Abstract

Whilst presenting a number of features that have been put forward to characterize modernity as a way of life and a social system, this entry suggests a dissident genealogy that reveals a hidden history of continuities and alternatives. It thereby problematizes the norms about periodization and the assumptions about the elaboration of a logos that underlie the concept of the modern. This approach to modernity as a complex of processes, institutions, subjectivities, and technologies challenges the more familiar history of linear temporalities and progressive transformations. The fruitfulness of seeing modernity, as much as other historical periods, as hybrid assemblages in a state of flux is that it draws attention to the heterogeneity and processual nature of cultures and feeds into the possibility of the critique of the present.