The Condition of Modernity - Essay Example

The condition of Modernity The concept of modernity brings meaning and significance to the social changes that have continued to take place in Europe in the 19th century. Such changes are industrialization, political democracy and urbanization. The concept of modernity came so as to compare and contrast the ‘modern’ with the ‘traditional’. The founding fathers of modernity and sociology are Marx Weber and Durkheim. According to these theorists, modernity carried suggestions of new experiences of the world (Burden, 2015, p.53). In the modern society, the world is often experienced as a kind of human construction that leads to some sense of freedom as well as openness of the future. Forms of mobility include moving ones hand, walking, driving, exercising, going on a holiday, travelling, exploring as well as attending conferences among others. The intangible nature of mobility makes it a mysterious object of study though it is a crucial facet of existence and provides basis for which ideologies could be constructed. Mobility is everywhere ranging from the kicks of a newborn baby to the travelling and mobility of international business people across the globe. The most known theories of social change are those that deal with modernity and include other related terms like growth and development. The discussion occurs on whether modernity deals with continuity or discontinuity and whether the theorists themselves are optimistic or pessimistic (Burden, 2015, p.86). Two major scholars and theorists who dealt with the continuity of modernity and developments were Weber and Parsons. These two theorists developed a new sense of self, subjectivity as well as individuality. Their ideas on modernity differentiate the modern person from the traditional one. The difference between the two is dependent on the understanding of how man relates with the supernatural and demographic alterations that followed industrialization. The concept of place has been strengthened by geographers who emphasize on the historical dynamism as well as the multiple identities in places. The work of conceiving place has been enabled by the increased postmodern social and cultural theories and the associated end of modernity in academia (Burden, 2015, p.129). Modernism has asserted that place is a crucial vehicle for the understanding of social change. The theorists of modernism contend that place is a particularly important environment for the representation of the experience of modernity and that the beginning of place when visualized in contemporary cultures always has crucial humanistic toots in the literatures of the 19th and the 20th century. The interests and implications of modernity are directly political to the problem of planning and organizing the forces of modernity. The secure and stable networks of the surrounding community as well as the modern individual is enforced to compose a new sense of self that involves new ways of acting in a political manner and redefining the entire political community. The manner in which the redefinition procedure occurs is defined by the theoretical and practical concern. Luxemburg and Lenin had some differing ideas on the role of organizations in exploiting the energies behind the concept of modernity as well as developing the political consciousness of the modern man (Cresswell, 2004, p.47). Mobility and modern life has been characterized by a vast past concepts. Mobility has increased constantly throughout modern era a stance that can be attributed to the evident cases of mass ownership of cars, travelling by plane and the rise of internet usage. Mobility has increased concurrently with the increase in freedom (Cresswell, 2004, p.74). The attempts by individuals to control or restrict the increasing mobility in the modern era is deemed a modernity characteristic itself. The regulation of mobility is central to what is experienced in modernity. Time and space are important facets that constitute the entire process of movement as it takes a spatial amount of time and a temporary instance of space. Life according to Kant revolves around the two axes which form the basic bases of classification. Objects certainly move coordinates in time and space as they are displaced from one point say A to another point B. Time is accounted in the displacement as well as space. The effective global shriveling by the ever increasing mobility of objects and people is aided by the speed of transport and communication technology innovations a case that is evident in the railroad technology success of the in the 19th century. The abstract notion of space and time constitute the social life aspect with meaning and power with meaning of social time and social space (Cresswell, 2004, p.142). In the process of movement, chaos and conflicts emerge a case that can rarely occur in a sedentary life. There is a connection in the mobility at the scale of the body to the mobility of other scales as frequent ideological stories link cells to patterns of the street and reproduction to travelling in the space. Mobility is characterized by meanings that jump scales however the meaning is not accounted into when making connections. It is then important to tie together the processes that drive the various human mobility accounts at different scales into a single logic without discarding the very crucial differences between them (Cresswell, 2004, p.194). William Harvey discovered the heart pumps blood through vessels throughout the body which is the returned to the heart by the veins. This discovery initiated others to see the issue in a similar way and later Thomas Willis suggested the presence of the nervous system. Air circulates in the city in a similar way to the circulation of blood. In Europe the sense of mobility in the feudal society was termed as a luxury item as majority of people lived much where they were as long as they accessed transportation facilities. The feudal society was highly territorial and the right to move lay in the hands of the private entities and mobility was controlled by the masters. Mobility in the middle Ages was deemed to be conducted by the people who lacked space both socially and geographically. Many Jews roamed around the medieval Europe as a result of persecution and expulsion but not by choice. The modern individual is rather a mobile being evoking the image of technological mobility by the use of cars, the plane and the spaceship signifying an increased movement of people on a global scale (Burden, 2015, p.134). The movement has been made possible by the reductions in the travel time due to the drastic improvements in the road and rail network in Britain in the 19th century from the prior usage of horses and coaches. Modernity is characterized by ambiguities and tensions within it and its nature revolve around notions of newness, order, artificiality, reason, technology, democracy and chaos. There exists a persistent sense in which mobility has been a source of anxiety in modernity as the modern, urban life provides a sensory overhead but the traditional rural life was slow and habitual. The onset of modern urbanity characterized by the developments in the money economy and clock time abstracted the people’s sense , and especially the development of a money economy and clock time, meant that people were bombarded with sensations that led to an increasingly abstracted sense of self and society (Burden, 2015, p.156). Anxiety and the important freedoms of citizens have escalated the pace of modernity as people are becoming increasingly cosmopolitan. The invention of clocks and watches usually compel people to act timely and hence they have something to do with modern nervousness. Place and Placelessness Geographers focus keenly on place as a key factor to differentiate their subject from other disciplines like the history has time, astronomy has the heavens and Geography has place. However the term place is complex as it is often described as the synonym for location and others term it as something that uniquely ensembles nature and culture. However it is something more (Relph, 1976, p.78). In order to understand place, it is important to explore the contents of space on the basis of how people experience it. The spatial experience is infinite, bodily, instinctive and immediate as to what Relph calls perpetual space, pragmatic space and existential space. He also comes up with spatial experience modes that are ideal, cerebral and intangible like cognitive space, planning space, and abstract space all of which have intensities that vary on a daily basis in an individual’s life. Existential space for instance which is particularly assumed to environmentally and spatially constitute the worlds daily social and cultural structure can be experienced on a way that is highly conscious and overwhelming by the exquisiteness and the holiness of a Gothic cathedral or in a implicit way that is unself-conscious when an individual relaxes in the office and pays little or no attention to the surroundings (Relph, 1976, p.107). All these modes affect the modern experiences of people and are not mutually exclusive but are crucial facets of the experience of lived and indivisible life of human beings. According to Relph, the space cognitive conceptions captured in maps aid individuals in forming their perceptual knowledge that in return colors the daily encounters of space as they move from one point to another in the places of the real world. The engagement between space and place is conceptual and intimate but most geographers talk of the two concepts giving few indications of how they relate or even treating them as separate aspects in terms of existentiality and conceptuality. Place uniquely powers to order the way human attentions are focused, their experiences as well as their actions in the space. Therefore space and place are structured dialectically in human experience with the environment as the understanding of space is correlated with the places that we live which can in turn gain meaning from the contents of space (Relph, 1976, p.132). Understanding of the relation between space and place contributes to the restoration and maintenance of existing places as well as the making of new ones failure to which one will find it hard to explain the reason as to why the current living place is special and the best way to repair or renovate it. In order to thoroughly understand places of different setting, an individual needs a language to identify the experiences of a particular place on the basis of intensity of meaning and the objective that a person has for the other (Burden, 2015, p.199). Insideness and Outsideness People move from one place to another in the modern era to place that they feel is safer without threats, that is enclosed without exposure and a place that they feel they are at ease without stress. The more an individual attains all the three concepts of satisfaction, the more he/she feels he possesses a strong identity in the new place he/she is living in. The mode of experiencing a place when an individual is separated or alienated from place is what Relph refers to as the outsideness. Individuals here feel some kind of separation and division in the way they live in the world like the feeling of homesickness in a new place for instance (Relph, 1976, p.178). When individuals are force fully relocated and resettled may be during extensions of public facilities like roads or construction of dams, the affected group is deemed to have experienced involuntary displacement. Space is prior to the later as this experience can be understood as a forced journey characterized by 8 stages; becoming uneasy, struggling in staying, accepting the change, securing a settlement, searching for the new, starting over, unsettling reminders an finally wanting to settle. The essentialist claims by Marxists and social constructivists argue that temporal, social and individual circumstances experienced by individuals and groups like history, culture and personal qualities must be included as they shape the very specific places that people live in the modern era (Burden, 2015, p.223). Relph however favored home and dwelling over the horizon, periphery, and journey (Cresswell 2004, p. 211) by emphasizing more in the positive qualities of a place and minimizing or ignoring the negative ones forgetting the possibility of a place generating xenophobia, parochialism and narrow-mindedness. The excess of a place can result to provincialism and callousness for the outsiders similar to the loss of identity and impartial relativity in an excess journey. The authentic places that Relph talked of exist in the modern era of cyberspace, human diversity, the continuous technological change and the social and the geographical mobility. People will always need place since identifying and having it are integral to what and who we are and hence the technological and the cultural creativeness in the postmodern society cannot ignore place as it can be existentially and potentially devastating in practice policy wise, in terms of design or popular understanding (Relph 1976, p.193). Place significantly continues to be vigorous conceptual structure and an irrevocable part of everyday human life despite of the dramatic changes that are evident in our societies and the environment. The independence of place in the modern society that is globally-linked is impossible in various ways (Cresswell 2004, p.242 & Relph, 1976, p. 202). The significance of place and locality must be in balance with the connections and awareness of the other places that the world needs as the compassionate and the empathetic understanding of the globe beyond our living places may be best grounded in a love of a particular place to which one belongs to. The needs of the individuals are parallel to the needs of the world and the continuing dissolution of places and insideness helps in explaining the ever increasing civility and civilization erosion in the West and anywhere else (Burden, 2015, p.234). Bibliography Dr Robert Burden, 2015. Travel, Modernism and Modernity: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. Literary Criticism - 278 pages Relph Edward, 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion. Tim Cresswell, 2004. Place: A Short Introduction. London: Blackwell. Read More