Visualising the Worlds of Modernity

This book examines the visual and material cultures of modernity through the radical imagination of world-building. It reasserts the central concept of the authors’ previous work that visualising the imaginary makes possible the building of the actual.As the world continues to reflect on its origins and its endings, it also reflects on its boundaries, what is above, and what is below. Building on the authors’ project to delineate, articulate and understand the ‘worlds’ of modernity through an elaboration of its visual artefacts and motifs, this book provides a retrospective understanding of how historical discourses—classical antiquity, the ‘dark ages’, feudalism and the space of pre-capitalist primitive accumulation—can help us to illuminate the peculiar cataclysm of modernity. It mandates that we understand modernity, human thought and self-reflection using the metaphors of storms, labyrinths, constellations, earth, glass and light, and posits that modernity is understood not as a house with foundations, but as a vortex, maelstrom or storm.As such, this book offers a culmination of the authors’ earlier work through an investigation of the metaphors of the social or even sociological imaginary. It will appeal to students and scholars of Sociology and the Social Sciences, Modernity, Literature, Anthropology, Philosophy, Humanities and Arts more generally.