How should we understand the shaping forces of modernity?

Chair: Isaac Ariail Reed

The last five hundred years of human history transformed the globe, introducing humanity to a new epoch via transitions to modernity. Sweeping changes in economic, social, technological, political and cultural life have created unprecedented autonomy and capacity, and yet also unprecedented forms of depredation and dehumanization. As modernity continues to evolve, not only do ideas and economic and political structures change, but so do behaviors, relationships, and ways of thinking.

Culture, and cultural perspectives on modernity, are both essential to the collective self-understandings of polities such as the United States. Yet, at the same time, the cultural presuppositions of certain aspects of modernity itself—which encourages intellectuals to reduce culture to class and to power—can disable in-depth analysis. Whether considering the place, role, and significance of religion in modern social life, examining the great joys and tense difficulties of pluralism in culture and politics, or examining how the sinews of global politics and economics are inflected by culture, the Colloquy on Theory, Culture, and Late Modernity is motivated by the deep sense that, first, theoretical debate at the deepest and most contentious levels is necessary for a healthy human sciences, and second, that the project of understanding the modern condition is deeply incomplete. Whether one thinks that the current age is postmodern, late modern, or the culmination of modernity, the urgency to do serious interdisciplinary philosophy, literary analysis, and social science has never been greater: modernity may be in crisis, but do we fully know what it is yet?