Visions of Transmodernity

* Article: Visions of Transmodernity: A New Renaissance of our Human History? By Irena Ateljevic.

URL = http://www.integral-review.org/issues/vol_9_no_2_ateljevic_visions_of_transmodernity.pdf?

Abstract

"In this paper I will engage with a broad range of literature that provides us with many signals and evidence of an emerging and significant paradigm shift in human evolution. In doing so, I will offer the concept of transmodernity as an umbrella term that connotes the emerging socio-cultural, economic, political and philosophical shift. My research across boundaries of many different fields such as critical economics, philosophy, subaltern and postcolonial studies, social anthropology and psychology, cultural studies, political science and social activism literature will illustrate how an integrated approach and dialogue is urgently needed, indeed more than ever before. Different authors use a variety of terms to capture what can essentially be described as the synchronised phenomenon of emerging higher collective consciousness— transmodernity paradigm (Ghisi); transmodern philosophy of political liberation (Dussel); Hegelian dialectical triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis (Magda); the reflective/livingsystems paradigm (Elgin); the partnership model of caring economics (Eisler); the relational global consciousness of biosphere politics (Rifkin); love ethics (hooks); the circularity paradigm of interdependence (Steinem). With a reference to a variety of authors I will argue that the reason we do not hear much about this movement is because it is not centralised and coordinated under a single unifying name. 'Transmodernity' ropes together many concepts/tenets of other writings that do not necessarily use the same term, but I chose it in order to communicate the overall idea of the emerging paradigm shift as the next cultural and material development in human history. I have opted to use the concept as a medium to convey humanity's unified synchronicity, which is part of a transformation that can be claimed to be 'the new renaissance' of human history."

(http://www.integral-review.org/issues/vol_9_no_2_ateljevic_visions_of_transmodernity.pdf?)

Excerpts

The Transmodernity Paradigm of M.L. Ghisi

Irena Ateljevic:

"The concept of transmodernity is a very complex thesis which Ghisi (1999, 2006, 2008) primarily explains as a new paradigm of the world which communicates certain underlying values that humans rely on to make their judgments and decisions in all areas of their activities — economy, politics and everyday life.

Ghisi begins his thesis with an overview of five levels of change, which he describes through an iceberg metaphor of human global (un)consciousness and (un)awareness. Like the submerged parts of an iceberg floating in the sea, Ghisi’s lower levels of societal change are the least visible to humanity.

• So, the first level is at the darkest and coldest bottom where our global civilization finds itself today, at the edge of unsustainability and what Ghisi describes as the slow death and collective suicide of humanity.

• The next higher level relates to the death of command, control and conquest patriarchal values which have turned the world into a competitive and territorial battleground.

• Level three refers to the death of modernity as a dominant paradigm through which we see the world as an objective reality rooted in impartial truth.

• Level four refers to the death of the industrial type of businesses and decline of the material economy,

• while level five concerns the overall crisis of overly bureaucratic and pyramidal institutions.

While such critical deconstruction of Eurocentric thesis of modernity (based around key mantras of growth, progress and competition) is nothing new and has been very much part of the postmodern critical turn in social science and humanities since late 1980s, Ghisi continues to explain, a transmodern way of thinking is now emerging, as our hope for a desperately needed and newly reconstructed vision. It is claimed that the everything goes of the postmodernists needs to go silenced. Whether they like it or not, there are things that have to have value, there is meaning that must be preserved, otherwise we drown in the coarsest cynicism, an expression of deep disdain for life (Boff, 2009). After the endless postmodern (albeit necessary) deconstructions of modernity in which many intellectuals engaged for the last few decades have led us to eclectic relativity and fundamentalisms that in many ways has paralysed us to claim any possible way forward.

The postmodern rubble in which we have found ourselves is quite neatly captured by Rifkin (2005):

- If post-modernists razed the ideological walls of modernity and freed the prisoners, they left them with no particular place to go. We became existential nomads, wandering through a boundaryless world full of inchoate longings in a desperate search for something to be attached to and believe in. While the human spirit was freed up from old categories of thought, we are each forced to find our own paths in a chaotic and fragmented world that is even more dangerous than the all-encompassing one we left behind. (p. 5).

According to Ghisi then, the very concept of transmodern implies that the best of modernity is kept while at the same time we go beyond it. As such, it is not a linear projection which takes us from (pre)modernity via postmodernity to transmodernity; rather, it transcends modernity in that it takes us trans, i.e. through, modernity into another state of being, “from the edge of chaos into a new order of society” (Sardar, 2004, p. 2)."

(https://integral-review.org/issues/vol_9_no_2_ateljevic_visions_of_transmodernity.pdf)

The Transmodern Dialectic Triad of R.M.R. Magda

Irena Ateljevic:

"Magda ... uses Hegelian logic whereby Modernity, Postmodernity and Transmodernity form a dialectic triad that completes a process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. As expressed in her own words: “the third tends to preserve the defining impetus of the first yet is devoid of its underlying base: by integrating its negation the third moment reaches a type of specular closure” (Magda, 1989, p. 13). In other words, transmodernity is critical of modernity and postmodernity while at the same time drawing elements from each. In a way it is a return to some form of absolute logic that goes beyond the Western ideology and tries to connect the human race to a new shared story, which can be called a global relational consciousness (Rifkin, 2005). "

(https://integral-review.org/issues/vol_9_no_2_ateljevic_visions_of_transmodernity.pdf)

Jeremy Rifkin on Global Relational Consciousness

Irena Ateljevic:

"In his work, Rifkin (2005) also draws on the psychoanalytical view of the global political economy and its history. He makes reference to Owen Barfield, the British philosopher who views history as an unfolding of human consciousnesses which can be divided in roughly three stages, which dovetail with Freud’s theory of individual mental development (cited in Rifkin, 2005). In the first stage of hunter-gatherer societies, humans had little sense of self and regarded Mother Earth as a primordial mother, treating her with the same love, respect and awe as they might confer on their own tribal mothers (similar to the infant-mother relationship when the infant still feel oneness with her/his Mother).

The beginning of agriculture marked the onset of the second great period of human consciousnesses when humans in their activities of domestication of animals and land slowly began to lose the intimate participation and communion with the natural world. It is comparable to the child/adolescence/adulthood stage of psychoanalysis, when the void left by our own sense of separation from our bodily connection with our own mothers is compensated by endless substitutes - material things, ideologies, unconditional love of God, sex, various addictions - you name it. The unhappiness of the modern era and its status anxieties (de Botton, 2004) become more explicable in light of a statement given by the psychologist Norman Brown (1985, p. 297) and used by Rifkin (2005,): “The more the life of the body passes into things, the less life there is in the body, and at the same time the increasing accumulation of things represents an ever fuller articulation of the lost life of the body” (p. 373). Barfield suggests, however, that we are on the cusp of the third great stage of human consciousness—the stage in which we make a self-aware choice to re-participate with the body of nature. It is this new relational consciousness in which we are increasingly becoming aware of shared risk and vulnerability, and economic, social and environmental interdependencies, which leads to the emergence of process-oriented behaviour and willingness to accept contradicting realities and multicultural perspectives. In many ways, Barfield’s view reaffirms Eisler’s (1987) evolution theory of human development from the ancient, matrifocal times, via the domination system of patriarchy to the emerging partnership model between men and women; nature and humans; mind, body and soul. So, instead of denying our own mortality (so characteristic to the youth’s sense of invincibility), the current era brings about a maturity stage in which we realize that we can’t really begin to live until we accept the inevitability of our own death. But how do we come to terms with our own death and make the choice to live?

Rifkin (2005, p. 374) again provides guidance:

- "[We do it] by making a self-aware decision to leave the death instinct behind, to no longer seek mastery, control, or domination over nature, including human nature, as a means of fending off death. Instead, accept death as part of life and make a choice to re-participate with the body of nature. Cross over from the self to the other, and reunite in an empathetic bond with the totality of relationships that together make up the Earth’s indivisible living community."

(https://integral-review.org/issues/vol_9_no_2_ateljevic_visions_of_transmodernity.pdf)

More information

• Ghisi’s and Dussel’s Positions on Transmodernity Compared