Crisis thinking, sensuous reflexivity, and solving real issues

The founding modernist move, Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs write in Voices of Modernity, their grand overview of the birth and maturation of modernity, is to “posi[t] a category of tradition, mak[e] it seem autonomous, and then creating new hybrids that contain tradition by virtue of being defined in opposition to it” (2003: 307). Rather than the summary term for an array of historical changes (the onset of capitalism, secularisation, industrialism, and so on), these authors understand modernity as a discursive construction that opposes traditional and modern developments, ways of being, and modes of understanding. Central in this narrative project have been conceptions of language. A first step involved John Locke’s imagination of language as a separate, autonomous domain of human intervention, standing apart from nature and from the social world. The second step was his argument that language needed to be purified so that its use could be trusted in these two other domains. In order to make it a tool for the accurate exchange of empirical knowledge, and less dangerously prone to misunderstanding in the political sphere, language needed to be stripped from ambivalence, intertextuality, connotation and emotion – all of them qualities an elite of urban, cosmopolitan gentlemen attributed to the speech of those they found ignorant, superstitious, lower class, indigenous, rural, in sum, premodern. And because purification required education, it was only logical to “claim[...] consciousness and rationality for oneself and one’s followers and deny[...] it to others” (Bauman & Briggs 2003: 298) – a move Fabian (1983) earlier called the “denial of coevalness”. This logic of temporalisation has been so fundamental, Bauman and Briggs hold, that it was deeply embedded too in the work of later authors like Johann Gottfried von Herder and Franz Boas, although they take up diametrically opposed positions – from Locke, and from each other – in their understanding of the local vs. global, rationality vs. emotion, deficit vs. difference, or individual autonomy vs. community custom. Bauman and Briggs argue moreover that this logic continues to impinge on contemporary visions of large-scale social change: