CONTESTING THE EMERGING MODERN: EARLY MODERN CRITIQUES OF MAINSTREAM MODERNITY

The author argues that postmodern, ecofeminist, and ecopsychological critiques of mainstream modernity are clearly anticipated by several early modern writers. In fact, they, among others, may be taken to represent the second, or self-critical, tendency in modernity. Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, and Moliere all seem to recognize what Pierre Bourdieu has argued explicitly: the "world" made available by representations for supposedly objective cognition is not the world we actually inhabit, but it can disastrously replace that world, which is the only one wherein we can survive. The represented world is a network of merely symbolic relationships and exchanges, into which only delusive versions of the self and the real can be incorporated. The writers looked at here denounce the suffocating proliferation of artifacts and representations, the dangerous craving for certainty, and the delusive detachment of mind from matter.