We will always be Modern

From Marx to Latour my notions of what modernity is and its social influences have expanded my theoretical knowledge but still leaves a void. I believe my preconceived definition of modernity was to break away from conventional traditions, and I still think that’s true but on a more extended level. Before this class I was naïve to believe it was the arts that inspired the development of modernity and carried it along throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth century, but now thinking about modernism in a scientific academic context I would refute LaTour’ s notion that ‘we have never been modern’ and claim that we have always been modern and always will be. I say this because usually there is a moment that initiates a new era and one that ends it, but it seems this is empty in reference to modernity. While in the late nineteenth century there was an outbreak of new and innovative thoughts being put to practice, this claimed to have initiated the modern era. My view is how can it cease to exist when its characterizations imply the innovation of old customs, isn’t this a constant change always in process?

Overall this class opened up my mind to new significant readings and academics, some I was aware of but did not fully understand such as Nietzsche, Benjamin, and others I never heard of, Gogol and Latour. It was the topics and ideas brought up in class discussion that really expanded my way of thinking. I would have to say that my favourite class was the discussion and reading of Gogol and the art exhibit we attended. Having the short story reading, a class discussion and a visual really helped my understanding of the topic in three dimensions. Anyways, I thought the class was great and always looked forward to attending.
Have a good summer!

-Jessica Hay

Fear and Loathing in Modernity

After watching Metropolis is perfectly clear the biggest beef everyone has with Modernity: the schisms that divide us.

Even as urbanization has moved us closer together, emotionally, we have never been farther apart. The workers in Metropolis may have run the city such that the heart of the city could never be maintained without their help, the elites depended on them and yet ever step was taken to ensure they would never meet. To the elites the workers were nothing but mere extensions of the machine. Were it merely that the workers were being oppressed it would be no different than slavery or a class system, but that’s not entirely where it ends. The elites, the supposed ruling class is also divided amongst each other. They find themselves taken in by a stripper! Not a flim flam man, or an individual with any particular skill at manipulation, but only a stripper. Such an incident could only be the result of a people not used to any particular challange found in ordinary human relationships, and so find themselves taken in by the most basic of human interaction.

Though exaggerated in Metropolis, this alienation between the workers and rulers is present in the real world as well. I remember watching films in the past where the protaganist had bulters and servents, and thinking how uncomfortable it would be to live with people that had been hired to serve me. To think, that we would engage in a business relationship with someone we know makes us uncomfortable. They say we should never lend money to friends, and it sounds like a good rule of thumb. Though we may socialize with our superiors at work, in the end for most of us our superiors are not the ones signing our checks. It is unlikely that many of us will have had a coffee with that individual.

Perhaps it is life imitating art, as it works just as well with those who work under us. The workers we employ may not be underground, though they may as well be. Jeans, cars, and various other items we take for granted are manufactured not here where standards of living are high, but rather in the poorer countries of the world. Are we really no different than the elites of Metropolis? We may not frequent strip clubs as much, but the meaning we find in our life is just as trivial. Instead of a stripper it’s Brittany Spears, or Martha Stewart; people that make us watch them not out of respect or love but for the sadistic pleasure of watching them fail.

Metropolis is an attempt to break through these barriers that divide us so that this relationship may be realized; by seeing ourselves as a people united, it may be not only that the workers benefit, but also the ruling elites. Depression, social anxiety, and various other mental conditions are on the rise; perhaps it is because we too lack meaning in our lives, and perhaps in uniting we can find that meaning.

–Josh