Fetishism Of Modernity Analysis

The first chapter of Fetishism of Modernities by Bernard Yack is, in essence, an exercise in the process of lumping and splitting discussed by Eviatar Zerubavel in Lumping and Splitting: Notes on Social Classification. In his writing, Yack strives to come up with a way of defining the concept of modernity so that he can explore it further in his book. In the first chapter, Yack uses lumping and splitting to help define the complex idea of modernity and to outline a way to determine if things or ideas can be grouped with those things modern.
Yack begins by wrestling with how language can make the understanding of the concept of modernity problematic. Zerubavel states that language is what “helps us carve out experiential continua discrete categories,”

Yack defines it as “focusing our attention on what it means to live with the consequences of distinctly modern ideas and practices” (Yack 1997:26). This definition of the modern age doesn’t have the clear starting point of the temporal definition, but it gives a sense of the importance of the types of ideas and practices that make the modern age important.
These definitions of the modern age are also problematic, as was the term modernity. For while the modern age may be delineated as occurring after a specific date, not all things that happen after that date are substantively modern. Equally, not all things considered substantively modern necessarily take place after that date. As Yack succinctly puts it “the two ways of conceptualizing the modern age do not logically entail each other.”
While the temporal substantive definitions of the modern age could be used as a sort of ideal type, “neither the temporal not the substantive conceptions portray the modern age as an integrated and coherent whole” (Yack 1997:29). So how then can we define things that are modern? The temporal answer again is easier to come by, “the modern is whatever is new, that is, anything that develops after the disruption of historical continuity that marks the beginning of the modern age” (Yack 1997:30). So, in the temporal sense something that is modern is something that has developed after whatever date is chosen as the beginning of the modern age.

Yack then identifies four categories in which the qualities of modernity can be described. These categories are the philosophic, sociological, political and aesthetic aspects of modernity. Using these categories Yack identifies qualities that can be associated with the subjective definition of modernity: philosophically it includes ways of thought that “break with tradition and received authority” (Yack 1997:32), sociologically it involves “new forms of association created by capitalism and industrial society and the break with traditional authorities and customs” (Yack 1997:33), politically “the replacement of religious and aristocratic political hierarchies with more egalitarian and democratic forms” (Yack 1997:33) is incorporated, and aesthetically includes styles which identify with the “constantly shifting conditions of modern existence, rather than in eternal forms” (Yack