Modernity or Postmodernity

Many historians, social scientists and other cultural commentators have stated that we are now living in an age of ‘postmodernity’, and that this has implications on our capacity for cultural construction, economic activity and the political process. Before we look at some of the empirical examples that support this notion we need to get some idea of what is meant by the term ‘postmodernity’. In popular parlance the state of postmodernity is defined as a society built on ‘sex and shopping’, or, in more sociological terms, people in ‘modern’ societies are defined by class derived from their role in production, whereas in a postmodern society people are defined by their consumption, or their lifestyle. This is very general indeed. Dictionary definitions tend to take us no further than tautological definitions of postmodernity as “the state or condition of being postmodern”. So, in true postmodern style, we need to deconstruct the notion of postmodernity and reconstruct it to give it some kind of generalised, overall meaning. French critical thinkers, notably Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard (and to a lesser extent Michel Foucault), from the 1960s onwards began to refer to postmodernity as a state or condition of society that could be said to exist after modernity, and / or a historical condition that marks the reasons for the end of modernity. The concept of postmodernity is entirely dependent upon an understanding of the notion of ‘modernity’, an historical epoch that coincides (more or less) with the Enlightenment or the Industrial Age. Philosophers, historians and cultural commentators, with varying emphases, generally concur that modernity is characterised by the ever increasing incorporation of rationality and hierarchy into public and artistic life, and some have gone further to say that modernity is a cultural condition characterised by constant change in the pursuit of progress. In this way modernity can be seen as contiguous with the development of capitalism (itself characterised by constant change and innovation) with its associated socio-political and scientific metanarratives of positivism, structuralism, liberalism and Marxism. Critical thinkers such as Lyotard argue that postmodernity represents the culmination of this process where constant change has become the status quo and the concept of progress has dissolved into obsolescence.

Others such as Fredric Jameson and David Harvey go further and identify postmodernity almost entirely with ‘late capitalism’, a stage of capitalism following finance capitalism, and characterised by highly mobile labour and capital and the weakening of geo-political boundaries and regulations to the movement of capital. Harvey specifically identifies late capitalism with the breakdown of the economic order following World War II (the Bretton Woods agreement).

Although there is some agreement in the description of postmodernity, there is no such agreement as to the benefits or drawbacks of postmodernity. There are many historians and philosophers who view the culmination of rationality and progress within modernity as inherently inhumane and flawed, leading to the long 20th Century of warfare, the holocaust and ever repeated explosions of ‘ethnic cleansing’ throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries. For these thinkers, the end of modernity has come none too soon. Equally there are those, particularly from the ‘critical theory’ tradition, such as Jurgen Habermas, that view modernity an unfinished historical epoch of the Enlightenment and view postmodernity and postmodern ideas with suspicion, as a resurgence of counter-enlightenment ideas, a return to a darker, less rational age.

Jameson views a number of phenomena as distinguishing postmodernity from modernity. Firstly, he speaks of "a new kind of superficiality" or "depthlessness" in which models that once explained people and things in terms of an "inside" and an "outside" (such as hermeneutics, the dialectic, Freudian repression, the existentialist distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity and the semiotic distinction of signifier and signified) have been rejected. Secondly he points to a rejection of the modernist "Utopian gesture" and the reductionism in art from the transformative to the decorative. The third feature of the postmodern age that Jameson identifies is the "waning of affect" He notes that "pastiche eclipses parody" as "the increasing unavailability of the personal style" leads to pastiche becoming a universal practice.

Jameson argues that distance has been abolished in postmodernity. The postmodern era has seen a change in the social function of culture. He identifies culture in the modern age as having had a property of "semi-autonomy", with an "existence… above the practical world of the existent" but, in the postmodern age, culture has been deprived of this autonomy, the cultural has expanded to consume the entire social realm so that all becomes "cultural". "Critical distance", the assumption that culture can be positioned outside "the massive Being of capital" upon which left-wing theories of cultural politics are dependent, has become outmoded.

Economic and technological conditions of our age have given rise to a decentralized, media-dominated society in which ideas are only simulacra, inter-referential representations and copies of each other with no real, original, stable or objective source of communication and meaning. Globalization, brought on by innovations in communication, manufacturing and transportation, is often cited as one force which has driven the decentralized modern life, creating a culturally pluralistic and interconnected global society lacking any single dominant centre of political power, communication or intellectual production. The postmodernist view is that inter-subjective, not objective, knowledge will be the dominant form of discourse under such conditions and that ubiquity of dissemination fundamentally alters the relationship between reader and that which is read, between observer and the observed, between those who consume and those who produce.

In terms of information dissemination and political action the basic premise of postmodernity is that the metanarratives of class, race, gender, and the consequent liberationist political movements are obsolete, and that the discourse of political change has become increasingly atomised and decentred.

At this point we need to take stock and determine whether or not we live in a state of (high or late) modernity or postmodernity.

The case for postmodernity would run roughly thus. The great socio-economic metanarratives of Marxism and liberalism with concerted political actions from a coherent philosophical perspective are dead. Communism has had its day, for example with the rapid capitalisation of China, the breakup of the Soviet Union and death of Yugoslavia. The iconic image to support this perspective is the fall of the Berlin Wall. Further, within the UK we have seen a slow but steady disengagement with political parties and the political process over the past twenty years and a consequent rise in single issue politics and personal political practices, such as, for example, 21st Century feminisms, that focus to a dominant extent on personal male behaviour and attitudes towards women, rather than meta-political processes of socio-political change to enhance the position of women power per se in our society. The past fifty years (in particular the past ten years) have seen widespread technological developments that have fundamentally shifted the ways in which we define ourselves and organise our lives. We are all on Facebook and are likely to live as much of our lives in cyber-space as in geographical space, we subscribe to specific single issue causes, and we define ourselves by our tastes and our consumption not by our occupation. In other words we are postmodern.

The case against postmodernity makes roughly the opposite claims. It states that we are living in a different age to that of our parents and grandparents, but we are still living in the modern age. It accepts that communism has failed in that the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are no more. It accepts that we are much more defined by a decentred consumerism than we used to be, and that national and even supra-national boundaries have less force in the regulation of capital than ever before. However, it would point to the persistence of the one major metanarrative, capitalism, and its capacity to change and reform itself to remain constantly historically contingent. It would also argue that total of the single issues that individual people become involved in tend to articulate to a coherent political position. In other words, from the individual perspective the labels of liberal, conservative, socialist etc, can and do still apply.

The arguments for some form of late modernity are more compelling than those for postmodernity. We do consume cultural artefacts (often ironically) in isolation from their context (think about exactly what is on your iPod); there is a ‘sex and shopping’ feel to our modern western societies, and we are more than inveterate consumers. We also engage more than ever in single issue politics, and are to some extent obsessed with lifestyle.  We also engage in the ultimate of postmodern experiences; using web technologies to interact globally from our own homes. However, we remain attached to our neighbourhoods; indeed our sense of place is as strong as ever, and socio-geographic mobility is no greater than in the 1950s. Class awareness OF itself is little changed in the past century and meta-concepts such as nation and ethnicity are still defining elements of our selves. There has been some decline in the meta-narrative of socialism over the past thirty years in that class awareness FOR itself has declined, but this is much more to do with the relatively recent success of neo-liberal hegemony that it is with a fundamental shift in the shape of our society. The majority of people still hold to the basic Enlightenment principles of rationality and progress, with a general support for science and other rational discourses.

Whether we are living in a state of modernity or postmodernity is important in terms of liberationaist actions, as it will determine the course of our political activity.