Fragments of Modernity

Author: (English) Frisby
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-12-01
Features: In recent years in China, we have repeatedly encountered modernity, experiencing deeply over and over again: the yearning for progress, the back and forth between advancement and regression, radicalism and conservatism, passion and disappointment, idealism and reality. These conflicting experiences have shaped our understanding and judgment of modernity. Modernity, from the West to the East, from the modern era to the contemporary, is an open concept of "family resemblance," serving as a focal point of contradictions and conflicts across political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of the modern process. This book primarily discusses the modernity thought and methods of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin. The author argues that unlike scholars such as Habermas and Weber, who attempt to construct all-encompassing abstract theories of modernity, the three scholars' research on modernity begins by deciphering the mysteries of fragmented modernity: the "fragment of the real contingency" revealed in Simmel's Philosophy of Money, and the "trivial surface phenomena" or "monadology" expressed in Kracauer's Mass Ornament and White Collar Worker, all redeeming the subtle traces of modernity at the level of the everyday world. The book is innovative in content, with delicate writing, making it an excellent work that interprets modernity from aesthetic, political, or historical perspectives.