Thinking Modernity. An Introduction.

What is "modernity"? What constitutes a modern experience, given that "experience" refers to the historically specific relation between forms of subjectivity, structures of objectivity, and principles of social conformity? And how can one conceive of modernity?—These questions define the analytical framework within which the texts on these pages form the elements of a theory of modernity.

These are texts on contingency, its cultural positivity, and its social normalization—on the relationship between modernity, postmodernity, and classical modernity—on architectures of functionalist socialization, spaces of institutionalized self-unfolding, and the political logic of totalitarian infrastructures—on urban revolts, metropolitan ways of life, and the ambivalence of mobility—on discourses of crisis, concepts of hope, and the sense of possibility as a mode of existence—on the middle class, mass culture, and the aestheticization of the social—on the border, the horizon, the sea, the Hansaviertel, and Potsdamer Platz—on Romanticism, the avant-garde, modern literature, and abstract painting—on progress, competition, rivalry, and the social compulsion toward permanent optimization.

The theory of modernity developed in these texts conceives of modernity as a culture of contingency—that is, as a distinctive relationship to the world in which what is could also be otherwise. In this culture, orders are mutable, realities are perspectival, and self-references are reflexive. Contingency is therefore not the negative consequence of modernity, as is widely claimed, but its positive prerequisite. Nevertheless, contingency is not ontologised in these texts, but analysed as the modal structure of a social self-constitution in the light of its conceptual and material forms. This analytical disposition differs from the melancholic theories of modernity, which conceive of modernity as a loss of meaning, significance, substance or a concrete totality of experience. The theory of modernity developed here does not share such interpretations. Rather, its methodological stance is one of calculated distance from cultural-critical diagnoses and social-critical problematizations that define modernity primarily in terms of deficiency. Consequently, in this theory of modernity, contingency is neither a deficit nor a curse; it implies neither meaninglessness nor arbitrariness. Nor does it manifest itself solely as insecurity, uncertainty or a lack of direction. Here, contingency is, first and foremost, an openness to possibilitiy. It is an openness that is realised concretely in the plurality of contemporary ways of life and abstractly in the potentiality of their future alternatives. It is therefore an eminently reflexive product. And ‘modernity’ is the name given to the cultural form in which this openness to possibility is institutionalised. It stands for the self-understanding of a society that constitutes itself through organised indeterminacy.

All of the texts on these pages have already been published elsewhere and are brought together here in digital form. Their shared theoretical framework is set out through a conceptual basis and a systematic outline, which are also available as files. In addition, most of the articles, essays, and studies are summarized in detailed, chronologically arranged abstracts. The images, photographs, and objects on these pages, however, are not elements of this theory. Rather, they represent the "other" of the theory—that is, they simply stand for themselves.