Transmodernity

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Transmodernity


Rosa María Rodríguez Magda

In her 1989 essay La sonrisa de Saturno. Hacia una teoría transmoderna, Spanish philosopher and feminist Rosa María Rodríguez Magda examines Transmodernity as a philosophical concept. According to Rodríguez Magda transmodernity prolongs, continues and transcends Modernity. It is the return of some of its lines and ideas, perhaps even the most ingenuous but also the most universal. Hegelianism, utopian socialism, Marxism, the philosophies of suspicion and critical schools showed this ingeniousness. After the crisis in these trends, we look further back to the illustrated project as a general, looser framework in which to choose the present. But this is a remote, ironic return that accepts that it is a useful fiction. Transmodernity is the return, the copy, the survival of a weak, ‘light’ Modernity. The contemporary area that is criss-crossed by all trends, memories, possibilities. It is both transcendental and apparential, and is voluntarily syncretic in its ‘multichrony’. Transmodernity is a fiction: our reality, the copy that supplants the model, eclecticism both mean and angelical. Transmodernity is postmodernity without its innocent rupturism, the museum display of reason, not forgetting history which has died to avoid ending up in barbaric cybernetic or mass media domestication. It is proposing values as stops or as fables, but without forgetting, because we are wise, because our past was wise. Transmodernity takes up and recovers the vanguards, copying and selling them, but meanwhile it remembers that art has had, and has, an effect of denunciation and experimentalism, that is, not everything goes. It breaks down the distance between elitism and mass culture and reveals the connections between them. Transmodernity is image, series, baroque fugue and self-reference, catastrophe, loop, fractal and inane reiteration, the entropy of what is obese, the clumsy inflation of data, the aesthetic of what is full and of what has disappeared, entropic, fatal. The key to it is not what comes after, the rupture, but the trans-substantiation and overlapping of paradigms. The worlds that penetrate each other and end up as soap bubbles or as images on a screen. Transmodernity is not a desire or a goal. It is just there, like a complex, random, imposed strategic situation. It is neither good nor bad, beneficial nor unbearable… and it is all of these things together… It is the abandonment of representation, it is the reign of simulation, of simulation that knows it is real

Transmodernity, as an open stage and the designation of our present, goes beyond a random denomination and aims to cover the inheritance of the challenges of Modernity after the collapse of the illustrated project. If we do not renounce Theory, History, Social Justice and the autonomy of the Subject, accepting post-modern criticism, we are limiting the possible horizon for reflection getting away from nihilism without committing ourselves to outdated projects but not forgetting them. Accepting pragmatism as a basis does not mean we have to deny that human action is guided by regulatory ideals that are the basis for argument and rationality. But these regulatory ideals which, after modernity, refused to be based on theology or metaphysics, can still not, after post-modern criticism, be legitimised by the illustrated project. We have weakened their gnoseological vigour but not the logical and social need for them, and this gives us the notion of pragmatism. Such regulatory ideals represent operational simulations legitimised by rational perfectibility, which criticism and consensus constantly renew, non-universal but universalisable public values which find their sphere not in intuition, common sense or tradition but in the theoretical effort to create conceptual paradigms that will help increase social and individual wellbeing. We are therefore talking about social transformation, the transcendence of mere practical management, of compromise, of lines of questioning that cross through rational enquiry, changing and being changed.

A discourse-centred reading

From a discursive perspective, transmodernity figures as the symbolic context within which, in the last decades, new formulations of selfhood and community have emerged that challenge consolidated representations of the world. In this regard, it stands as the discursive condition under which modernity experiences a sense of crisis as the result of a higher degree of sophistication. Spatial displacement, virtuality and fragmentation intensify an over-development of modern binaries to a critical point of disruption, where modern conceptions of space and subjectivity fade.[1]

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