Resistance to Modernity: From Germany to China--The Wilderness Academic Series

Author: Shan Shilian
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1998-08-01
Features: This book introduces the German response to modernity, an aesthetic critique of modernity that resists modernity and Chinese thought. Is resisting modernity too avant-garde in China? Common sense and public opinion both harbor such doubts. However, this book, with "resisting modernity" as its theme, is not merely intended to answer this question. The history of thought has long shown that it is precisely the distinction between two concepts of modernity—modernism in the aesthetic or cultural sense—that actually opposes socio-economic-technological modernity, i.e., the entire lifestyle and values of the bourgeoisie. Resisting modernity is the very content of aesthetic or cultural modernism. Resistance, as a corrective, aims to critique and rewrite, rather than to reject non-historically—as Weber said, modern people are compelled to enter the "iron cage" of rationalization—modernity is fundamentally not designed according to human preferences. But the pathologies and crises it reveals indeed call for resistance to achieve self-adjustment and improvement.