Among the most compelling issues within the various attempts to define modernity involves placing it within a temporal framework by linking it to specific events within history to illustrate modernity as an distinct epoch. The debate surrounds locating the origin point of modernity, which in turn, shaped the character and nature of its meaning. Some question this temporal component by constructing modernity as a process of economic and technological conditions rather than a specific point in time attacks this logic. However, these seemingly competing conceptions of modernity seem to feed into a similar understanding of the modern that suggests modernity is not merely an epoch, but a new system of cultural understanding that resulted from …show more content…
More to the point, Singer’s categories represent shifts in the way society addressed the physical and social environment through cultural apparatus, facilitated by advances in technology and philosophy. These themes amount to a structure of modernity, or a set of conditions that constitute a new conceptual lens to view human activity. While they remain connected to the history of the west as a source of examples, the themes are not necessarily fixed in time, depicting modernity not as a historical age, but as a developmental stage that happened to be reached by the west in the last 200 years. Indeed, while the event and developments depicted in Singer’s themes happened in a certain time in western history, they do not preclude those events being replayed at a later time. Singer’s work presents modernity outside the temporal perimeters established in the earlier works he cites, but as an absolute set of conditions. In Singer’s argument, the modern moment depicted by Kern and others is not identified in a specific event or series of events that epitomized a confluence of cultural and intellectual change, but rather a outline of conditions that constitute “modern” from “pre-modern” in the same way that one can determine …show more content…
Held’s attention to this connection brings about the question of whether modernity and capitalism are mutually dependent. Both concepts have problematic temporal origins historiographically speaking, but each seems to emerge as a topic in western thought by the 19th century. Karl Marx’s ideas on consumer society, and the act of consumption itself alludes to a new and unique characteristic of social interaction linked to the changes in economic and social structure during the first half of the 19th century. Marx’s critique of capitalism in The Grundrisse could easily be transposed to an analysis of the proliferation of modernity. In an abstract sense, Marx’s relationship between production and consumption is analogous to the connection between capitalism and modernity. Marx writes “No production without a need. But consumption reproduces the need.” Modernity could not exist without a specific set of condition in place, as outlined successfully by Singer. Capitalism functions to “reproduce” modernity, altering the perspective of the consumer, shifting from “need” to “want.” Simply put, the methodology of capitalism allowed for the process of modernity to take hold in the west, and the ideology of capitalism allowed for a stark transformation of values that must be seen