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2.2 Concepts of the West and Multiple Modernities
It already became clear that one area of study of the influence of hegemonic European or modern paradigms is the topos of Westernization.52 The concept of the West was central to the efforts of Ottoman modernization. Viewed from the perspective of international relations the Ottoman state stood in manifold and contradictory relations to the West. On the one hand, it was a part of the West as s part of the Concert of Europe.
On the other hand, Orientalist fantasies kept constructing the Ottoman Empire as the other of the West or of Europe. The West is not meant as a fixed geographical entity but as a concept which contains many aspects of modernity, and in a certain (Eurocentric) understanding is even congruent with the latter. The concept of the West emerged with modernity. It is an imagined space within which modernity was located. The Ottoman Empire actively contributed to the making of the West as much as “available perceptions of the West were integral part of the way individual subjects and social groups made sense of the World and themselves.”53
Linked to the postcolonial approach are the question of modernity, the relation of the Ottoman state to modernity, and the notion of modernity when trying to locate what was modern and what isn't. Is it useful to draw on approaches that work with notions of alternative or multiple modernities instead of drawing on a monolithic notion of modernity that's inevitably linked to that of Western civilization? Or is it rather useful to extend the concept of Western modernity to global dimensions?54
One of the questions asked is when did modernity appear in the Ottoman Empire,
52 An essay by Engin Deniz Akarlı, dealing with changing relations of center and periphery in the era of European imperialism, traces the entanglement of Ottoman politics, European imperial domination and threat, changing attitudes towards Westernization, and the changes brought about by the establishment of the Turkish Republic; see Engin Deniz Akarlı, ‘The Tangled Ends of an Empire:
Ottoman Encounters with the West and Problems of Westernization--an Overview’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26, no. 3 (2006): 353–66.
53 Exertzoğlu, ‘Metaphors of Change: “Tradition” and the East/West Discourse in the Late Ottoman Empire,’ 45.
54 I have already mentioned Arif Dirlik's substantial critic of approaches of alternative and multiple modernities; see Arif Dirlik, ‘Thinking Modernity Historically: Is “Alternative Modernity” the Answer?’, Asian Review of World Histories 1, no. 1 (January 2013): 5–44, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.12773/arwh.2013.1.1.005.
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or when the Ottoman Empire became modern. Additionally, to what extent is modernity connected with industrialized capitalism, state organization and subject-state relations, and the creation of citizenship and bourgeois society? Şerif Mardin claims that modernity in the Ottoman Empire can be traced back to the 16th century if “understood as the development of pragmatic rationality in administrative practices and diversion from the Islamic code.”55 Alev Çınar argues that one should talk rather of “creative adaptation” of modernity in non-Western contexts than of servile imitation or an inorganic imposition from outside or above.56 By opening the view to multiple modernities, one would avoid disregarding forms of modernity which weren't common or existent in Europe and aren't recognized.
“The claim that modernity is an exclusively European product becomes a self-fulfilling hypothesis, because other forms of modernity that do not comply with European norms either are conveniently categorized as belonging to the realm of the pre-modern or traditional or are simply disregarded as anomalies altogether.”57
In addition to a definition of modernity for this study beyond modernist terms, it is also important to critically scrutinize Ottoman and Turkish definitions of modernity and what they included and excluded.
İbrahim Kaya criticizes perspectives that equal modernization to Westernization in non-Western societies, thus denying an option of non-Western modernities. Therefore he develops from the Turkish case a notion of modernity which contains a plurality of modernities.58 In his study of the ideas of İzmirli İsmail Hakkı, M. Özervarlı discusses alternative approaches to modernity next to materialist perspectives in the late Ottoman Empire. He analyses how modernity was discussed in religious circles.59 He also shows that tradition was rather a part of modernity than its opposite.
Ottoman modernization discourse functions within the narrow framework of
55 Alev Çınar, Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies, Places, and Time (Minnesota: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005)., 4.
56 See Ibid., 2.
57 Ibid., 3.
58 Ibrahim Kaya, Social Theory and Later Modernities: The Turkish Experience (Liverpool Univ. Press, 2004).
59 M. Özervarli, ‘Alternative Approaches to Modernization in the Late Ottoman Period: Izmirli Ismail Hakki’s Religious Thought against Materialist Scientism’, Peace Research Abstracts Journal / Canadian Peace Research Institute 44, no. 6 (2007): 77–78.
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thought of the “the West and the Rest,60” a premise still valid for contemporary Turkish society. My interest here is twofold: I want to scrutinize both how Ottoman politics contributed to the construction of this dichotomous concept and the consequences of this dichotomy for Ottoman society. And maybe also a third point: What existed beyond bipolar constructions: “alternative modernities or alternatives to modernization?”61 Which kinds of conceptions of difference appeared? And how were concepts of the West and modernity employed to construct a national bourgeoisie?
I will draw on Stuart Hall's thoughts on the emergence of the West as a historical concept with the wake of European colonialism. According to Hall, the idea of the West appeared with European expansion in the fifteenth century and was deeply entangled with colonialism. Western societies came to be regarded as modern societies. The West became the space of modernity, and understood as advanced, developed, industrial, capitalist and secular. In addition, the idea of Europe as the first center of the West was tightly infused with Christianity. The West as a historical construct became the category used to measure and classify societies along the standards of a certain type of modern society, which saw the West as the exclusive retainer of modernity, set against all “the Rest.” Hall states that while this type of society first emerged in Western Europe, the West is not located exclusively there. By now, any society acquiring certain characteristics could become a Western society. In Europe such processes took place with the brake from feudalism, and at many different levels:62 economical, social, political and cultural. The West functioned as a value system similar to an ideology. Yet in order to fully grasp the meaning of the West and its power, Hall suggests to treat it as a discourse, a system of representation, that can be analyzed by looking at the discursive strategies which produce it.63 It is then a coherent entity which incorporates the self-image of Western societies. Opposing to its Other by idealization and degradation and through fantasies of desire, it fails to recognize and respect difference and imposes European
60 See Stuart Hall, ‘The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power’, in Formations of Modernity, ed. Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben (Cambridge UK: Polity Press in association with the Open University Press, 1992), 275–320.
61 Phrase taken from Bruce M. Knauft, ed., Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002).
62 Exactly when, where, which and how changes took place could be further differentiated from a historical point of view to prevent teleological and homogenizing tendencies of an analysis of modernity. That includes the historiziation of such notions as capitalism and feudalism.
63 Hall, ‘The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,’ 215.
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categories and norms on societies regarded as different. The Rest became essential to the construction of the West, which constituted itself through the colonization of the Other, while the Other - or the Rest - was already an active part of this process through strategies of resistance and appropriation. The appearance of modernity in western Europe (and then in the West) was conditioned by interrelations with what was considered the Other, as regards to these parts of Europe. At the same time, Western hegemony became more and more established and it remained the model, the prototype, and the measure of social progress: “It was Western progress, civilization, rationality, and development that were celebrated.”64 A last point I want to stress is the significance of the discourse of the West and the Rest
“as formative for the West and 'modern societies' as were the secular state, capitalist economies, the modern class, race, and gender systems, and modern, individualist, secular culture - the four main 'processes' of our formation story.”65
For my own study, I will focus on how the subject of the West and the Rest were negotiated through the politics of dress and on the importance and visibility of this discourse.
Headgear was a crucial means in forming first Ottoman and later Turkish modern identity, and a crucial means in expressing and negotiating relations to the West. It was a marker of difference and equality. The concept of the West versus the Rest assumes that there is only one model of and one road to modernity that is congruent to a certain notion of the West. Anti-colonial movements and theories argue that modernity does not necessarily need to be Western. This is where concepts of multiple and alternative modernities come into play. The example of headgear shows the complexity of processes of identification and the difficulty to produce unequivocal and distinct meanings of certain symbols and practices. According to Bill Ashcroft,
“alternative, or non-Western modernities emerge either by the development of hybridized cultural forms through the appropriation of those of Western modernity or by the introduction of innovative, and thus truly alternative forms of modernity.”66
64 Ibid., 225.
65 Ibid., 225.
66 Bill Ashcroft, ‘Alternative Modernities: Globalization and the Post-Colonial,' ARIEL 40, no. 1 (January
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Yet he emphasizes that “neither of these forms has emerged out of thin air.”67 Theories of alternative or multiple modernities put emphasis on the dynamic relationship between Western and colonized or non-Western societies, between those states regarded the cradle of Western modernity and the Rest.68 A key thought of this framework relates to the reciprocal character of these relationships, in contrast to the modernization paradigm which regards modernization as a process of diffusion from a flow of knowledge, techniques, forms of government, institutions, and practices from the West to the East. Instead, Ashcroft points out, it was important to note that many postcolonial researchers and activists considered Western modernity as an outcome of the interrelations between colonial centers and peripheries. Later modernizing states had not depended on a Western European model that they were more or less keen to copy.
Rather, Ashcroft assesses, multiple forms of modernity did emerge during the process of modernization, not just as alternatives to Western modernity, but also within the West.
In fact, from the beginning different forms of modernization existed and developed within global dynamics.69 Thus one of my research questions is whether the conceptualization of Ottoman modernity is rather an alternative model to Western modernity, a copy of Western modernity, a part of Western modernity in a way that it was subsumed under Western hegemony, or rather an active contributor to the making of the West?
Bill Ashcroft talks about the way global modernities appropriated, adapted and transformed modernity while he stresses that modernity was much more adapted rather then adopted, a process which contains a (re-)creation of modernity.70 The fact that
2009), 83.
67 Ibid., 83.
68 See Ibid.
69 Taking the example of the modern novel as a cultural form usually perceived as Western, Keya Anjaria argues that actually all forms of modernity are alternative, altering from an idealized norm, which makes a differentiation between center and periphery dispensable. She quotes Moretti's Conjectures on World Literature where he comments on the inadequacy of the East-West divide: “And actually more than that: it had completely reversed the received historical explanation of these matters: because if the compromise between the foreign form and the local is so ubiquitous, then those independent paths that are usually taken to be the rule of the rise of the novel [ ... ]—well, they’re not the rule at all, they’re the exception.” Moretti, Franco. ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review (January-February 2000), 58 as quoted in Keja Anjaria, ‘The Dandy and the Coup: Politics of Literature in the Post-1980 Turkish Novel, Üç Beş Kişi’, Middle Eastern Literatures 17, no. 3 (2014): 263–82, doi:10.1080/1475262X.2014.997575. Still these novels reflect the East-West dichotomy by dealing with the struggle over meanings between local and foreign interests. Ibid., 265.
70 See Ashcroft, ‘Alternative Modernities: Globalization and the Post-Colonial,’ 84.
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modernity consists of a multiplicity of characteristics and different kind of modernities which put emphasis on its different traits was often overlooked. Thus modernity should not be reduced to things such as a capitalist economy, even though that was an important feature of it. In her study on modernity and Islam, Alev Çınar also emphasizes that the notion of modernity contains multiple dimensions as constitutive parts of social, political and economical life.71 An analysis of (non-Western) modernities thus needs to consider which of the elements of modernity are addressed on one hand, and needs to be careful not to overemphasize certain characteristics as ultimate measures of (Western) modernity on the other hand.
Within these lines, Ashcraft draws on Charles Taylor's differentiation between a cultural and a-cultural notions of modernity. The former was a teleological concept that considered a certain form of economical progress and structure as inevitable and neglected that its becoming was related to a certain cultural milieu.
“The inevitable effect of this was that globalization came to be seen a-culturally so that the diffusion of capital, industrialization, urbanization and the spread of education implied a unified world and a homogeneous program of development available to all.”72
In a similar manner, Dipesh Chakrabarty assesses that modernity was often viewed from a political perspective, encompassing state, bureaucracy and capitalist enterprise, disregarding “certain categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe.”73 Thus, as Ashcroft remarks, modernity takes the form of both particular conditions as well as a certain mode of representation.
The notion of multiple modernities was introduced by Samuel Eisenstadt.74 His concept was directed against classical theories of modernity such as Marx's, Durkheim's and, to a great extent, Weber, who assumed that modernity as a cultural program and its basic institutional constellations would spread with modernization completely
71 Such as discourse, culture, historical epoch, lifestyle, movement, project mindset, constitutionalism, secularism capitalism, industrialization, democracy. See Çınar, Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey.
72 Ashcroft, ‘Alternative Modernities: Globalization and the Post-Colonial,’ 89.
73 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. as cited in Ashcroft, ‘Alternative Modernities: Globalization and the Post-Colonial,’ 85.
74 Samuel N. Eisenstadt, ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus 129, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 1–29.
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throughout societies. In contrast, Eisenstadt notes, modernizing societies refuted homogenizing and hegemonic characteristics of the “Western program of modernity”, and gave rise to multiple ideological patterns which were still distinctly modern.75 These multiple forms of modernity evolved under the influence of respective local conditions and experiences. Joint anti-Western and anti-modern themes did not make their modern character extinct. Likewise it didn't abolish Western modernity as a crucial and ambivalent reference point.
To Eisenstadt an important point of understanding multiple modernities was to distinguish modernization from Westernization, as he considered both as maybe intersecting but not identical. A view that I would consider critically, and contrasts Eisenstadt's account to such as Ashcroft's or Stuart Hall's. Eisenstadt regards Western patterns thereby as an authentic precedent amongst others and as a reference point.76 The question arising here was if there was a common core of modernity in its multiple forms.
An answer might be found in Eisenstadt's definition of the history of modernity or of modernity itself. He describes it as a “continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs,”77 where multiple actors on different levels of society and kinds of institutions produce unique expressions of modernity.
Modernity as it emerged in Western and Central Europe, according to Eisenstadt, had as its cultural and political program “distinct ideological as well as institutional premises”78 such as shifts in the conception of human agency, and the questioning of social, ontological, and political orders. Additionally, modernities respond to these same problematics, and in their answers they also remained within the very same. Another crucial element of modernity was the construction of boundaries of collectivities and collective identities. Thus modernity in that sense can be defined as a permanent negotiation between the general and the particular, between equality and difference.
Eisenstadt also notes that internal antinomies in general are a characteristic of modernity, such as between freedom and control, or autonomy and restriction, individual and collective, constructional or primordial definitions of collective identities, or modern and traditional. These clashes between different conceptions of state and society and
75 Ibid., 2.
76 See Ibid., 3.
77 Ibid., 2.
78 See Ibid., 5.
2 Ottoman Modernity and Bourgeois Culture: The Era of the Fez conflicts arising from that were crucial to societies' self-perception as modern.79
Meltem Ahıska offers the term Occidentalism to provide a fresh framework of analysis of Ottoman and Turkish modernity.80 She argues that the East/West dichotomy and a certain perception was constitutive of both Turkish modernity (which for her also encompasses Ottoman modernization) and its historiography. Therefore, accounts on Ottoman and Turkish modernity very much concentrated on the framework of either the success or failure which also takes reference to a Western model perceived as original.
This is because both models and Turkish modernity itself are based on temporal and spacial imaginations relying on backward versus progress and East versus West dichotomies. While modernization theory prescribed a linear progression of modernity, it at the same time essentialized space. Thus the above approaches to Turkish modernity remained “within the problematic of imitation,”81 where modernity moves from the Western centers to the margins, neglecting the complexity and crisis of (Western) modernity itself. In order to re-conceptualize the analyses of Ottoman and Turkish modernity, it was required to ask how notions like impact, influences or imitation can be conceived. Ahıska also suggests the application of hitherto neglected tools of postcolonial theory to dismantle dichotomous constructions of progress and tradition, West and East, and a historical representation of self and other along these lines. Albeit, Ahıska is also critical of concepts of alternative of multiple modernities because of their dismissal of the power of Western hegemony.82 Therefore, she proposes the use of the notion of Occidentalism, which on the one hand included Western powers, and on the other hand took agency of the postcolonial subjectivity of the Other into account. In addition, the
This is because both models and Turkish modernity itself are based on temporal and spacial imaginations relying on backward versus progress and East versus West dichotomies. While modernization theory prescribed a linear progression of modernity, it at the same time essentialized space. Thus the above approaches to Turkish modernity remained “within the problematic of imitation,”81 where modernity moves from the Western centers to the margins, neglecting the complexity and crisis of (Western) modernity itself. In order to re-conceptualize the analyses of Ottoman and Turkish modernity, it was required to ask how notions like impact, influences or imitation can be conceived. Ahıska also suggests the application of hitherto neglected tools of postcolonial theory to dismantle dichotomous constructions of progress and tradition, West and East, and a historical representation of self and other along these lines. Albeit, Ahıska is also critical of concepts of alternative of multiple modernities because of their dismissal of the power of Western hegemony.82 Therefore, she proposes the use of the notion of Occidentalism, which on the one hand included Western powers, and on the other hand took agency of the postcolonial subjectivity of the Other into account. In addition, the