Why "Hypermodernity"?

The State of Affairs

by Arpad Szakolczai

NOTE: This is the first post from ‘Hypermodernity’, a new Substack which is co-authored by a group of writers associated with the journal International Political Anthropology, and draws on the ideas and perspectives developed there. The Substack is a collective effort to explore the political and cultural consequences of hypermodernity - modernity accelerated to the point of hyperreality, where all solids are liquified, every limit transgressed, reality replaced by representations, the extraordinary normalised, and truth whatever the current narrative proclaims it to be. It aims to be a space for more freewheeling contributions unfettered by the conventions of academic writing, with a focus on current events and cultural commentary, including on books, films, music, architecture and the performing arts. The Substack is not formally affiliated with the journal, and the viewpoints expressed here should not be assumed to reflect the editorial policy of International Political Anthropology or its publisher.

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By now almost half a century ago, around the end of the 1970s, a new fad took hold of social theorising: postmodernity. It was part of a series of “post”-prefix fads, perhaps starting with “post-industrialism”, and by now getting out of any control. However, whatever was the reason for its original proposition, it was since the start seriously misleading, as it generated the impression that modernity is passé, and instead we now live in a quite different kind of world, “after” modernity. However, quite on the contrary, over the past decades, in spite of all different kind of events and changes, one thing remained constant: the kind of processes that led to the emergence of modernity only gained more intensity, spiralling forward. This is comparable to the way Alexis de Tocqueville recognised the basic continuities even concerning the pre- and post-revolutionary times in France. And this is why the title for this blog is hypermodernity. Forget postmodernity; we live in surmodernité, using the neologism of Marc Augé; in hyperdemocracy, following Ortega y Gasset; or, combining the two, in hypermodernity.

The topos of postmodernity, in the 1990s, coinciding with the end of the Cold War – and so by no means accidentally – was replaced by the newly fashionable word “globalisation”. This term is certainly more interesting, and relevant, especially through its romance version, mondialisme, as it captures the continuity of the project “modernity”, the unbroken spread of this “something” through the entire globe, or the “world”. But it also immediately poses a question for genuine social theorising, which concerns the meaning of the word “world”: a question rarely posed when one is talking about “the world”, but yet which sorely requires precision: does this refer to the entire universe (as is usually implied in science, also called “natural science”)? Or only to Earth, as a planet-entity (in which case “nature” has a quite different meaning)? Or, moving further, to even smaller entities that have the character of constituting a kind of “world” on their own, as, for example implied in the intriguing “Routledge Worlds” series, which by now has published 68 volumes? Or, moving to a different register, what is the “world”, “this world”, of which the Prince, according to the Gospel of John, is Satan?

At any rate, what the term “globalisation” rightfully captures is that this something, this way of organising human existence, which is called “modernity”, is now spreading to the entire “planet” – and some even would like to spread it further, into “space”. Such spread of modernity, or modernisation, is usually characterised with words like “growth”, “development”, and “progress”, and is usually assigned, in an almost natural or taken-for-granted way, a positive meaning, but this is exactly what this blog wants to question, or put into brackets. It is quite paradoxical that while modern social “science” categorically excludes value judgments from its remit, questioning the value of this entire modern globalising project seems to be almost out of the question – as if any persons doing so have lost their mind.

Yet, the argument offered here is that this is exactly what is required, and with great urgency, being well aware that probably it is all too late now – but too late for what?! As a metaphor for characterising the spread of global modernity, I suggest terms like “infection”, “contamination”, or “contagion”. Modernity is like a contagious disease that threatens to infect and destroy the entire “world” – meaning Earth, identical to Nature, in contrast to the physical universe, as investigated by the “sciences”; it is like an epidemic, a mad, feverish disease that accelerates, beyond any meaningful and reasonable limit, the speed of circulation (or what? of everything: “goods”, people, signs, messages), until every single living and non-living being, until every square meter of space, with be covered and dominated by it.

The recent Covid epidemic madness, which so many people have forgotten, and even more others would like to forget, is a perfect illustration of this idea, and in many senses. To start with, such a quick-moving epidemic would have been inconceivable in the past, as only recent “progress” in transport and communication made it possible that a disease could be spread from one area to another with such a speed. But even more indicative of the spread of modernity than the contagion produced by the disease was the similarly contagious spread of certain policies, evidently also radiating from one centre and imitated by most countries or governments. And the main tools of such contagion were the increasing deployment of the worse aspect of modernity, the replacement of direct human face-to-face contact by mediated communication – central for the spread of modern power, as such mediated forms of communication on the one hand allow for more indirect, though still total control, while on the other they weaken human resistance to propagandistic influence: a process which now, through the supposed claims of public health, gained ideological legitimation. Here the word “contagion” was used in a metaphorical, as opposed to a direct sense, as in the case of a disease, but one might argue, following the ideas of René Girard, that contagion in the case of imitation is just as real as it is concerning viruses.

This idea leads us right into the heart of the claims of this essay, partly because René Girard is one of the main figures of Political Anthropology, the broader approach or field with which this blog is associated, and partly because imitation is one of the most important means by which the ways of doing of the modern world are spread, while covered under the ideology of “rationality” – economic, political, technological, social, and so on – leading to their mimetic character being ignored.

I immediately must clarify that it is not reason, or the logos, that is an ideology, as claimed by some prominent figures of postmodernity, like Derrida; not as it is used by classical Greek thinkers and their genuine followers. It is only the specifically modern idea of “rationality” that is an ideology, which oscillates in a vortiginous spread between universalistic claims, based on “science” and “logic” – which thus has nothing to do with anything on Earth in particular – and concrete matters of our existence, right here, right now: just as the worst of modern ideologies, economics, oscillates similarly between “the market” – implying our daily purchasing of the necessities of life – and “the market” – implying actions on the stock-market, which for us are as distant as the conjunctions of planets in the sky. This way of proceeding is constitutional to economics since David Ricardo, one of the greatest tricksters of modern thinking, confused the real and idealised histories of fairs and markets (that is already four systematic confusions!), and excluded the study of the stock-market from the books and text-books of economics.

Thus, “rational action”, especially but not only in economics, is an ideological veil that covers the way real action is taking place in the contemporary world – especially concerning the contagious, imitative spread of modernity. Communicative action, and its rationality, central for Jürgen Habermas, is the ideological twin of economic rationality, as it raises communication, the field par excellence of activity of Hermes, the Greek arch-trickster (see Károly Kerényi and Michel Serres), into the ideological justification of modernity. That Habermas is an ideologue can be best seen through the manifold parallels of his thinking with that of Karl Popper, the arch-ideologue of modern science and also the media.

However, one might claim, if there is so much continuity in the spread of modernity, why not call out blog simply “modernity”? Well, there are at least two good reasons for suggesting this somewhat new title. First, after a time words gain a certain meaning which becomes almost impossible to alter. Modernity certainly has gained its own by now, and the interpretation given here is certainly different from this. Second, the prefix “hyper” has its own, considerable importance, as it is associated not simply with difference, or being “beyond”, but with the idea of excess. Here “hyper” has etymological connections both with “hybris” and “evil” – which is somewhat controversial, but this connection is evident, and was considered as evident by classical linguists. Such questioning of historical evidences is itself a crucial part of trickster modernity, which often goes under the label “revisionism”.

And, in fact, by bringing in the words “limit” and “trickster”, this short essay already alluded to two further central terms of Political Anthropology; central for understanding the unique character of our times. Pushing everything “beyond” any conceivable limit, irresponsibly catering for excess in everything, is not a natural phenomenon, not an inevitable character, or side-effect, of “growth” or “development”, but is an agenda that is pushed, doggedly, by certain people, using certain occasions. And for these “certain people” Political Anthropology coined, or uses, the word “trickster”; while for these “certain occasions” it uses the word “liminality” – words which, together with “imitation”, are among the most important technical terms in this field. Even further, more important than concrete persons as “tricksters” is the characterisation of their mode of operation as a “trickster logic”: or, the spread of their mode of acting, which is by no means “natural” but is always and extremely excessive, in the social body; and, still more, in the whole world. Thus, (hyper)-modernisation can be characterised as the spread of trickster logic in the entire lived world.

Finally, this is no small matter as, using the etymology of evil, the trickster playing with limits, going beyond any limit, purposefully destroying all the limits of a decent human life, is evil. Thus, hyper-modernisation is itself evil; or evil itself.

Our purpose, of course, is not a labelling game. We don’t want to re-label anything that was called “modern” as evil. It would not have any sense, as the word “modern” was applied in the past to an infinite number of phenomena; it was very often used to problematise an earlier stage in the development of the modern world, though more often than not it only resulted in rendering the same developments even worse. We certainly would like to have nothing to do with this game.

Rather, on the contrary, our purpose is to characterise modernity as playing a labelling game; to help recognise that it was largely just a labelling game, redefining every aspect of a decent human existence, to be superseded, as being backward, or regressive, at any rate needing to be substituted by ‘change’ or ‘progress’, and which was spread, since the very beginning, by a ruthless propagandistic machinery. This machinery was extremely effective, as it managed to convince almost “everybody” – but who in particular? and why?! – about modernity’s vast superiority to every other social and cultural way of life, conquering and destroying them in the process, so that we would not even have an inkling about the real alternatives to this “(hyper)-modernity”.

However, at this moment, when the victorious spread of “hyper-modernity” seems irresistible and is almost complete, we do not need “alternatives” – a very problematic term anyway, part of modernist tricks, as it contains the term “alter”, recalling alteration, and the altered reality, which is a central project of “hyper-modernity”. We need to return to genuine, authentic, real life. As reality itself is a value, not a fact – a value not in the sense of a “table of values” to which we should conform, but in the sense in which only a real friend is a friend – somebody faking friendship is not real, just a piece of trickery – like the various propaganda machineries of (hyper)-modernity.

While this blog will certainly not be reduced to matters of the “East”, or even of Central-Eastern Europe, several Board members have such “identities”, origins, or affiliations. And there is indeed a reason why this particular region, and “Eastern” matters in particular, have special importance. This is partly due to historical experiences, especially experiences related to the spread of modernity, and modern ideologies, of which the most important but not exclusive is the experience with Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist Communism or Bolshevism; but partly also to the geographical situation of the region, literally in between East and West, thus being a strongly liminal zone. Given the importance of liminality, even permanent liminality for modernity – “permanent liminality” being a twin term for capturing “hyper-modernity”, just as “Trickster Land” – and given that a temporal extension of liminality also captures particularly well the historical experiences of the region, it can be considered as a privileged area to explore the constitutional and constitutive paradoxes of modernity, or “hyper-modernity”.

The previous two, historical and geographical arguments can be combined in calling attention on the impact of the Byzantine world, and its collapse, on the rise of modernity. This has been all but ignored in the past, even by the most important reflexive historical sociologists and genealogists, Max Weber, Lewis Mumford, Norbert Elias, Franz Borkenau, Eric Voegelin, and Michel Foucault included. However, it could be argued that actually this was the single most important historical source of modernity; and that therefore modernity should be considered not so much as the glorious conclusion of European history, as argued in various “end of history” theses, rather a Byzantine aberration. In his thesis about modernity as a “Gnostic revolt”, Voegelin had some inkling of this.

Indeed, there was a single moment in which Voegelin came close to developing an interest in the Byzantine world. In late 1956 he travelled to Vienna, just in time to encounter the wave of refugees who escaped Hungary after the Soviets crushed the anti-communist popular uprising. His related impressions are contained in a 29 December 1956 letter to his friend Robert B. Heilman: the situation was “quite interesting at the moment, because the impact of the Hungarian affairs makes itself strongly felt (even in the streets and hotels: Vienna is full of Hungarian emigrants). What strikes one in talking with these people (historians, journalists, etc.) is the long-range view which they take: the manifold of the Byzantine and Asiatic cultures […] they regret that so little is really known in the West about the undercurrents of experiences and ideas in the East. They consider it the most important task for science, to find out a good deal more about Eastern living culture than is known in the West today. The Western literature, including the American, about Communism—based as it is on the reading of a few books and articles of persons who hold the limelight—they consider ludicrous”. However, Voegelin would soon return to the States, then move to Munich, and overall forget, like practically everyone in the West, both the Hungarians and their heroic stand again Bolshevism, and the great importance of Byzantine matters. Thus, while in some draft plans about the fourth volume of his Order and History project formulated around that time, provisionally entitled “Empire and Christianity” – which thus evidently should have been primarily devoted to Byzantium – he considered a short discussion in a section on “orthodox Empires”, though without any emphasis, in the actually published Volume Four (in 1974), the Byzantine world is only fleetingly mentioned as background to the rise of Islam.

However, and before being accused of fixating on the East, the perspective should be extended. It might be that, now again, the global world, or the ecumene, can be best understood from the extremes of Europe: just as fifteen centuries ago, when the centre, the core of the Roman Empire, starting with Rome, was collapsing, while it survived in the East, in the form of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire; while to the former core new winds were brought from the other, Western extreme of Europe, by Irish monks. The first of these was St Columbanus, an Irish missionary monk, who in a letter of around 600 to Pope Gregory first used the word Europe in a cultural and not just geographical sense (totius Europae; all of Europe).

So perhaps that “whole of Europe” can be best discovered, and addressed, from its liminal margins.