Below you will find an archive of useful images and other multimedia materials, categorized by chapter.
Part I
Chapter 1: MODERN SELVES and FASHION
In the 14th century, Europe was ravaged by the Black Death. Many cities lost 60 to 80 % of their populations. Survivors could not count on inherited identities, so they were forced to become modern, self-fashioning individuals. They used dress to claim new identities, and started the modern system of fashionable change.
Chapter 2: COMMUNITIES OF STRANGERS and MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE
Modern selves not only invented new ways of dressing and developing social identities, but also had to forge communities with strangers. They did this with infrastructure, turning to impersonal means of connectivity.
Chapter 3: CULTURAL IMAGINARIES and MODERN STATES
Modern culture was built with imaginaries, dreams of possibility for improvising selves and lives. Modern states were also constructed around imaginaries– dreams of collective heritage and destiny that made sense of impersonal, institutional power by defining it as a historical necessity.
Chapter 4: LIBERAL and INDUSTRIAL MODERNITY
Modernity began to change in the 17th and 18th centuries as major thinkers began to articulate and promote principles of modern culture. Modernity that had been developed around dreams of possibility now took discursive form, principles of progress distinguishing what was modern from what was not.
Part II
Chapter 5: RACE and GEOPOLITICS
Nowhere was the power and destructiveness of modern discourse more evident than in development of conceptions of race, naturalizing differences among groups of “men.” But while race was being discussed as a singular reality, multiple racial imaginaries were being elaborated to fit the geopolitical desires of Europeans.
Chapter 6: GENDER and POLITICAL ECONOMY
As men were being sorted into races according to their “natures,” women were set apart as not natural at all. They became the complementary “other” to natural man, the citizen in modern liberal philosophy, and thereby disqualified from having the rights of modern citizens to power and property.
Efforts to naturalize race and gender hierarchies remained contentious, but children were successfully naturalized as dependents. Differing conceptions of childhood were incorporated in stages of child development, leaving children to follow the “ascent of man” from primitive to modern. Childhood, in other words, naturalized the dominance of modernity.
Part III
Chapter 8: DIGITAL GAMES and PATHS through MODERN LIFE
Digital maze games give people a chance to play with or laugh at the routine tyrannies and cultural contradictions of modern life. As mazes, they pose the enduring human question of how to find a path through life. But in emphasizing individual progress in playing games, they have players practice skills of modern self-making.
Chapter 9: PHILOSOPHICAL MACHINERY and FILM
Narrative media like film and television serve as philosophical technologies for questioning the principles and practices of modern life. They present “what if?” stories about how lives might be lived and what it means to be human in the modern world.
Modernity is painful and modern life is demanding. The categories cut, the personal restlessness never ends, the accounting and accountability are oppressive, the drive for profits is corrosive, extracting property from nature is destroying the planet, despotism seems just as resilient as democracy, secularists battle with spiritual believers, technologies as well as give plrace, racial hatred abounds, women are subject to violence, robots replace workers, people use mobile technology to blow themselves up in crowds of strangers, and time moves on anyhow. So, modern people want to get out, opt out– escape.
