Beyond the Certainty Principle: Towards a Political Reading of the Modern Experience

Abstract

It could be argued that today we are witnesing the dislocation of the dominant image in which modern society identifies itself. This image – the positive picture of a society which is founded on absolute certainties guaranteed by a scientific discourse which can master and control the totality of the real – is put into question by the resurfacing of uncertainty and negativity (empirically present in phenomena such as the Mad Cow disease scare, environmental crisis, the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear terrorism etc.). Certainty is revealed as a social construction which attempts to do the impossible, namely to fully symbolize and neutralize the real in the Lacanian sense of the word. With reference to the discussion on the legitimacy of modernity (Lowith, Blumenberg), the sociology of risk (Beck), and social constructionism, and within a broader Lacanian framework, I try to articulate a political reading of the inconsistencies of the modern project and introduce an alternative formulation of a modernity open to the constitutive nature of uncertainty.