Deconstructing Stereotypes about Modernity

The critique of modernity in post- and decolonial theory is often based on an epistemic distinction between reason and sense, universality and indigenousness, culture and nature, secularity and sacrality, Enlightenment and mythology. The notions representing rationality and universality are ascribed to Western modernity, whereas those denoting sense and mythology are attributed to the Global South, or the Global East. 

While it is true that vestiges of colonial mentality might be the principal cause for assigning these characteristics to the Western and non-Western geographies respectively, critical thought frequently reproduces them when it views reason, Enlightenment, and modernity as cultural concepts valid predominantly for the West. My essay attempts to deconstruct such dichotomies hinging on location and explore potentialities that could surpass geopolitical and geographic determinations. 

Consequently, this text asks whether standpoints that attribute the modern or counter-modern view to concrete historical periods or civilisational landscapes might not err, even when they rely on evident cultural tendencies or stereotypes. Such stereotypes are well known: traditional cultures do not fit modernity’s understanding of temporality, grounded in history, revolution, and event; modernity is determined by the exchange of the old and the new, whereas traditional non-Western cultures rely on transhistorical stillness and permanence without past and future. 

In his seminal work Exhausting Dance, André Lepecki equates the temporality of modernity with the colonial mentality. He characterises the temporal paradigm of Western dance and music as the constant pursuit of the lost present moment. Lepecki’s main point is that the choreographed and composed temporality of dance (and consequently of the music of modernity) relies on the “now”’s eventuality passing away: choreography of modernity stages the grievance over the eluding moment, over the loss of the present. The spell of the kinetic in the performing arts, their motility and chase of fleeting beauty as modernity’s frame, arises precisely from the pursuit of the lost object or moment.¹

This is why the body in the performing arts—choreography, theater, music—has to be artificial, “architectured,” and disciplined. It should attain “impossible” skills in the performing arts’ paradigms of modernity, since it has to perfectly fit the pursuit of the ideal and irretrievable “now” in each moment that this “now” passes by. In this case, we are dealing with a sequence of utmost moments rather than a becoming of the present. Instead of the colonial model of “classical” modernity, Lepecki advocates for an expanded anti-kinetic durational present without past and future, without the fleeting moment of the “now,” which presupposes a return to stillness and the natural duration of an organism. In short, body and temporality should not be structured; a body should inhabit space and loosely exist in time rather than aspire to reaching a yet unattained goal.

A similar distinction between the temporality of the event and that of stillness is made by Theodor W. Adorno in his Philosophy of New Music—with the only difference that his preferences are the other way around.² In Adorno’s study of new music, one of the types of temporality evolves as a revolutionised articulation of the event and its pursuit, as a resistance against the stillness of ontological duration. Such an approach is embodied by Arnold Schoenberg and the New Viennese School. Another approach is traditionalist counterrevolutionary temporality, as exemplified by Igor Stravinsky and featured in the folk music of all nations, as Adorno assumes. The reason he сhooses Schoenberg over Stravinsky is that the latter relies on traditionalist pattern-based paradigms of composition, evading the developmental approach to time. Because of that, many theorists have concluded that Adorno’s stance is elitist and Eurocentric. 

Adorno’s disregard of folk music does not depend on location. He prefers the “revolutionary” type of temporality because it is characterised by the choice of an idea and its dialectical development in a composition: the musical material itself (its textural parameters) forms an articulate logic, reflects on its own form and thereby surpasses a mere horizontal passage of time. In this musical paradigm, a piece transcends the chronic pace of time, which is its mere adornment and accompaniment, and its organisation becomes a speculation on itself. 

Thus, Adorno does not criticise folklore as such, but the inability of music to reflect on itself.³ However, such a reflection is not necessarily confined to a composing subject, as he erroneously assumes. It can often be ingeniously generated by an ensemble in a performance, as is often the case in the ethnic and folk music of any region, be it in the East, South, or West. What is meant is the speculation on the development of musical form, which is inscribed in the musical material by the composer and becomes immanent to it. 

Adorno clearly overlooks (allegedly due to insufficient knowledge of non-Western musical traditions) that forming an idea with musical material is not confined to professionally composed music. Folk music actually contains both paradigms he outlines: the one that presupposes stillness (traditional), as well as the one that features resistance, development, and tragic or ecstatic climaxes (revolutionary).

Much in the same way, what Lepecki criticises as the temporality of modernity—pursuit of the event, of the lost moment, or of the precious object, and the intensification of this pursuit in the excessive forms of performative repetition—already characterised ancient Greek tragedy and the myths it was based on. And it occurred well before European modernity. Indeed, modern European music rests upon the establishment of the harmonic minor scale for the opera, which was chosen for its raised seventh and served to represent grief and mourning. 

The structural logic of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music had to express the loss of a beloved person—its paradigmatic plot being the myth of Orpheus. Unlike the monotonous, circular form of medieval music, music since the early Baroque (1600) and up to 1910 took on a developing form, leading to a culmination. The Baroque opera adopted the intensity of ancient Greek tragedy. 

Yet, the use of a special scale to express pain or grief can easily be found in indigenous vocal music, too. Modern music had to invent its own tonality, different from that of ancient Greek tragedy, as the latter’s musical components did not survive and could be reconstructed only approximately. 

This is to dispute Lepecki’s dismissal of the pursuit of the lost moment in dance and music, which he predominantly ascribes to modernity: even when music did not rely on the keys traditionally used for mourning—be it the ancient Locrian scale, employed in tragedy, or the harmonic minor of European modernity—it could still articulate grief with its own tonal means, specifically molded for that purpose, and shift away from chronic, static temporality. The desire to express grief and the search for its musical and tonal articulation is thus not confined to a particular location. 

In his study of “the rhythm of cultural dynamics” in Europe, Alexander Dobrokhotov shows that certain cultural qualities of modern time—which we predominantly ascribe to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—can be traced to other periods and landscapes as well, since they share certain attitudes to sociality, tradition, novelties, beliefs, or habits.⁴

For example, the signs of the Enlightenment usually associated with the eighteenth century can be discovered at the end of the fifth century BC in the Middle Eastern or Caucasian literary canons. Likewise, the early twentieth century avant-garde, with its rejection of classical forms as well as its denial of mimesis and figurative realism, has analogies in the first to third centuries (early Christianity). We see here that the decision in favor of modernity or countermodernity is determined by a desire to overcome a certain stability of social and cultural forms (in the case of modernising movements) or, on the contrary, to preserve those stabilising components. 

This is to say that a revolutionary gesture suspending a tradition (or a custom) can be performed anytime and anywhere; such a gesture subsists in the denial of religious idols and habits or in the reluctance to comply with the ruling authorities. Hence, a striving toward a modernisation that leaps out of the temporalities of permanence and stability might as well be discovered in indigenous, non-Western, or ancient cultures. 

Conversely, the ritualistic attitude to social life practiced in ancient, theocratic, or indigenous societies is no less prevalent in contemporary business models or new forms of vectoral capitalism⁵ than in clerical and fundamentalist communities. An exchange between the adherence to outdated customs and regulations and the abrupt choice of a novelty can be encountered in various parts of the world as well as various epochs and societies. In any social or cultural experience, there is something that replaces the status quo and something that remains intact. At times, what supersedes the tradition might be more emancipatory than what stays the same.

To Borrow from Empire

Thus, the concept of modernity acquires historical and geopolitical relativity, whereas the concept of culture, usually associated with a particular identity or period, reveals its nomadism. A good example of cultural nomadism is the so-called Graeco-Arabic translation movement, which emerged in the eighth century in the Islamic Golden Age, during the Abbasid period (750–1258). It initially developed as an echo of Hellenism but later became an autonomous Arabic humanities school. Eventually, it expanded the zone of secular intellectual creativity in the Islamic world and considerably influenced the Christian countries, which had limited opportunities to circulate ancient Greek texts because of clerical regulations.The center of the movement was the House of Wisdom—a library established in Baghdad at the end of the eighth century, gathering translators of both Muslim and Christian denominations and initiating translations from Greek, Persian, and Sanskrit. Among the conspicuous representatives of the movement were Hunayn (808-873), his son Ishaq Ibn Hunayn, his nephew Hubaysh Ibn al-Hasan al-A’sam, and colleague Isa Ibn Uahya. 

It should be noted that some texts by Aristotle, Plato, as well as Plotinus and other Neoplatonists only became accessible in the Caucasus—Georgia in particular—because of these Arabic translations. The Byzantine clerical culture of the time was not interested in the proliferation of pre-Christian thought. Moreover, it is through the Arabic and Persian poetry written between the nineteenth and twelfth centuries that Neoplatonism influenced the emergence of the poetry of courtly love in medieval Europe (Languedoc). The same goes for the Georgian poetic tradition, located at the crossroads between West, South, and East. Georgia’s main literary monument of the twelfth century, Shota Rustaveli’s Knight in the Panther’s Skin, would be unimaginable without that influence. 

Even more remarkable is the impact of Arabic-Islamic philosophy and Arabic poetry on the motifs and imagery of late medieval and early Renaissance Italian and French poetry. As Samar Attar emphasises, Francis Petrarch, Guido Cavalcanti, and even Dante would not have been able to develop the theme of venerating a lady associated with divinity without “borrowing from the Arabic and Islamic sources.”⁶ Dante and Cavalcanti studied under Brunetto Latini, who was quite familiar with Arabic and Islamic works. The adoration of a woman, which was a blasphemy in medieval Europe, came from Arabic poetry and Sufism (for example, Ibn Arabi). As Attar confirms, “the idea that a beloved woman can be the manifestation of divinity or the emanation of God was acceptable among the Arabs much earlier before the thirteenth century.”⁷ In the Arabic tradition, there was no conflict between human and divine love. The metaphysical dimension of corporeal love also appeared in this context because of translations of ancient Greek Platonic and Neoplatonic texts.

It is probably impossible to find a region that was able to evade the impact of neighboring societies and cultures in the history of humankind. Such an impact might often have the character of an assault or conquest. There are many cases where a colonial state dominates a foreign culture, erasing local languages and customs. But cultural influence might as well be caused by the voluntary aspiration to exceed one’s local limitations and study other modes of production and creativity to learn or even borrow from how others live, produce, and interact. 

Both the Byzantine Empire and the Arab Caliphate subjugated Georgia—a small, less influential country—in various ways. From the middle of the eighth century, Georgia was part of the caliphate for almost two centuries (in Georgian history, this period is known as the Araboba). The capital Tbilisi was part of an emirate for even longer, until 1122, after David IV “the Builder” won the Battle of Didgori against the Seljuqs in 1121 and reintegrated the city into Georgia, making it the royal seat. 

These examples crystallise two seldom discussed issues: inevitable cultural nomadism and voluntary borrowing from a colonising culture. My question here is: Does the colonial pressure Georgia experienced from the Byzantine Empire and the Arab Caliphate cancel the cultural and humanitarian impact Arabic and Greek philosophy and literature might have had on Georgian poetry and thought? Should we give culture, poetry, and thought a space that preserves their epistemological autonomy and aesthetic achievement without completely identifying them with the colonising state in which they emerged? 

Maybe culture and thought function in a dimension that—following Chantal Mouffe’s distinction between the ontics of real politics and theontology of the emancipatory political horizon⁸—cannot be completely instrumentalised but maintains their emancipatory potential ontologically, culturally, and epistemologically?

Culture Beyond Territories and Geopolitics

In his Poetics of Relation, Martinican anti-colonial thinker and poet Éduard Glissant provides an excellent formula for the cohabitation of cultures: he suggests that the opacity of another culture, or of the other, is not an obstacle for creating a relation and common fabric out of the difference between them. Togetherness does not contradict distinction. “To feel in solidarity with this other or to build with him or to like what he does, it is not necessary for me to grasp him . . . nor to ‘make’ him in my image.” At the same time, opacity “is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. . . . The right to opacity would not establish autism; it would be the real foundation of Relation, in freedoms,” writes Glissant.⁹

If he still preserves the self as the unit of the cultural landscape—albeit as an opaque one—Vladimir S. Bibler goes even further and argues that culture in its episteme and inception is a dialogue: it cannot profess any authentic identity by definition.¹⁰ Moreover, the dialogue with the other is inevitable, as one has no credible identity even within oneself, and hence even with oneself one enters into a dialogue in the role of the other. 

In the associative logic of cultural phenomena, Bibler argues, facts or figures belonging to different periods, regions, or landscapes communicate with each other simultaneously. Their connection is dialogical: Hegel communicates with Sophocles, Dante with Ibn Arabi, Rustaveli with Ferdowsi, Sergei Parajanov with Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky and Sayat-Nova, Andrei Tarkovsky with Pieter Bruegel and Johann Sebastian Bach, Akira Kurosawa with Fyodor Dostoevsky. Culture exceeds ethnography, geography, and folklore. 

This dialogue, however, is not a regular conversation. As Bibler contends, it is held not merely between contemporaries but with a potential interlocutor “in such a way that s/he should be able to perceive me—even when I disappear from this potential interlocutor’s momentary horizon (leave the room, go to another ‘polis,’ pass away from life). So that the potential interlocutor would perceive ‘me’ as if from another, infinitely distant world.”¹¹ This means that, potentially, “I” will be speaking after my death, that is, I might need to speak with others of other times and places—from another time, century, landscape, or language. Every culture, therefore, is a kind of “two-faced Janus.” “Its face is as intensely turned toward another culture, toward its existence in other worlds, as it is directed into the depths of itself, in an effort to change and complete its being.”¹² In such an interpretation, the destiny of a culture is to exist outside its own territory and address another existence. 

In Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975), the protagonist remembers standing in a snow-covered landscape as a schoolboy and looking down a hill where other children are skating and tobogganing. The image explicitly refers to Bruegel the Elder’s Winter Landscapes. A viewer who has seen these paintings immediately grasps the cultural and poetic association. However, this oblique quotation is not meant to merely demonstrate the landscape’s affinity with famous artworks. It is used because there is something in Bruegel’s art that exceeds chronic time and place, so that the quoted paintings serve as an imaginary satellite of anyone’s reminiscence about winter or childhood.

This supplementary cultural association allows Tarkovsky to elevate an everyday moment into the realm of the eternal. Moreover, such references emphasise the existential dimension of daily experience, common to many, beyond one’s lifespan and geographic location. The example perfectly illustrates Bibler’s metaphor of culture as Janus-faced. Bruegel’s painting has its own specific origin, its site of belonging and peculiar features, but is at the same time open for an encounter with whomever discovers it as an existential event, quite like discovering a message in a bottle in the middle of the sea.

An earlier version of this text was published in steirischer herbst ’24 – Horror Patriae: The Return of Toxic Nationhood, Hatje Cantz, Berlin 2025.

Footnotes

1. André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement, New York: Routledge, 2006, pp. 123–25. ↑

2. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. ↑

3. Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York: Continuum, 1988. ↑

4. Alexander Dobrokhotov, Filosofiya kultury: uchebnik dlya vuzov, Moscow: Higher School of Economics, 2016, pp. 363–85. ↑

5. McKenzie Wark, “The Vectoralist Class,” E-flux # 65, May 2015, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/65/336347/the-vectoralist-class/. ↑

6. Samar Attar, “Divided Mediterranean, Divided World: The Influence of Arabic on Medieval Italian Poetry,” Arab Studies Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2018): pp. 197–212, here p. 203. ↑

7. Ibid. ↑

8. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political, Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. ↑

9. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010, pp. 193, 190. ↑

10. Vladimir S. Bibler, Ot naukoucheniya—k logike kul’tury: Dva filosofskikh vvedeniya v dvadtsat’ pervyy vek, Moscow: Politizdat, 1991, p. 288. ↑

11. Ibid. ↑

12. Ibid. ↑