Modernity and Postmodernity

Postmodernism as an intellectual and cultural movement gained momentum in the late twentieth century. Following Lemert, Jean Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition and Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature marks its inauguration as a subject of academic inquiry.

Starting from an expression as aesthetic movement, postmodernism rejects the modernism, especially "high modernism". While modernism rejects formal aesthetic theories in favour of the functional, postmodernism questions the adequacy of functional as an inspiration of artistic expression. In general, it may be said that where modernists tend to think in terms of totality, genre, or system, postmodernists think in terms of fragmentation, ephemerality, and discontinuity. The distinction of the two has more to do with attitude. While modernism laments the fragmentary and the chaotic, postmodernism accepts and even valorizes it.

Jean-Francois Lyotard says that Postmodernism may be characterized as "incredulity toward meta-narratives." (i.e. don't believe the big talks) Meta-narratives refer to grand theories about eg the spirit, man, the rational subjects, and the proletariat. Such grand theories often associate with Marx and Freud which are taken to have at their center a category (or sets of categories) that is assumed to be universal, therefore, marking the internal difference.

Postmodernism favors more small scale, local narratives that take into account the contingent, provisional and unstable nature of the social world.

For example, Foucault's concept of power. Moving away the idea that power is often vested in the state, Foucault trace the micro-politics of power in multiple locations and social context (Three type of powers)

Jean Baudrillard, reflecting on the power of mass communications media, questions the notion of reality in postmodern societies. The power of mediated images, he argues, has led to the production of the "hyperreal" in which it becomes impossible to differentiate between the imaginary and real. The world becomes a world of simulations, of images without an original. Since the postmodern world has come to be characterized largely by consumption and seduction, Baudrillard suggests that relations of production have now given away to relations of signs.

At the same time, the social structures also experiences significant changes, for instance, the economy has been deindustrialization and the increasing dominance of post-Fordist practices in which capital has become more flexible and disorganized. In other words, capital accumulation increasingly occurs through flexible work practices that have resulted in significant spatial de-concentration of work and labour.

Consumption dominates this new economy. Global information and communication technologies have come to assume a powerful role in our world.

Zygmunt Bauman in his book "Modernity and the Holocaust" explores the limitation of modernity. Holocaust, in his view, was a product of the modernist faith in progress embodied in the bureaucracy and technocracy. It was the desire to remake the world that motivated the Nazi project. Like Baudrillard, he agrees that capitalism has evolved from a system based on production to one based on consumption.

Post modernity--Postmodern society

Post modern society is often understood to mean the society which follows modern society.

However, Lyotard and Baudrillard refer the postmodern society to the demise of exhaustion of modernity.


Three concepts are closely linked to post modernity:

Post industrialism Daniel Bell provides five basic changes for post industrial society:

1. A move towards post-Fordist production, which holds principle that stocks should be highly sensitive to sales; and company budgets tend to be spent less on R&D than on marketing and advertising.

2. The emergence of a new professional and technical occupational class
3. A growth in the importance of theoretical knowledge as a source of innovation and of policy formulation
4. An increasing systematic orientation towards the future in the management of technology
5. The increasing use of organizational and information theory.

Consumerism which explains why in post modern society the exchange now plays a more important role than production.

Lash and Urry suggest, the consumption of goods on the basis of their symbolic value, or sign-value, has created a highly specialized market for consumer goods. Significantly, this tends to involve stylistic imitation, or pastiche, rather than invention. As a result, distinctions between styles from different historical periods or cultures are increasingly blurred. The sheer complexity of imitation, interchangeability and manipulation of sign-values has led to a decentring of subjectivity, our self-identity losses coherence.

Liberal democratic capitalism