``...could one of you offer a tentative definition of modernity? I mean other than the ideology of progress based on technical progress and a neo-classical/function-based aesthetic ....'' Joanna
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For me, it's the totality of a world, but in relation to another world. For example, remember going to Los Angeles after Rumania? That.
In my case it became the contrast between Mexico and the US. After living in Guadalajara for about a year and a half and rarely seeing other Americans, we moved back to the states. I was ten. First we went to Scottsdale, Arizona which was a very rich suburb of Phoenix and stayed there with my uncle for a couple of months. I went to school there briefly. I couldn't understand what was going on at school and didn't like it at all. The people were assholes. Then we drove to Los Angeles. Driving to LA from the desert I could see a huge brownish bank of something in the distance. It was the smog. Everything, the cars, the people, the city, was vast. In those days (early 50s) Guadalajara didn't have any smog at all, so I didn't know what this stuff was, even if I had been born in it---I had forgotten. All the colors were washed out. Everybody was running around like they were crazy people.
In other words, the ideology of technical progress and function based society transformed into a material world build on a superhuman scale running at top speed---for absolutely no reason. Behind it, beyond it there is nothing at all, Weber's polar night.
Dwayne answered this question by referring to the future. But I answering in terms of the past.
In terms of religion, it is the contrast to the Catholic church in Mexico fifty years ago, and Protestant churches in the US. These are completely different universes. Imagine a US protestant church digging up its bishop from two hundred years ago, re-dressing the body in new vestments, presenting him in a glass coffin, saying mass over him and then holding a street parade complete with brass band and oval placards of Guadalupe, then putting him on display for a special week and then putting him back in his catacomb tomb under the church. Imagine a calendar with saint names for everyday of the year so that you can name your child on the day he or she is born after the saint for that day. Imagine that school runs from nine in the morning to twelve, then everybody goes home to eat lunch and comes back to school at two and goes on until five. The entire time frame of such a place has nothing to do with our conception of time. And these frames of course are only a residue of other periods and places in which the contrast was even more extreme.
There is a subtext of modernity and tradition that separates or used to separate Latin and Anglo America. It's probably gone now, but when I was kid you could still feel it without knowing what it was. Time was central to it. Manana was a joke, but also a reality. Tomorrow was equivalent to never.
Paz turns this into the concept of a Christian eternity in contrast to the future which is the telos of modernismo.
More later. Gotta go back to work.
CG