Modernity: A Myth That Manufactures Consent

Humanities

Mehmet Atif Ergun¹ 

[1] Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA; E-Mail

关键词: modernity;    myth;    power;    colonialism;    naturalization;    othering;   

DOI  :  10.3390/h3040606

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

This paper argues that “modernity”, as a process, a temporality, a category, and so on, is akin to Orientalism in that those who speak of it produce it as their ideology, their stereotyping of themselves and their others. The first section, on time, employs Kristeva’s work in “Women’s Time” in regards to the gendered politics of chaos and ordering. The second section, on alterity, pulls from various “times” and “spaces”, where multiple authors from, at times, conflicting backgrounds converge on the politics of othering. The third section, on consent, is on structuring the limits of imaginable alternatives of discourse. The final section draws from the previous three in order to deconstruct “modernity” as a mythology of temporal, spacial and societal orderliness, producing forms of alterity to manufacture the consent of whomever speaks of modernity towards creating a convenient history and setting a hegemony-laden agenda. As such, modernity takes the place of “the real” to consolidate and augment hegemony by way of self-naturalization. It is a manufactured consent, of those who speak of, to and about it, to colonial aggression and arrogance by evacuating colonial relations of power from the limits of the debate.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.