Modernization discourse and its discontents

Abstract

The paper proposes to analyze how the discourse of modernity has been providing for the historical reproduction of capitalist relations of production in the spheres of ideology, politics, science and culture, thereby maintaining the historical continuity of Western imperialism and neo-colonialism in disguised ideological forms. Particular emphasis is put on the historical analysis of the formation of post-WWII modernization discourse in social sciences as a politically grounded project and dominant scientific and cultural paradigm, whose ideological and explanatory matrix provided for the exclusion of the actual, given material relations of socio-economic, cultural and artistic production from the scientific analyses of the real historical processes. Particular importance is given to analysingthe manner in whichthe categories of modernity and modernism were conceptually appropriated by and interpolated within different forms of scientific, cultural and artistic production, in order to reveal the ideological mechanism underlying the processes of reconfiguration of ideologicalpolitical space in post-Yugoslav countries. Hence, the notion of historical revisionism is being taken as the key category underlying the analysis of current historicist interpretations of socialist historical legacy, which are premised on the general reductive presupposition that socialism historically had ensued exclusively from the so-called Western modernity project. By hypostatizing merely the modernist substratum of the entire historical legacy of Yugoslav socialism, the historicist formalism actually fits the current ideological matrix underlying the different forms of the ideological distortion and symbolic appropriation of socialist historical legacy, which we refer to as yet another form of historical revisionism. Moreover, the manner in which the historical phenomenon of Yugoslav antifascist memorials has recently been subjected to reductive formalist interpretations particularly indicatesthe extent to which a modernist-oriented historicism has been effective at converting them into depoliticized objects of revisionist historicization.