Notes: Modernity

Postmodernity and anti modernity, ancients and moderns, the value and judgement that penetrates every day. The assumption of classical as original is shown by the expression “classical modernism” which reveals the outmost field of authenticable.
Habermas refers some conceptions of modern: the distinguishing of present and the expression of consciousness -an epoch that relates itself to the past of antiquity-. The transition from old to the new (Hans Robert Jauss) seems to belong to the abstract opposition between tradition and the present. Also the idea related to the project of enlightenment inspired by modern science and moral betterment.
The characteristics of modernity are the cult of the new manifested with the exaltation of the present throughout transitory, elusive, ephemeral, organized in the dynamism of the principle of unlimited self-realization, the demand of authentic self-experience and the subjectivism of a hyper stimulated sensitivity with hedonistic motives.
The discipline of aesthetic modernity is appointed by attitudes which find a common focus in a changed consciousness of time towards the future, directed against a false normativity in history. For example, the museum as the institution which stabilizes value and reception in a naturalized perception trough isolated, self-constituted and confined objects to glass boxes with symbolical transaction instead of its real context and provenance. The revolt against the normalizing functions of tradition which neutralizes morality and utility.
The cultural modernity is profoundly compromised with the purposes encouraged by the project of enlightenment such as the development of objective science, universal morality and law, and the autonomous art. The aspects of validity turn out rightness, authenticity and beauty as well as the scientific discourse, theories of morality, jurisprudence, production and criticism of art could be institutionalized with each domain of cultural profession and the birth of special experts.
The expectation of arts and science promoting the understanding of the world and of the self, moral progress, justice of institutions and happiness of human beings. The main problem is that aesthetics absorbed utopia and exscinds art and praxis life, assuming the role of bonhomie it makes irreconcilable aesthetics and social world.
The detachment of the history of purposive art, shown with the independence of Renaissance from the sacred and courtly life, imprints modern art with the negation of representation and the distinct consciousness of formal elements that used to be media or techniques (lines, colours, planes, etc.) to become the aesthetic object itself.
The division of anti modernism pre modernism and postmodernism
A). young conservatives: recapitulate the basic experience of aesthetic modernity, spontaneous powers of imagination, self-experience and emotion (Georges Bataille, Michael Foucault, Derrida).
B). old conservatives: do not allow themselves to be contaminated by cultural modernism and recommend a position anterior to modernity (Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, Robert Spaemann).
C). neoconservatives: development of modern science to carry forward technical progress, capitalist growth and rational administration. Their thesis confines science, morality and art to autonomous separated spheres: science as meaningless for the orientation of the life-world, politics as something that must be kept far from demands of moral-practical justification, and art as the pure immanence with a limited aesthetic experience to privacy (Wtitgenstein, Carl Schmitt, Gottfried Benn).

Jurgen Habermas “Modernity - An Incomplete Project”, originally published in New German Critique #22 (Winter 1981), p. 3-15, found in Postmodernism A Reader, edited by Thomas Docherty, University Press Cambridge, 1993, p. 98-109

palabras? urdimbre?

los compendios mayugan la estancia aleatoria de los objetos (donde solo la trans- tergi- con- versa -cion no la salva), quales ambages transigentes en el morbo sucedaneo de una falta

aquelarres- culposos -colectivos

"polimenda rinteosa"

roperos bigamos de sucinta sospecha maltratada de deseos pigmentosos, que anaden la corteza de antecedentes caprichosos. kien vacila en la ralea de la desesperacion, del orgullo, de informales polimeros. Postrera contractura de evidencias, torso lastimero de citadinos coleandose, lamentaciones de marmol disecado. expedientes secos y permutas longevas, argumentos perifrasticos en falacias pertrechas