Pre-Post-Post-Modern

R. Scott Appleby convincingly argues that fundamentalism can only be understood as a response to modernism; that is, that fundamentalism is anti-modern. And while that seemed to me, as I read it, a correct assertion, the very next author I encountered, Bruce Lawrence, posed a challenge – that of “[foregrounding] the disciplinary variables we face today” – that called into question the neat, clean delineation implied by the word “modern.” As a supposed modern, should I not be able to define the word? And if I cannot define modernism, how can I understand anti-modernism?

 I “foreground” the problem of historical periodization with respect to the cluster of recent events that can loosely be associated under the rubric “War on Terror,” precisely because they have not yet fallen into the domain of history proper. Hence they yield a certain charge, like a foul ball sailing into the stands at a baseball game, markedly different than the prior events studied – they’re still up in the air. Does this difference also entail a different approach? A different ethics of historical methodology?

 “’Modernity’…plays a peculiar dual role as a category of historical periodization: it designates the contemporaneity of an epoch to the time of its classification; yet it registers this contemporaneity in terms of a qualitatively new, self-transcending temporality which has the simultaneous effect of distancing the present from even that most recent past with which it is thus identified. It is this paradoxical doubling, or inherently dialectical quality, which makes modernity both so irresistible and so problematic a category.” – Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde