"For a
long time the 'modern' has been seen as the opposite of the 'ancient.'
It is a word which for centuries the new and the here-and-now have used
in triumphalist self-justification as a means of relegating everything
that is not themselves (or that they think is not themselves) to the
past. Its magic powers seem inexhaustible. Yet its meaning has
changed... In France in the middle ages the elected
or co-opted magistrates of the towns with burgomasters...and
consulates...were known as 'moderns.' The retiring magistrates were
called 'ancients' as distinct from 'moderns.' [The term modern] involved
the double idea of renewal and of regularity in renewal; elections were
held according to a strict mode [Latin: modus] laid down in the
charter, or according to municipal tradition. This idea of cyclical
regularity of change, and of change as a norm, did not last long. In the
different sectors of social and political life, and above all in
culture, the term reappears at various dates, and is always heavy with
polemical [i.e., divisively hyperbolic] meanings... Later, the issue
loses its polemical edge; it does not vanish completely, but it becomes
subsumed in the self-triumphalism of 'modernism' and 'modern' tastes. By
the end of the nineteenth century, with the 'modern style', 'modernism'
(i.e., the cult of innovation for innovation's sake, innovation as a
fetish) is fully fledged."
—Henri Lefebvre, (opening lines of) "What is Modernity" in Introduction to Modernity [1962], John Moore, transl. (Verso, 1995) p168 . [brackets are my clarifying insertions] (parentheses are Lefebvre).
—Henri Lefebvre, (opening lines of) "What is Modernity" in Introduction to Modernity [1962], John Moore, transl. (Verso, 1995) p168 . [brackets are my clarifying insertions] (parentheses are Lefebvre).
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