Jean Baudrillard's Theory Of Modernity

The term “Modern” is related to a range of periods, in which it describes the progress of the society at different wide levels, like: nation state, industrialization, proliferation of mass media and increasing the role of science and technology… The western world is using lately the term “modern era” to mark a period in the western civilization history that came after the medieval era, in addition to the Middle Ages reference. Scientists, and others, refer modernity to modern architecture, art, literature, technology, and science. There are no scholars that would agree on a single date represents the beginning of modernity. Even there is disagreement on a wider range about the modern era, whether it ended or it is ending. However, scientists

Jean Baudrillard is a scholar that studied modernity too. He defined modernity as a characteristic mode of civilization, which opposes itself to tradition, that is to say, to all other anterior or traditional cultures: confronting the geographic and symbolic diversity of the latter, modernity imposes itself throughout the world as a homogeneous unity, irradiating from the Occident. Since Baudrillard said that modernity is neither a political concept, nor a historical concept, nor exactly a sociological concept. Nevertheless, modernity remains a confused notion, in which it connotes any change of mentality and historical evolution. He continues, modernity is not an analytic concept, so it has no laws since modernity has only traits. Modernity has no theory of it too, it has only a logic of an ideology and modernity. By making a link to a structural and historical crisis, we can consider modernity as a symptom of it. Modernity expresses crisis in a mysterious fashion since it does not play any role in analyzing this crisis. It acts as a principal ideology and ideational force that sublimate the history contradictions in the civilization effects. It transforms crisis into a value, a moral contradiction. Thus, by considering an idea of recognizing all the civilization itself, modernity assumes a thereby surreptitiously rejoins tradition and regulatory cultural

The network of media, organizations, and institutions are drawing increasingly the individual, which give rise to the individual abstraction, modern alienation, loss of identity in leisure and work, incommunicability, etc., which intended to compensate through signs and objects of a whole system of personalization.

Modernity and Time

Modern temporality is specific, in all its dimensions.

The chronometric dimension: the time that is measured, in which one measures others activities; as that which marks the division of social life and labor, this abstract time is substituted for the rhythms of celebration and work, and belongs to the imperative of productivity.

The linear dimension: “modern” time develops according to a past, present, future line, by referring to an expected origin and end, and it is no longer cyclical. Modernity seems centered on the future, tradition on the past. In fact, at the same time that modernity projects a future, it projects a past, according to a proper dialectic to it.

The historic dimension: history has become the modernity dominant instance. At the same time as transcendent allows its final accomplishment glimpse and as the real becoming of society.

Tradition and Modernity in Third World Societies

Destruction