When We Talk about Modernity

Abstract

Some Modern people have discovered a new world. Its people are not like Modern people. Their society seems primitive, their intelligence undeveloped, their emotions excessive. Their lack of Modernity clearly justifies their subjugation. Colonization begins, with the seizure of un-Modern property facilitated by the legal and moral arguments of Modern intellectuals. In the process, some un-Modern elites unwittingly facilitate their own eradication; meanwhile, a few Modern people go native, embracing un-Modern lifestyles and values. Gradually, un-Modern artifacts are transferred to Modern metropoles, where they are prized by private collectors and the curators of competing imperial museums. The un-Modern comes into vogue, inspiring Modern fashions, theatrical genres, artistic schools. Un-Modern mythology circulates in translation; un-Modern languages are objects of study. Enthusiasts even attempt to enact aspects of un-Modern life, while popular culture reflects increasing fascination with un-Modern stories and settings. By this time, though, there is no way to write the history of the un-Modern world—at least not from an un-Modern perspective. No un-Modern people survive as witnesses to their own past. Their very landscapes have been transformed. A few sites will be “restored” as romantic refuges, but most will become wastelands where the detritus of Modernity is dumped. In 1958, the year of Charles de Gaulle's controversial visit to “Algérie française,” the French Academician André Chamson imagined a parallel struggle for independence taking place in another French colony: the past. The hero of his curious political parable, Nos ancêtres les Gaulois, is a subaltern spokesman who makes an eloquent case for his people's right to self-determination, petitioning the United Nations to “recognize and proclaim that France does not exist” and to allow “Gaul, my fatherland, a sovereign nation, to be seated among you, to work alongside you for the expansion of civilization and culture.”1 Hardly a supporter of decolonization, the future director of the Archives nationales (he was appointed by de Gaulle later that year) developed this fanciful scenario to expose the “injustice” of a principle that, fairly applied, would unravel not only overseas empires but the very fabric of modern identities.2 What if our alleged ancestors were to reclaim their heritage? What if peoples of the past were to reject the “civilizing mission” of modernity and insist on the sovereignty of their indigenous cultures? What if they could speak for themselves? As if in response, Astérix le Gaulois soon made his appearance in print.3 Historians working in many different fields will recognize the familiar pattern of events sketched in my opening vignette. Will we also recognize our role in modernity's imperial project? “Colonization of the past is an indispensable companion of empire,” observe two of the scholars who have recently called for the decolonization of the Middle Ages.4 We who study that era—defined, like the so-called “non-West,” by what it is not—usually call ourselves “medievalists,” which implies that we medievalize, that we reify the terms that bring this epoch into being and pretend to explain it. Even though we always seek to understand some more meaningful temporal segment within this rough millennium, or strive to create new narratives that resist teleology, our efforts are all too easily nullified by the parameters within which we operate.5 Those who resist the hegemony of modernity will still end up bolstering it, because there is no way to study “medieval” people for their own sake or on their own terms. To use the adjective as a descriptive or heuristic category, when it is really an analytical or evaluative one, is to predetermine the ways in which something can be known.6 Meanwhile, “invoking the modern is never a natural inconsequential affair, but a violent regulatory speech act.”7 It suggests that people who inhabit “un-Modern” times and cultures are not fully developed, not really human, “the antithesis of whatever it means to be ‘modern.’”8 For this is what we talk about when we talk about modernity: rights of equal (historical) representation, complexity of consciousness, capacity for agency, the dignity of being considered relevant and fully real. This is why the people of the “Middle Ages” inhabit a conceptual space analogous to that of “India”: both, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, “refer to certain figures of imagination” that can be shaped and reshaped to serve particular historical and political projects.9 And although it has often been observed that the idea of “Europe” governs this process, it is really the idea of Modern Europe put about by self-proclaimed Modern Europeans.10 Just as “the British conquered and represented the diversity of ‘Indian’ pasts through a homogenizing narrative of transition from a ‘medieval’ period to ‘modernity,’” so Modern Europeans and their imitators squeezed the diversity of “medieval” pasts into a homogenizing narrative of barbarity from which they, qua modern people, had liberated themselves.11 To take on the role of medievalist is consequently—and all unwillingly—to become a minor colonial official whose job depends on maintaining the subaltern status of the population under scrutiny. All the time expended on acquiring real knowledge of “medieval” lives and outlooks merely makes “medieval” peoples (and medievalists) complicit in their subordination to modernity. Medievalists thereby earn the tepid approval of “modernist” colleagues who care little about the medieval people we have created between us, so long as they stay medi-eval. “Consider the margins (one could just as well say the silent, silenced center) of the circuit marked out by this epistemic violence.”12 Confronting Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's seminal essay for the first time a few years ago, this medievalist was forced to reevaluate what she had gathered from other sources: that postcolonial theory could not be applied to her own field.13 Not only can vast portions of “the West” be regarded as postcolonial spaces after fragmentation of the Roman Empire, but many of the colonial enterprises that made “Europe” can benefit from postcolonial critique (e.g., “Post-Conquest” England).14 Moreover, the word “medieval” can be substituted for “subaltern” in nearly every sentence of Spivak's essay with no distortion of sense. There is a similar range of possible answers to the question “Can the medieval speak?” While innovative scholarship always holds out hope that new ways of reading sources will reveal new truths about the past, a perspective more closely aligned with that of Spivak suggests that no methodological move can make medieval voices discernible—regardless of whether “medieval” is a marker of radical alterity or essential affinity. Accordingly, one tactic has been to focus on the various manifestations of “epistemic violence” enacted upon the period itself, tracing “the Middle Ages” through recurring cycles of demonization, romanticism, gothicization, obfuscation, and dismissal.15 Another is to demonstrate the extent to which postmodernism's central tenets actually arose from readings of medieval texts and phenomena, and to emphasize the close kinships among medievalism, orientalism, and colonialism.16 There could also be a powerful alliance between medieval studies and studies of indigeneity.17 Yet many scholars of other un-Modern (or non-Western) places and times will understandably be reluctant to claim kinship with medievalists, for the very reason that “dark ages” and benighted peoples have been so frequently equated. One thinks, for example, of Hugh Trevor-Roper's magisterial dismissal of “the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe, tribes whose chief function in history … is to show the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped.” By “the past” he meant the Middle Ages, analogous to “black Africa” because it can have no history of its own; it exists merely to enrich the glow of the spotlight cast on people like Trevor-Roper.18 The medievalist Kathleen Davis is thereby making a fundamental contribution to modern history by exposing how and why the delineation of these territorial and temporal colonies occurred simultaneously, and for the same purposes. In Periodization and Sovereignty, she demonstrates that the discovery of a “new world” unsettled Europeans' understanding of their own history at the very same time that competing claims to national sovereignty were being based on fictions of a “feudal age” from which some states had allegedly emerged triumphant, with a warrant to subjugate or colonize those who could be deemed throwbacks to that fictitious past.19 Hence the lives and property of both “primitive” peoples—non-European and un-Modern—would be deemed forfeit to this soi-disant superiority. By the nineteenth century, a further fiction of modernity's enlightened rejection of religion came to be “defined as the very basis of politics, progress, and historical consciousness; correlatively, Europe's ‘medieval’ past and cultural others … were defined as religious, static, and ahistorical—and thus open to narrative and territorial development.”20 The current uses of “medieval” as a synonym for “ignorant,” “unevolved,” “intolerant,” and “inhumane” continue to ensure the momentum of this process.21 But is even this trend really modern? In fact, the concept of modernity has been performing this sort of trick for a very long time. Rather ironically, the word “modern” appears to have been coined during the Middle Ages, more specifically in the first decades of the ninth century c.e., to describe the renewal of Roman imperial glories in the age of Charlemagne and hence to throw the foregoing era into shadow.22 By the twelfth century, in northwestern Europe, “modern” and “modernity” (Latin modernus, modernitas) were terms of art among university scholars and the “new men” of royal and ecclesiastical bureaucracies.23 And these are relatively recent uses of a specific word, whereas the ideas undergirding these words are timeless. To some extent, all history is predicated on a concept of modernity, on a present claim to novelty or superiority when compared to a “great before.”24 Telling stories (whether laudatory or dismissive) about the past is an indispensable part of telling stories about the “now” (Latin modo), the way we become à la mode—and why that makes us better, or if not better, more complicated and more interesting than other peo-ple. It could also be said that the practice of history has always been a way of occupying other peoples' territories and times, something evident in the oral traditions that precede any vaunted invention of history as a “modern” scientific discipline—whether by Herodotus, Thucydides, Sima Qian, Ibn Khaldun, Lorenzo Valla, Giam-battista Vico, Edward Gibbon, Leopold von Ranke, or any other contender. The epic tale that we know as Gilgamesh was known to its first audiences as “The One Who Saw the Abyss”: a quintessentially modern perspective, one would think. It represents Gilgamesh (r. ca. 2700 b.c.e.) as the first king to be “called by name,” to be knowable and to convey knowledge, “to cut his works into a stone tablet.”25 (Jean-François Lyotard defined the modern condition as self-referential and self-legitimating.)26 Gilgamesh's “Other,” whom he eventually befriends and assimilates, is a wild man who represents the primitive world from which the urbane (modern) people of Uruk have distanced themselves. Gilgamesh helps Enkidu to become fully human by bringing him up to date, making him civilized. But Enkidu's modernity does not make him immortal, and his sudden death sends Gilgamesh to the edge of the abyss, the timeless underworld, where he hopes to find the means to revive his friend. And of course he fails. Yet his lasting legacy is the conquest of the wilderness now compassed by his city walls, the conquest of the past now seen through his perspective, and the conquest of the future into which he projects the fame of his deeds. Turning to the texts usually recognized as the first “true” histories—texts that were the products of a “literate revolution” perceived by contemporaries as a modernizing (and to many, alarming) force—we will find that the reasons for writing history and the consciousness of modernity are inextricable and inextricably linked to imperial dominion.27 Herodotus (ca. 490–ca. 425/20 b.c.e.), born in a Greek-speaking outpost of the Persian Empire and revising his notes in Athens at the height of its aggressive colonial project, appears to claim for the Greek-speaking world the stored-up knowledge of other ages and cultures while buttressing his adopted polis's imperial pretensions. Thucydides (ca. 460–ca. 400 b.c.e.), more firmly presentist than the most presentist pundit of today, makes short work of both the distant and the recent past under the heading of “archaeology” (old stuff) in order to focus on “the greatest war in history,” waged in his own day, and its terrible consequences for Athens, its empire, and its democracy—not to mention he The first of the Roman empire, the (ca. b.c.e.), can his for his own and (he nearly years as a in and that his recognize the of their which his narrative is to also and a “dark a concept that is to For and the many by “the ages” were both the past and the future the to by the that between his own present and the was a age” from which he to and this present was the of a of empire, both that of and that of the Roman A study of the many and that have shaped human historical consciousness would that Modern modernity's of the Middle is just another of the Yet would that it is different in if not in because it is more aggressive and The period from “the of that to “the that has been an of study at least the if one with its if it was not as “the Middle Ages” the nineteenth The upon it is and the of modernity's narrative can even the most to any of it, or to any of the more or within the very of temporal and territorial means that the conceptual space of the Middle is for a of some It most often as a of modernity's own are and as Hence the the of usually as modern (e.g., with the Middle a similar historical events are if they modernity's For example, the of the century during the Middle Ages, although the of by its him a place in the aspects of the Middle that are for modernity through a of the chief of “the as the of modernity, not only deemed “the so-called to be a was but he deemed its to be the work of an of was as its at the of This is of the way that of modernity very often the of medieval artifacts that have been temporal and national It also another familiar just as the cultures of the and were to be the of civilization as well as so the Middle the of modernity. There was a for long the for and the who for the of national that were and all one claims to its it as the the first in making it “the of the while were being to it as their own Meanwhile, a French of medieval was for making to a that had actually in the a few an official by the French that texts and in the de were really being The of history as a by national and imperial as well as this for It also with the same scientific being by colonial and In the of Charles The of to that the same The of in the for explain how certain medieval to survive and to modernity's while others to and to bring into with the theory of the same time, many of the most of the nineteenth and were born and in Europe's whose could be by their to Medievalists have long recognized that these and have created the sources we study. We all use as the in whose political and cultural is by the very of what a of Its the by of the and the that from historical Not only have the of medieval history been in to modern so has the on which we our studies of that that one could the of and who have the one would still have to with a of and all in and The same is in of medieval and which are “restored” that they a modern of the medieval or from their and has us has is that the past has to be within the terms of the of that shaped it any But it has not us not has been its most the of the of modernity. Lyotard defined as a of in the of in to the of Yet from the of the practice of critique has it. it has even the concept of “the and the that it had In as one has of the thus on an of in which of our own time are as the consequences of certain whose are in a particular or of who are as of the Medievalists be a at this the has been In the process, has by making “the “the Middle and any of other to its own As a the of that to from its has been by another powerful the of The for many is to the and of “the Middle Ages” by making it modernity's of for or for often at the of and the even of human to the narrative and the Middle place within so a popular of medieval the modern known as “the “the and “the of which the would have meant to the people who through the to which they allegedly these terms are the products of to describe the past in a way which has both and that they are because are modern how modern can to be with the past and not be This is at it is not By or of the from which the of is to the past to modernity's in a way so that the human these terms is one would to the as or he the many have and that it and for a while It is not a historical for it it is a powerful that the and of the people who make it. the idea of the of scientific to artistic and cultural after the Middle that is what is with What is “the concept of the has to the historical years to which it those in the same way that has to But it is this very of with some of “the past” that has so real and in the and that we all efforts in of not create historical they create an appearance of it, a And these the efforts that have created “the modern “the Middle “the “the of the are not just is but we not our of for political we not even have political And no one from our current of historical those who “the of the Middle will continue to “modern” on its while will within terms that have the of the of the ages that to the distant of our will continue to be in similar and what if we to these or at least to the same critique that we now to other and What new historical could we the subaltern of the past be to speak in The is an And it for a an of the between the of The and the who has been him on historical from a idea of to a very period of to increasing and to and he about it. been among the could not In the we can all about what we what we we talk about modernity. We can be on the for of or people and that we not know as about is that the means whose speech like but only to the making that the to become a medievalist or a out to be a political one, so is the not to care about the peoples by those be an of and a could a role in the As the medievalist it, and is of people in that of people who not Un-Modern or they to

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