Habermas, in his essay “Modernity- An Incomplete Project”, claims that the project of modernity, which takes its roots from the Enlightenment, is an unfinished project; yet unlike post-modern thinkers, he does not think that modernity is a thing of the past, meaning it is something to be surpassed and subdued. Habermas starts to give an idea and a definition of modernity by explaining the etymological roots of the word “modern”. He explicates thet the term “modern” is used throughout the history to mean “what belongs to the present”, in opposition with the term “ancient”. In this understanding, what is modern is formed through developing relations of the new with the old forms. Aesthetic modernity, which expresses itself in the “avant-garde”, is a revolt against the mainstream normative assumptions of the traditional art that rules in the domain of art so far. The term “post−avant-garde” then, refers to an alleged failure in the premises of aesthetic modernism. Habermas’s main argument in his essay is to put forward why the thinkers who develops the idea of “post− avant-garde”, i.e. postmodern thinkers in general−yet he differentiates different forms of “conservatisms” in relation to modernity−, fails to surpass the premises of modernity. To support his argument, he refers to the differentiated and institutionalised domains of art, religion and state, which signifies the origin of modernity for Weber. For Habermas, the Enlightenment provides the domain of art its own autonomous and institutionalised forces, thus provides an inner logic to it. Also he regards the aesthetic modernity as “only a part of cultural modernity in general”. This claim makes it easier for him to support his ideas regarding the instution-dependence of the artistic domain. He later claims that anti-modernists have failed in their attempt, first because they ignored this institutionalised side of it making the content of art vulnerable to the changes and ruins in the corresponding institutions, secondly they failed to see the so-called rational forces dominating the everyday life and providing access for it to the cultural, thus aesthetic, domain. The second reason of Habermas is, I think, mainly derived from his theory of communicative action, in which he claims that the internal logic of everyday communicative action between people provides the solution to the problems to the Enlightenment central and all-encompassing subject, but not the alternative of postmoderns who declare the decentered subjectivity− death of the subject in its extremes. Habermas never ignores the problems that the antimodernists bring forward regarding modernism, yet he claims that these problems can and should be resolved by learning the failures of such attempts to negate modernity- thus culture, for Habermas- and this resolution does not provide a completely new epoch like the “post-modern” or “anti-modern”.
One may relate Habermas’s conceptualising the modernity with the first and the third definitions of the modernism given by Harrison (1997) in the essay, “Modernism”. For Harrison modernism has three related definitions. According to his first definition, “modernism is used to refer to the characteristics of Western culture from the mid-nineteenth century until at least the mid-twentieth: a culture in which processes of urbanization and industrialization are conceived of as the principal mechanisms of transformation in human experience”. Regarding this definition, Simmel puts forward clearly the main and the most essential problem of modern life as the struggle of modern subject to preserve its autonomy upon an encounter with the social and institutional forces. This problem is also the one that Habermas admits, yet provides a different solution than declaring the decentering the subject as postmoderns did, explicated above. Also, the third definition that regards modernism as a critical tradition is applicable to the Habermas’s whole account. Yet, the second one differentiating the “modern” and “modernist”, similarly from “Kitsch” and “art”, is not applicable I think; because it sees it as an artistic tendency only and it is more or less abstacted from the social forces that Habermas is so much interested in.
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