method. To see what kind of method is critical, one could return
back to the most famous thesis 11 in the history of philosophy: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx, Theses On Feuerbach). What Marx as a philosopher and thinker says here is not to leave every theoretical and philosophical practice, but to engage in a way of critical knowledge-production that can only be possible via changing the world. In simpler terms, critique means knowing by changing.
Therefore, an intervention in the world as a practice is central to the critical methods and that is exactly why dramatization is a critical method: “it is central to the idea of dramatization that the political world can only be known by way of an explicitly critical intervention. Dramatization … adds the claim that this intervention must take a dramatic – by which we mean a practical, critical and creative – form” (MacKenzie and Porter 2). What one may say after all these explanations, is that dramatization as a method connects aesthetics to politics, but by no means subjects one of them to the other: it investigates the political in its moments of aesthetic forms as well as surveys the politics of aesthetics as a way of dramatizing and actualizing the political concepts from the Idea of the political. If one goes back to the relation between Idea, concept and drama, one could say that conceptualization of our real political problematics are conditioned by the Idea of politics and the political as well as the way we dramatize them, the way we individuate each conceptualization from the immanent field of real problematics. On the other hand, the Idea of politics is also conditioned by the dramatization and conceptualization process, since dramatization, as it’s already mentioned, is a critical way of knowing world – world as the immanent field of problematics -- by transforming it [4].
But who is the subject of dramatization, the one who carries out this task? Is it a privilege of philosophers? The answer is simply no: The subject of dramatization is the subject which transforms the world. Therefore, Mackenzi and Porter are right when they claim “that the dramatization of concepts is as likely, and perhaps more likely, to occur on the streets… There is nothing in being a professional philosopher that privileges these individuals in the use and dramatization of concepts […] The philosopher is the one who creates concepts and to create concepts means to create events. What is more, the philosopher need not be an individual; it could just as easily be a pair, a group or social movement. Any movement, for example, spurred to respond to an event by creating a new way of articulating their existence, a new concept … is a philosopher” (MacKenzie and Porter 68).
This is how the method of dramatization will initially guide the following research, and then be transformed appropriately during it, to try to analyze the critique of Modernity and globalization performed by the performative war machine of alterglobalization movement and how it conceptualizes, through its own dramatization method, altermodernities. Therefore, a double use of dramatization will be used in this research: a dramatization in the following text itself by the activity of conceptualizing, writing and researching which itself explores the dramatization process of alterglobalization movement. The alterglobalization movement have put on the mask in various ways to bring the concepts of globalization and Modernity on the stage, but the way they – already labeled as terrorists, anti-moderns, anti-globalizations, dreamers, savages, hippies and etc -- have been dramatizing these concepts in their global networks defamiliarized the whole context, and created new conceptualizations which lead to the creation of new concepts: altermodernity
and alterglobalization. This is how their war machine of performance worked. Deleuze once wrote about Proust that “thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiplied, and we have as many worlds at our disposal as there are artists, worlds more different from each other than those that spin through infinity” (Deleuze, Proust and Signs 187) and now we see that one of the main slogans of alterglobalization movement was this aforementioned Zapatista slogan: a world in which many worlds fit. Perhaps that’s when, in the beginning of 21st century, the radical performance arts and radical politics
reinforced each other, and that’s why “dramatizing the political is not simply a critical method vis-à-vis other forms of political thought but a way of doing political philosophy that explicitly links it to the need to challenge the institutions and formations of everyday politics by way of an art of critical intervention” (MacKenzie and Porter 4). Moreover, considering dramatization of the political allows us to think beyond the mainstream propagandized idea of politics which happens in traditional institutions and parties, and to see it on its main place, i.e. streets. Finally, the whole intention of this research project is best articulated by Deleuze and Guattari themselves:
That is what the completion of the project is: not a promised land and a pre-existing land, but a world created in the process of its tendency, its coming undone, its deterritorialization. The movement of the theatre of cruelty: for it is the only theatre of production, there where the flows cross the threshold of deterritorialization and produce a new land – not at all a hope, but a simple “finding”, a “finished design”, where the person who escapes causes other escapes, and marks out a land while deterritorializing himself. An active point of escape where the revolutionary machine, the artistic machine, the scientific machine and (schizo)
analytic machine become parts and pieces of one another (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 322).
However, theatre of production [5] makes us to pay attention to the internal critique of
drama in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. Concerning his works after Difference and
Repetition, Deleuze claimed that his perspective is now different from what he previously
called dramatization. Guattari and he criticized Freud psychoanalysis because of its theatrical characterization of unconscious through primal scenes of sexual intercourse between Father and mother, and the theatrical development of oedipal complex: a stage set of symbols which always interpret every and each mental disorder (neurosis as well as psychosis) by referring them to the familial triangle of father, mother and the son. According to them, unconscious does not constitute a theatre, but rather a factory, a production machine (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 24). However, Deleuze’s disinterest in theatre was not limited to his critique on Psychoanalysis. “Theatre is too long, and too disciplined”; it is ““an art that remains entrenched in the present and in daily issues, while never advancing beyond dimensions of the present”; “To stay four hours sitting in an uncomfortable armchair, I cannot do this anymore. That alone destroys theatre for me”: these are some examples of what Deleuze said about theatre (Garcin-Marrou) and it is not surprising. For him, art should be an art of the people to come, experimenting with the present in order to envision a future. For him, art is the art of movements, speeds and slowness, and remaining as a disciplined non-moving body in front of a representational art would not be an option. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari were critical of representation in both meanings of the term: aesthetic as well
as political. Deleuze particularly considered theatre as a representational art. By the way, they never ceased to refer to Artaud or Carmello Benne works as non-representational theatrical works which are really close to what we now understand as performance arts: the theatre of production which considers the process (of production) not the product. This is why the adaptation of performative lens would correct dramatization method of Deleuze and re-appropriate it for its own use. Therefore, the present research would use performativization as a correction for dramatization according to the following reasons:
Drama has been historically identical to “text” in the history of post-primitive theatre, when the form of theatre was not anymore ritual and ceremonies but a means of literature. Hans-Thies Lehman, in his Postdramatic Theatre (2006) argues that historically “the text as an offer of meaning reigned; all other theatrical means had to serve it and were rather suspiciously controlled by the authority of Reason” (Lehmann 47). However, he continues that in the second half of the 20th century, the live performance became more important again and in what he himself calls postdramatic theatre, the performative qualities are more important. Therefore, dramatization has the danger of turning the social interaction, in a structuralist manner, into texts which are to be read and decodified. Performativization, on the contrary, insists that the dynamics of social phenomena and the sentiments and affections invested in through these phenomena have to be considered.
Following from the previous point, one could say that the notion of performative includes in itself the notion of drama, and puts it in a non-reductionist framework. If the dramatic is always referring to something outside of itself (which means if it is
representational), then as Judith Butler clarifies “'performative' itself carries the double-meaning of 'dramatic' and 'non-referential.'” (J. Butler)
Having said the referential character of drama, one should also notes that drama used to be considered as a representational art. In the alterglobalization movement, we do not deal with the representation of concepts, ideologies or people. The radical refusal of representation is itself a part of altermodernities struggles. Radical arts and radical politics, with their performativity, presents us with alternative conceptualizations, alternative ways of thinking about politics, economy, consumerism and so on. The war machine of performance which launched during the alterglobalization movements around the globe made possible for the people to perform, live and experience their idea of a possible future away from capitalist globalization. It was not at all about representing the utopian ideas, but to realize alternatives in the experimentations of a performative war machine which tried to create “an active point of escape where the revolutionary machine, the artistic machine, the scientific machine and (schizo) analytic machine become parts and pieces of one another”. Thus, performativization is not simply representing the concepts or ideas of a possible future, but actively creating, changing, revising, and living these concepts.
Performance is about the primacy of process over the result, or the theatre of production over the spectacle of the product. Thus, there is an analytical benefit performative lens gives an analyst equipped with dramatization method, and that is the analysis can avoid supposing the subject and subjectivities as givens, but rather
considers the process of constructing and forming these subjectivities in a special context. Moreover, altermodernities are not given themselves, but actively constructed and reconstructed during the movements.
Dramatization has the danger of making the protest movements into a spectacle, extracting images out of them, and therefore, subtracting their dynamism and turning them into a static image. It has the danger of making human actions and social changes into a neutral object of studies. But through performativization, the dynamism of the movement, the way bodies performed the ideas, and the movements inside the movements would be considered.
All these considerations lead the following research to correct the dramatization to performativization, using both of them according to the particular cases.
Chapter Two: Beyond Resisting Modernity
In the beginning of their Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels deal with a widely discussed problematic: Modernity. “The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, and new forms of struggle in place of the old ones”, they write. Around 150 years later, there was a big protest movement – certainly a “new form of struggle”, a performative carnevalesque one -- in Seattle against the unequal capitalist globalization and its “new conditions of oppression”, which everybody agreed on its disagreement with Modernity, modernization and its contemporary implications. Some Leftists saw the sparks of altermodernity in it and official analysts, from their point of view, recognized the destructive flames of antimodernity. The latter was unable to see why Modernity was criticized; they couldn’t even recognize the leaderless nature of this new form of struggle [1].
Through a long trajectory of critical literature, Modernity has been regarded as a normative Eurocentric concept trying to degrade its prior forms of development and civilization as well as hegemonize the alternative efforts outside its geographical territory under its norms. That’s why Modernity is written with capital M in this research, since its western meaning and connotations, from the dominant discourse perspective which is certainly not true, has acquired a status of being absolute: Modernity is only what developed by Europeans. It is often said that Modernity, in its political side, is closely tied to representative parliamentary liberal democracy and the project of Enlightenment (superiority of Reason); in its artistic side, Modernity in arts has certain codes which must be followed by “others”; from the
economic point of view, capitalism and Modernity are inseparable twins; and finally, its models of societal organization are also hierarchical and based on unequal power relations, exploitation of workers, sexism and racism. This chapter will deal with these critiques, starting with defining Modernity as a concept created out of the real problematics as well as the notions of modernization and modernism, presenting Modernity’s “dark side” via the criticisms against it, considering the anti-modernity trends developed after its emergence, and finally speaking about what is called “altermodernities”.
2.1 Modernity, Modernization and Modernism
2.1.1 Modernity
Before giving the definitions on Modernity, it is worth to take an etymological path toward this term. Modernity comes from modern which is itself rooted in the late Latin word
modernus. Modernus is itself a word comes from modo in Latin. According to Oxford
Dictionary, modo means “just now”, or what is present in here and now. The meaning certainly refers to a break with the past or what philosophy placed disputably for a long time as Modernity’s opposite, tradition. According to American Heritage Dictionary, however, Latin modo comes from med-, an Indo-European root, and this gives another meaning to modo: med- as a root has three meanings: to measure, to give advice and healing; three meanings that can reveal the normative implications inherent to the word modern, and more historically, to the word Modernity. Even though the first known use of “modern” dates back to 1585 (according to all dictionaries), but the Latin modo was used in 5th century to show the distance between the nature of Christian thought in that time with
the ancient philosophy. St Augustine used this word in order to “contrast the new Christian era with pagan antiquity. More generally, it was used as a means of describing and legitimizing new institutions, new legal rules, or new scholarly assumptions” (Martinelli 5). Just as this quotation shows, the following pages of this chapter will show how the meanings of modern root – med- – as “just now”, “measure”, “give advice” and “healing” developed hand in hand and in the end, what Modernity historically rigidified in itself as a concept was more related to normalizing, measuring, giving advice, or in other words, thought on behalf of all human being to give them guidelines to heal themselves.
Modernity, however, has been conceptualized as the new society, particularly because time was redefied by Enlightenment philosophy, or in particular, by German idealists. During the 18th century, views about time and consequently history underwent a major conceptual shift. Inspired by Newtonian physics, Kant liberated time from the space and movement and turned it into an autonomous axis of existence. “The time is out of joint”, refers Deleuze (1984, vii) to Shakespeare’s Hamlet in order to formulate Kant’s view of time. And Hegel was the one who took the linear autonomous time to define the history teleologically, as the history of the development of reason. Therefore, the German word for Modernity, “Neuzeit”, could refer simultaneously to two issues: first, this is the new time of human societies, a new era; and second, the time itself is renewed in human understanding. All these ontological and epistemological breaks opened the way “toward a conception of modernity with the idea of progress at its core” (Martinelli 7). Moreover, in a more concrete basis, Enlightenment established the “fundamental identification of the modern with the here and now”, and “from then on modern society is our society” (Martinelli 6), which shows the internal tension inside Modernity: a new time, a new era. On the other
hand, this attitude toward the new has been identified to the status quo of a very particular certain kind of society, their society.
Nonetheless, the idea of Modernity which was developed during the Enlightenment period was not only this. Although he directly connects Modernity to Eurocentrism, Samir Amin in his Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion and Democracy gives this definition for Modernity: “the claim that human beings, individually and collectively, can and must make their own history” (Amin 13). This claim was corrected by Marx after Enlightenment, when he added this condition: “but [human beings] do not make [history] as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past” [2] (Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 10). However, making one’s own history, the autonomy of mankind, was certainly a part of what Kant would call the emergence from one’s self-imposed nonage (Kant). Moreover, Kant’s essay on What Is Enlightenment?, summarized the whole idea of Modernity: self-governance, appreciation of men’s value, going toward novelty, autonomy, democracy and so forth. Therefore, the Modernity’s project had a universal aspect of an emancipating project with a motto that Kant formulated as having “the courage to use your own understanding” (Kant). This understanding would refer to human reason and its reality as its exclusive source and consequently, change constantly according to the time. This is what Martinelli calls a modernist definition of Modernity:
Modernity is a process with no end that implies the idea of permanent innovation, of continual creation of the new. Living in the present, it is oriented towards the future, avid for novelty, promoting innovation. It invented … the tradition of the new (Martinelli 7).
Modernism is distinct from, but at the same time part of, the whole process called Modernity. In their essay, Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha defines political Modernity “as a constellation comprised of three major elements: the dynamics of modernization (modern social and political transformations and formations), the idea of Modernity (normative claims to autonomy, self-governance and non-domination) and modernism (the critical or self-reflexive, and aesthetic dimensions of political Modernity)” (Rensmann and Gandesha 12). As the idea of Modernity is more or less mentioned before, the next few paragraphs will deal with modernization and modernism and in its course of development, shows the problems, dangers and shortcomings of Modernity itself through its actualizations in modernization process as its primary drama played on the stage of history. As we shall see, these considerations will lead us to use the mentioned definitions of Modernity only for analytical reasons, see their weaknesses, inevitable contradictions, and issues these definitions cannot grasp, explain or consider and ultimately define Modernity as a “power relation”, since Modernity tried to dominate the other world, as well as the western critical trends (modernist thought) and there was a huge resistance against it; a resistance not external to Modernity, but internal to it – a resistance which finally transformed Modernity actively to the point of envisioning altermodernities.
2.1.2 Modernization
One cannot speak about Modernity without its concrete transformations and formations created in the name of it. These economic, political and cultural processes are called
years after the second world war, marked on one hand by de-colonialization and associated hope for rapid development of post-colonial countries and, on the other, by the competition between United States and Soviet Unions to attract such countries into their sphere of influence” (Martinelli 1). The historical narration given by Martinelli seems a bit true but not critical enough. If one mentions the de-colonialization, one should immediately refer to the economic reason behind this. It was obvious that to continue colonial rule means to spend a lot of money for running a big bureaucratic state in another country and there are better ways to follow a western state interests than that [3]. On the other hand, one should not neglect that the “associated hope for rapid development of post-colonial countries” led mostly by international organizations such as IMF and WTO which lend money to underdeveloped countries only to carry out their development policies, i.e. the imposed re-structuralization programs which designed to bring them into the open arms of, borrowing a term from Guattari and Negri, Integrated World Capitalism (Guattari and Negri, New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty 48). These issues were all accompanied the processes of modernization, but there are also other aspects to this process.
The essential aspects of modernization (Martinelli 10-11) can be categorized in three general but closely tied categories: economic modernization, political modernization and cultural modernization. Each of these categories or processes of modernization reinforces and intensifies each other, and sometimes even contradict with each other. Economic modernization is
generally understood as a system of industrial production that applies scientifically-based technology, replaces human and animal labor by inanimate and mechanical energy, develops
a complex division of labor that reveals a hierarchy of specialized abilities acquired in formal education processes, produces commodities by means of commodities, and involves the vast commercialization of goods and services in a tendentially global market. The organization of such an economic system pivots on the figure of the entrepreneur innovator, craftsman of the destructive creation of capitalism (Martinelli 12).
Therefore, what economic modernization entails are alienation, division of labour and exploitation of workers, participating in global free market and depending on innovation or “the destructive creativity of late capitalism”. Hanna Arendt described this economic modernization as a “modern glorification of labour” leads to the “deworlding the world through which human-being regress to a merely private, atomistic self. And leads to the regression of human form of life, bios, to life as such, zoē” (Rensmann and Gandesha 13). This analysis took on by Giorgio Agamben, who claimed that under modern states of security and control, the nomos of the world became the concentration camp, and the permanent situation is a state of exception under which everybody treats as homo sacer: human beings deprived of their rights as citizen – having the bios as their form of life – and become naked life -- a life reduced to zoē (see Agamben 1998).
However, economic modernization could not be achieved without on one hand, the cultural modernization which promotes the individualism or better atomism, utilitarianism, consumerism, shopping as experience, pure entertainment as art, fashion as a way to be different, and division of the public and the private and, on the other hand, the political modernization which can develop a central hierarchical state for imposing policies proper to economic modernization, protecting the private property, and “pacification of a territory
via the ‘monopoly of legitimate violence’” (Martinelli 15) in order to absorb more foreign investments [4].
This is why a modern state in the process of modernization has to exercises a “sovereignty over a population and a territory and holds a military, fiscal and administrative monopoly, expropriating the warriors from their means of war and public functionaries from their means of administration” (Martinelli 15). The western nation-state as natural: this is what modernization studies have implicitly in themselves, but nation-states are instead “artificial and open systems that are historically mutable with potentially fragile geographic as well as cultural borders” (ibid 30). Even some writers went so far in the analysis of every political regime according to their notion of a closed nation-state characteristics and called the experience of the communist states of the USSR and Eastern European countries with ‘fake modernity’ (ibid 14). However, not even all political and cultural forms suitable for economic modernization should be Western, though in a bad meaning. As Slavoj Zizek points out, the contemporary capitalist ideology of free market is like an empty form that can absorb any content and that’s why the dictatorships in east and southern east of Asia, for example, are so efficiently functioning in economic modernization and global market (Zizek, Capitalism with Asian values).
According to canonic political science studies, ideal modernization can be equated to westernization. The whole perspective of western gaze about many countries undergoing modernization process was like a reasonable wise father watching his naughty son becoming a little mature and proper [5]. As Martinelli notes, “numerous North American sociologists and political scientists devoted themselves to studying the problems that ‘backward’ Third World countries had to face in order to acquire the characteristics of
modernity as it appeared in the developed countries of the West” (Martinelli 1). Moreover, in many studies carried out around the subject of modernization, a strong presence of the concept of evolution can be found. Evolution means but a way to be better, to be more advanced.
There are certain elements in the idea of Modernity itself which modernization has tried to develop. Adorno refers to the “universalized instrumental rationality” as one of these elements under which modernization takes shape; the element that “subsumes and transforms particulars according to their abstract exchange value” (Rensmann and Gandesha 13). This is the instrumental rationality of labour which makes way for exploitation of workers and blockade of creative flows. However, one could not easily argue that emancipating reason of Enlightenment Modernity project is really different from this instrumental reason. Samir Amin points to the property, equality and liberty as the “triplet of Modernity” which is paradoxical in itself, because as Marx believed, “capitalist property (market) and development of equality”, as two tendencies in Modernity’s reason, has an insoluble conflict, and the latter is neglected for the sake of the former in the process of Modernity (Amin 17). In this regard, Amin writes:
Enlightenment thought offers us a concept of reason that is associated with … emancipation. Yet, the emancipation in question is defined and limited by what capitalism requires and allows (Amin 14).
It seems, therefore, that capitalism and Modernity can be regarded as twins. “Modernity is the product of nascent capitalism and develops in close association with the worldwide
expansion of the latter”, writes Amin (Amin 7). However, capitalism transformed a lot during its course of development and this can be one reason why Modernity, as Hardt and Negri believe, is devalidated as a concept and idea (Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth 71), or at least is in deep crisis. Now what Modernity really refers to is but modernization, and what modernization mainly comes into mind “concerns the transformations of capitalism, manifested in the globalization of the economy, in the unfolding of the post-industrial society, in the passage from the organization of labor in large assembly-line factories (of the Fordist–Taylorist type) to automatic and flexible forms of labor, and in the increasing centrality of consumption with respect to production” (Martinelli 2). If Modernity is now at work in globalization, alterglobalization movement has revealed the crisis of Modernity caused by the development of global capitalism which “puts human civilization itself in danger” (Amin 8). In addition, this movement is a new force which aims toward altermodernities as a fundamentally different project.
2.1.3 From The Modernist Critique to Anti-Modernity
Until the second half of 20th century, there had been always a tension between modernism and Modernity. Modernism is usually refers to the period between 1850s to World War II as a [counter]cultural, artistic and activist process in which the actors of these fields
opposed the very idea of Modernity itself. The adjective “modern”, thus, is in a constant
fluctuation between these poles. This tension is captured at best by Bruno Latour when he writes:
Modernity comes in as many variations as there are thinkers or journalists, yet all its definitions point, in one way or another, to the passage of time. The adjective 'modern' designates a new regime, an acceleration, a rupture, a revolution in time. When the word 'modern', 'modernization', or 'modernity' appears, we are defining, by contrast, an archaic and stable past. Furthermore, the word is always being thrown into the middle of a fight, in a quarrel where there are winners and losers, Ancients and Moderns. 'Modern' is thus doubly asymmetrical: it designates a break in the regular passage of time, and it designates a combat in which there are victors and vanquished. If so many of our contemporaries are reluctant to use this adjective today, if we qualify it with prepositions, it is because we feel less confident in our ability to maintain that double asymmetry: we can no longer point to time's irreversible arrow, nor can we award a prize to the winners (Latour 10).
Modernism was regarded as “the self-consciousness of Modernity” (Bernstein 56), a claim which is disputable if we just consider the drama behind it, because it is put as if the dark side of Modernity was its involuntary acts and modernist critique was its true face; as if Modernity is similar to kind-hearted honest philanthropist Dr. Jekyll and only when it is drugged and unconscious, it shows its evil face. However, one could not neglect that Modernity has had a two-faced development, not one conscious and the other unconscious, but both fundamental to its actualization in reality, to the dramas it played on the stage of history:
[Modernity] was Jan us-faced, not only progressive, benevolent, and competent, but also primitive, malevolent, and irrational. It produced, not only merely troubling, but deeply
dangerous strains. Slavery and racial domination were fundamental to western Modernity” (Alexander 148).
Jeffrey C. Alexander, in his book The Dark Side of Modernity, presents a list of what he calls “grave short-comings of Modernity” through the modernist critique of thinkers in 20th century. At the top of the list, is the “unholy trinity of Modernity”: hierarchy, bureaucracy, secrecy. This is not only three adjectives proper to third world countries, but also to western democracies themselves. What Alexander sees as a possible remedy for this Modernity’s disease is firstly social movements; the grassroots movements which can formulate new alternatives. The list goes by commodification (against which one should challenge the abstract logic of market exchange), the culture industry, isolation, othering (either as exclusion based on race, sex, nationality, and so on, or assimilation by encouraging the individual to be normalized by developing the qualities of dominant culture, or in other words, forced hegemony), nationalism, war, techno-scientific destruction, and threat to the
self (Alexander 147-157).
One fundamental Idea in Modernity as well as many modernist trends was individual and a fundamental aim was individual liberty. However, one should see how the drama behind the individualism as it really happened and actualized. It seems, for so many critiques, that the Modernity’s claim to universal freedom and diversity led to “modern forms of heteronomy, disempowerment and thoughtlessness” (Rensmann and Gandesha 10). Weber was among first who pointed to the contradiction between the idea of individual freedom and the way it was indeed in Modernity. He claimed that this freedom is not at all granted; on the contrary, the “extensive institutional coercion” is depriving individuals of their life.
“Against the individual stood barriers of hard and cold institutions of the modern world” (Alexander 38). He even attacked the illusion of representative democracy, of being subject by being a citizen who votes, and believed “citizenship is the other face of depersonalized domination” (Alexander 40). Weber believed that the discipline underlying Modernity turned all means of representative democracy for making the mass participation of people possible into soulless organizations “resembling machines” (ibid). Therefore, the very seemingly individualist idea turned to something completely different. As Martinelli writes
The culture of Modernity is also revealed in the control of emotions and affectivity. This mainly concerns public life, where a higher degree of control over one’s emotions and feelings and impulses is expected. The expression of affectivity tends to be confined to private life (Martinelli 32).
To maximize one’s efficiency and productivity, controlling and taming one’s most inner feelings was a principle and the separation between public sphere and private sphere seemed necessary in this regard. One main reason for controlling affectivity was to promote another principal idea of Modernity: rationalization. What critiques such as Weber saw in this rationalization was a totally irrational character. For Weber, this rationalization “rested upon the most unnatural motivation, led to the most abstract orientation, and inspired the most desiccated organization that the world had ever known” (Alexander 43). Rationalization was mostly seen as an idea promoting and reinforcing market logic and capitalist conditions of production. The concepts such as rational consumer’s choice, rational behavior of decision-makers, and so on emerged which referred to the behavior of
consumers and the way they buy. Moreover, the cult of rationality translated to the disciplinary systems of control in factories which demanded high productivity of “rational” workers who do not consume their energy on non-productive ways. It is famous that this cautious measure reached to the point of even discriminating sexual intercourse in the Soviet Unions of highly exploited workers. Maybe that’s why Sorel, defending general strikes against the system as the collective act of deliberate violence, believed appeals from upper classes to reason are not but confused and parliamentary trash and serve to hide the terrible fear of officials from the contradictions between their class interests and workers’ interests (Sorel 60-61). Therefore, there’s a double movement in Modernity under the name of rationalization: a movement toward homogenization and the other toward separation and segregation.
The notion of capitalist progress is also criticized radically by modernist thinkers and artists in 20th century. One could take a look at the dramatic scene set up by one of Benjamin’s
Theses on the Concept of History to see how progress actually works (Benjamin 392). The
angel of Benjamin’s Theses is famous: an angel Paul Klee depicted in his “Angelus Novus”, an angel looking backward and witnessing all the ruins of history, “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage”, while a very strong wind coming from the Paradise pushes her forward. “The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned” (ibid), since he wants to go to the past, wake up all the dead and direct them to the salvation. But what is that storm which pushes him forward? The answer is: progress. Benjamin criticizes the idea of progress in many of his works. For him, progress is the ideological alternative of bourgeoisie for emancipation and history, and under its name, so many catastrophes has been piled up. The history of progress is the history of
barbarism; a history leads “from the slingshot to the megaton bomb” (T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics 320). Therefore, the Paradise is nothing more than the hell which would be provided by industrial capitalism on earth. But why the angel wants to go back? The history behind him, the history that repeats the catastrophe, is also a history with so many non-actualized potentialities. Only if all these potentialities would be actualized, the continuity of catastrophe and the course of the past as oppression will be ended and humanity will be saved. These potentialities are called, in this research, as trends of
altermodernities.
However, many modernist ideas, trends and movements in 20th century, which have been resisting Modernity, have been described or named as “anti-modernity” and therefore categorized as modernity’s simple opposition or anti-thesis. One could argue that even this act of naming is itself a westernized one, trying to assimilate everything and annul the differences. Anti-modernity rooted in the dialectical paradigm of the Same, which considers the dissent ideas and movements as negative, and is founded on four categories of
identity, similarity, analogy and opposition, either sees the dissolution of the differences as
the ultimate result or considers the indissoluble dissent activities merely as negative forces against Modernity. These forces, consequently, negate Modernity either to reach a synthesis or just to keep the critical tension alive in society. From this perspective, all resistance against Modernity can be labeled as anti-modernity. The anti-modern modernist point of view, nonetheless, has presented a lot of useful critiques in different spheres. This section discusses briefly these critiques.
