Explain what is meant by the terms ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization’. To what extent do they help us to understand cultural developments in Latin America?
Marshall Berman discusses the topics of modernity and modernisation in All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. In the Preface to the Penguin Edition, he defines modernity as “any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip of the modern world and make themselves at home in it” (Berman, 1988). He implies that members of a modern society must be aware of changes occurring in their surroundings as they are taking place to be experiencing a modernity and thus, that modernity is a state with temporality.
Berman goes on to attribute modernity to “scientific knowledge” (Berman, 1983). He discusses that throughout history, with scientific developments came altered perceptions and ideas for devices of technology to advance knowledge. The “industrialization of production, which transforms scientific knowledge into technology, creates new human environments and destroys old ones” (Berman, 1983). In particular, as this scientific knowledge develops to feed machine based production and industrialisation, new economic relations are built and an underdevelopment of certain socioeconomic classes comes about and splits society. With the emergence of the larger, global capitalist market and the development of world trade, mass urbanisation, democratic changes and social mobility were generated, all facilitated by the introduction of mass systems of communication.
He continues that “in the twentieth century, the social processes that bring this maelstrom into being, and keep it in the state of perpetual becoming, have come to be called ‘modernization’” (Berman, 1983). He names the process of social and technological developments over time, such as “great discoveries in the physical sciences”, “industrialization” and “systems of mass communication” (Berman, 1983), as the process of modernisation. Berman’s developed idea is that over time, the increasingly rapid pace of developments and changes in society, or ‘modernization’, leads to citizens there-within acquiring a new sense of reflexivity and disconnection between concepts such as time and space. He explains that what marks modernity is its sense of discontinuity from the past. Members of a modernised society look to the future more than the past with a sense of critical distance from it – a reflexivity that includes critical thinking on the past. By observing the past critically and from a distance, one can assess the positives and negatives and what needs to be changed from the past in order to bring about an improved present.
It could be said then that ‘modernization’ is the process by which ‘modernity’ comes about. Time being measured more accurately with modern technologies such as the clock, and its standardisation separating the past, present and future; writing allowing people to obtain a critical sense of the past; transport and the printing press are all technologies that accelerated the pace of change. This change becomes faster and more widespread and consequently, modernisation and modernity becomes more widespread and develop at a faster pace, at least in modernised and developed countries.
Importantly, Berman argues that due to the experience of modernity being a constantly changing process, and people understanding and becoming critically aware of the past and present and looking to the future, there exist many modernities as well as a sense of temporal and spacial fluidity. He talks of “modernities of yesterday”, “modernities of today” and the “modernities of yesterday” (Berman, 1983) to display a conflict of temporality which helps us grasp the concept that modernity brings the contradiction of loss of rootedness and identity with the hope to gain a better future. Spacially, Berman implies that there are various modernities, not just the one from the Western perspective.
To apply these topics to Latin America we can look to Beatriz Sarlo, who develops her notion of ‘peripheral modernity’ in Una modernidad periférica: Buenos Aires 1920 y 1930 (Sarlo, 1988) to describe the type of modernity experienced in Latin America and, specifically, in Buenos Aires during the 1920s and 1930s. She examines the idea that Latin America underwent its own unique process of modernity. As Rowe & Schelling write, “‘peripheral’ is used ironically to expose the paternalistic assumption that Latin American countries were incapable of a proper modernity” (Rowe and Schelling, 1995). The idea here being that ‘modernity’ is a relative condition and concept, and that it was not necessarily the desire of Latin American countries to modernise to a European or North American, capitalist standard, as many did not share the ideal of living the North American capitalist modernity.
The idea that ‘modernity’ is often associated with a Western centre is echoed by Kefala as he writes that “As knowledge has become synonymous with technology, science and information, modernity in turn has become synonymous with the West” (Kefala, 2007). Brunner agrees with regards to Latin America, saying that “we have been accustomed to think the cultural problem in Latin America within the parameters of dependency theory” (Brunner, 1995). The idea of Latin America as dependent implies that it is merely an extension of the Kefala’s Western modernity. It is in this way that Sarlo argues that Latin American nations experienced their own, distinct modernity in time with their own technological developments and changes, away from the modernities of the Western world. As Brunner continues to explain, “…modernity, as a differentiated experience in the capitalist world, has a centre, which radiates a zone of marginal and dependent peripheries…” (Brunner, 1995), Sarlo ironically labels the modernity of Buenos Aires as ‘peripheral’; distinct from the processes of modernisation of European and North American countries which were experiencing their own liberal capitalist norm.
An understanding of cultural developments in Latin America can be helped by the employment of the aforementioned sociologists and cultural historians. Sarlo’s concept of ‘peripheral modernity’ offers Buenos Aires’ modernity its own identity. This is particularly important when we define modernity by Berman’s ideas of people’s sense of discontinuity with the past. As change occurs at a rapid pace, as it did during the beginnings of the twentieth century in Argentina, combined with the creation of a “cultura argentina como cultura de mezcla” (Sarlo, 1988) as mass migration and immigration occurs, a partial rupture with the past is created which then evokes nostalgia and memory of a previous time. The notion of the ‘peripheral modernity’ that existed in Buenos Aires provides us with an idea of how Borges approached the writing of Evaristo Carriego as he documents his attitude towards the memory of the Buenos Aires he left when he relocated to Europe n 1914 and the changed city he found on his return in 1921.
Borges writes with the aim of documenting the changes of his microcosm of Palermo during this time of mass urbanisation, gentrification, technological development and socio-economic changes in Buenos Aires. As we see in the first chapter of Evaristo Carriego, his constant references to the people of Palermo as ‘el orillaje’ (the people of the ‘orillas’ or the ‘arrabales’), those living in the suburbs, on the ‘periphery’ of Buenos Aires. This brings a strong parallel to the idea that the identity of the Argentine, who had been mostly Creoles up until the time of huge industrialisation and diversification of the early 1900s, was to diversify and become challenged by the inflow of immigrant Europeans searching for new, better lives. Borges analyses this crisis of identity by focusing on the space that occupies the edge of the migrant city and the vast expanse of the traditional pampas as a parallel to Sarlo’s same concept of ‘peripheral modernity’.
The notion of ‘peripheral modernity’ also suggests temporality as both Berman and Borges discuss. Berman’s ‘maelstrom’ or ‘chaos’ describes the space in time between the past with tradition and the present with modernity. It is Borges’ design in the first chapters of Evaristo Carriego to show Palermo in both temporal and spacial terms as the space in between.
Palermo and its inhabitants personified the border between tradition and urban advancement that Borges focused on when he documented Buenos Aires at the time. It is useful for us to understand the notion of ‘peripheral modernity’ because we can better understand the perspective from which Borges writes. He mentions his intentions to give an accurate account of Palermo of the time with a short quote from De Quincey at the start of Evaristo Carriego, “… a mode of truth, not of truth coherent and central, but angular and splintered.” (Borges, 1998). It is with this accuracy which he outlines the contrast between the identities of the inhabitants as it reflects his own questioning of who he is as an Argentine writer during a time when a romantic and traditional past is fading into nostalgic abyss but the future of his booming city excites him with promise of huge technological progress and modernisation. Though he sits relatively on the fence, his aim is clearly to save the gauchoesque Argentina of the past to popular memory lest it be forgotten.