Ultraviolet Futures: A Critique of Progress

Abstract

Modernity is both a subjective concept and an objective historical social formation. It is both the object of study for sociology and its condition of possibility. This coextensive relationship effectively reduces prescriptive accounts of what exceeds the constitutive antagonisms of modernity to descriptive explanations of the modern experience. Sociology cannot understand social and historical change beyond the terms of the reproduction of modernity. This thesis pinpoints this recursive, temporal feedback loop as an effect of the specific temporality of the structure of modernity. The argument of this thesis addresses the dynamics of this contradiction across four central chapters. In the first chapter, I define and explain modernity through a reconstruction of a critical exchange between three central interlocutors. This exchange identifies the self-referentiality of modernity as attributable to the specifics of its temporality and demonstrates how these dynamics circumvent modernity’s supersession. Secondly, I identify the social form of time in capitalist modernity as socially necessary labour-time. I examine how this social form appears in modernity through the transformation of historical time and as the real abstraction of mechanical clock-time. The transformation of the temporality of modernity provides the condition of possibility for the modern paradigm of progress. The third chapter critiques progress through the work of Walter Benjamin and critically examines his attempts to retemporalize modernity through messianic concepts and the dialectical image. The last chapter further develops the antinomies of progress and reveals how these antinomies mask the underlying social contradiction of progress. This clears the terrain and reevaluates the critical potential of what appears as anachronistic in modernity and to reinterpret modernity as comprised of multiple non-contemporaneous temporalities.