World-System and "Trans"-Modernity

In this short text I begin anew a reflection that has concernedme since the beginning of the 1960s. I will radicalize some theoretical options by finding in recent scholarship very plausible hypotheses that have until now been regarded as trivial. Understanding the “centrality” of Europe as just two centuries old allows us to suppose that what has not been subsumed by modernity stands a good chance of emerging strongly and being rediscovered not as an antihistorical miracle, but as the resurgence of a recent potentiality in many of the cultures blinded by the dazzling “brightness”—in many cases only apparent—of Western culture and modernity. This modernity’s technical and economic globality is far from being a cultural globalization of everyday life that valorizes the majority of humanity. From this omitted potentiality and altering “exteriority” emerges a project of “trans”-modernity, a “beyond” that transcends Western modernity (since the West has never adopted it but, rather, has scorned it and valued it as “nothing”) and that will have a creative function of great significance in the twenty-first century. To repeat: the thesis advanced in this essay is that modernity’s recent impact on the planet’s multiple cultures (Chinese, Southeast Asian, Hindu, Islamic, Bantu, Latin American) produced a varied “reply” by all of them to the modern “challenge.” Renewed, they are now erupting on a cultural horizon “beyond” modernity. I call the reality of that fertile multicultural moment “trans”-modernity (since “post”-modernity is just the latest moment ofWesternmodernity). China, a privileged but not exclusive example, shows us just how recent a phenomenon European hegemony is, only two centuries old and only beginning to influence the intimacy of non-European everyday life in the last fifty years (since World War II), principally because of the mass media, especially television.1