New Left Review I/192, March-April 1992

Peter Osborne

Modernity is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and sensation of Time.

Charles Baudelaire

Few thickets are more tangled than that in which the idea of modernity has become enmeshed, few topics less likely to inspire confidence than the question of its relations to the ‘postmodern’. Not least of the problems concerns the character and status of the concept of modernity itself. For it is far from clear that the main figures in recent debates have been writing about, and disputing, the same set of issues when the term has been used. This is of course, in one sense, precisely the point: it is the meaning of ‘modernity’ that is in dispute, and the argument is hardly just terminological. Nonetheless, there remains considerable scope for reflection about what kind of concept ‘modernity’ is, and in particular for a more systematic consideration of the relations between its various uses. What follows is offered as a preliminary contribution to this task. [*] An earlier version of this essay was presented to a symposium on ‘Postmodernism and the Re-reading of Modernity’ at the University of Essex in July 1990. A slightly different version will appear along with other contributions to the symposium in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iverson, eds., Postmodernism and the Rereading of Modernity, Manchester University Press, Manchester 1992. My title, ‘Modernity is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category’, is taken from Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott, London 1978, p. 218.

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