Postmodernism and Globalization

Though often conceived as a crisis within Western civilization, postmodernism, Featherstone argues, is partly impelled by globalization.

Globalization, he begins, usually conveys two images – the spread of a single, increasingly uniform culture throughout the world, and the “compression” or layering and juxtaposition of various cultures within a particular location (Sushi bars jostling with McDonald’s). His own emphasis is that globalization is less a common global culture than a “field in which differences, power struggles and cultural prestige contests are played out.”

What has this got to do with postmodernism?

For postmoderns, “modernity has been seen as entailing a quest to impose notions of unity and universality on thought and the world. In effect its mission is to impose order on disorder, to tame the frontier.” As this mission has expanded, however, many have objected that “modernity will not be universalized,” and the patterns of Western culture and politics will not take root everywhere: “This is because modernity is seen as both a Western project and as the West’s projection of its values on the world. In effect modernity has allowed Europeans to project their civilization, history and knowledge as civilization, history and knowledge in general.”

Rather than “construct theory and map the world” from a secure, European center, postmodernists join postcolonialists in seeing “theory as mobile, or as constructed from an eccentric site, somewhere on the boundary.” Theory from the boundary is not authoritative: “There is a lowering of theory’s capacity to speak for people in general, to a greater acknowledgement of the limited and local nature of its assertions.”

Postmodernity in Europe and the US means that theory from the margins has gained a voice at the “center”: “on a global level the situation is becoming increasingly pluralistic, or polytheistic, a world with many competing gods . . . . This has been referred to as the global babble. It has meant that ‘the rest are increasingly speaking back to the West’ and along with the relative decline of Western power it has required that the West has increasingly been forced to listen.” Rather than attempt to carry out a “civilizing mission” to the world, which assumes that the West is at the top of a hierarchy of civilizations, the West accepts the “marginal” critique of its own claims: “the term ‘postmodernism’ can be understood as pointing to this process of cultural fragmentation and collapse of symbolic hierarchies which, I would argue, gaines much of its impetus from awareness of a shift in the value of the symbolic power and cultural capital of the West, rather than a move to a new stage of history, ‘postmodernity,’ itself premised upon a developmental model of tradition and modernity constructed from Western experience.”