This book is Lash's most comprehensive statement in social and cultural theory. It is a book addressed to sociologists and philosophers, to students of urban life, modern languages, cultural studies and the visual arts. Alongside the Enlightenment has emerged another modernity. This second modernity has - in opposition to the Enlightenment rationality of progress, order, homogeneity and cognition - initiated a different rationality of uncertainty, transience, experiment, and the unknowable. This second, this other modernity, is present in notions of 'difference' and 'reflexivity' so central to the contemporary world-view. The logic, however, of such notions can, itself, lead to the same unhappy abstraction of the first modernity. What is forgotten, Scott Lash argues, is the dimension of the ground. This book consists of explorations into this ground: as place, community, belonging, sociality, tradition, life-world; as symbol, sensation, in the tactile character of the sign. The book addresses the other modernity's forgotten ground. The first and second modernities co-existed in a state of irresolvable tension along the history of western industrial capitalism. This is thrown into crisis, Lash argues, with the turn of the twenty-first century emergence of the global information culture. What are the implications of this explosion of first and second modernities into today's technological culture? When the previously existing third space of difference is exploded into the general indifference of information and communication flows? How might we lead our lives in an age in which difference - and indeed the ground itself - become primarily a matter for memory, for mourning?

Scott Lash is Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies and Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He previously taught at Lancaster University for many years. He was a Humboldt Fellow in Berlin between 1988 and 1990. His previous books include The End of Organized Capitalism (co-author, 1987), Sociology of Postmodernism (1990), Modernity and Identity (co-editor, 1992), Economies of Signs and Space (co-author, 1994), Reflexive Modernization (co-author, 1994) and Detraditionalization (co-editor, 1996). His books have been translated into nine languages.

Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

(16)

Enlightenment versus the Enlightenment: Reflexivity and Difference

2

(3)

The Ground

5

(1)

The Groundless Ground

6

(4)

Exploding Difference: from Second Modernity to Global Information Culture

10

(7)

Part I Space

17

(72)

The First Modernity: Humans and Machines

19

(23)

Garden City and Functionalism

20

(6)

Structuralism

26

(5)

Formalism

31

(6)

Modernist Humanism?

37

(3)

Conclusions

40

(2)

Simulated Humanism: Postmodern Architecture

42

(17)

Avant-gardes

45

(2)

History

47

(3)

Humanism

50

(2)

Complexity

52

(2)

Vernacular

54

(2)

Conclusions

56

(3)

Grounding the City

59

(30)

Fields of Mapping: Grids and Labyrinths

60

(5)

Productions of Space: the Classical and the Gothic

65

(7)

The Other Modernity: Lived Space in Japan

72

(6)

Urban Space and Allegory

78

(6)

Conclusions

84

(5)

Part II Society

89

(46)

From System to Symbol: Durkheim and French Sociology

91

(20)

Space and Society

91

(3)

System

94

(8)

Symbol: Durkheim and Mauss

102

(9)

Symbol and Allegory: Simmel and German Sociology

111

(24)

Values and Facts

111

(13)

From Symbol to Allegory

124

(7)

Conclusions

131

(4)

Part III Experience

135

(60)

The Natural Attitude and the Reflexive Attitude

137

(29)

Alfred Schutz: from Meaning to Understanding

140

(15)

Signification and Existence

155

(11)

Difference and Infinity: Derrida

166

(29)

Kant, Husserl, Derrida

167

(6)

Escape from Totality

173

(4)

Time and Self-presence

177

(4)

Three Modes of Signification

181

(4)

Pointing, Seeing, Hearing

185

(3)

Conclusions: Experience and the Second Modernity

188

(7)

Part IV Judgement

195

(70)

Reflexive Judgement and Aesthetic Subjectivity

197

(34)

Transcendence and Undecidability

199

(13)

Finality of the Object, Singularity of the Subject

212

(10)

Permanence and Finitude

222

(9)

Discourse, Figure . . .Sensation

231

(34)

The Body with Organs

233

(13)

Greeks and Jews

246

(15)

Conclusions

261

(4)

Part V Objects

265

(82)

Objects that Judge: Latour's Parliament of Things

267

(18)

Towards a Non-modern Constitution

269

(4)

Morphism Weavers and Object Trackers

273

(4)

C'accuse

277

(4)

Networks: Spiralling Time and Space

281

(4)

Bad Objects: Virilio

285

(27)

From the Cite to the War Machine

286

(4)

Death: Bads, Contingency, Theodicy

290

(4)

From War to Cinema

294

(4)

From the Mental to the Instrumental: the End of the Gaze

298

(4)

Polar Inertia: the Last Vehicle

302

(5)

Time of Exposure

307

(5)

The Symbolic in Fragments: Walter Benjamin's Talking Things

312

(27)

Aura

313

(11)

Allegory: the Aesthetics of Destruction

324

(6)

Protestant Ethic, Baroque Melancholy

330

(9)

Conclusion

339

(8)

Notes

347

(40)

Index

387

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