Sublime

Philosophically, modernity is often referred to as “The Age of Man.” In ascension since the Renaissance, it crystallized toward the end of the 18th century into a configuration of knowledge that French philosopher Michel Foucault characterized as an episteme in which the figure of Man as the foundation of all possible knowledge. Jamaican

To be modern is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its

(3) Historically and ontologically, modernity is characterized by the separation between humans and nature (anthropocentrism), mind and body (rationalism and mechanicism), observer and observed (representationalism), us and them (colonialism, supremacy ideologies), and so forth. This dualist ontology was fundamental for the development of

indignities such as, overall, the oppression of women and other minorities, the toxic despoliation of nature and the environment, the lack of evenly applied civil rights, the general reign of materialism itself—all were aggressively attacked, and attempted to be remedied, by Postmodernism.

Who the Heck Is Modernity?