MLA Seminar: What is Modernity?

Our world is unambiguously modern. Or, at least, that is what we are often led to believe by way of the dominant culture today: we live in a world of hyperconnectivity; of fluid and free movement; of open and accessible resources; and of a constant stream of information and data. But, when the surface of these claims is scratched, modernity is not as utopic as might at first appear. Borders are points of violent conflict; powerful forms of exploitation and dispossession render the planet socially and environmentally unequal; and the burning up of fossil fuels has brought about a new era of geological and biological existence (the Anthropocene). It would be wrong, however, to declare that modernity was either one of these images or the other. Rather, it is both simultaneously. Modernity is a contradictory historical, social, cultural process of collective life on a planetary level. In this course, we will be exploring a multitude of elements and aspects of this contradictory social system and historical period. We will think about concepts, problems, and social operations such as progress (or positive historical development), urbanization, commodity production and consumption, the credit/debt system and financialization, colonization and uneven development, the “formal and real subsumption” of work and life, the psychopathologies of everyday lived experience, and methods of trying to make sense of all these things. Due to the diverse range of themes and topics covered in this course, we will take an emphatically transdisciplinary approach. We will read texts from the history of philosophy, sociology, art criticism, literature and literary studies, anthropology, and psychoanalysis.