Transmodernity
"Transmodernity" is a philosophical concept coined by the Spanish philosopher and feminist Rosa María Rodríguez Magda in 1989 in her essay La sonrisa de Saturno: Hacia una teoría transmoderna.
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. 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 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. Transmodernity is not a desire or a goal, but a transition. It is just there, like a complex, random, imposed strategic situation.
Transmodernity, as an open stage and the designation of our present, goes beyond denomination and aims to cover the inheritance of the challenges of Modernity after the collapse of the illustrated project. 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. But, at the same time, transmodernity is a historical period in wich the social, cultural, political and economical crisis leads to a search for the roots. Beying so, many coespecimens of this period are looking back to some spirituality. 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 efforts 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]
See also
References
- ↑
- Mura, Andrea (2012). "The Symbolic Function of Transmodernity" (PDF). Language and Psychoanalysis 1 (Autumn/Winter): 68–87. doi:10.7565/landp.2012.0005.