Postmodern society

David Lyon’s little book, Postmodernity, provides an excellent introduction to the sociological, technological, and political contexts in which postmodern thought has arisen. He is cautious about inflating claims about a “postmodern” condition or the coming of a “new society,” but attempts to isolate those features of contemporary life that have moved us beyond modernity – particularly communications technologies, consumerism, pluralism, and the treatment of the body – into something not yet formed.

A few quotations from late in the book:

“The sense of fragmentation and uncertainty seen in today’s art and architecture, movies and music, creates a cultural collage, a melange of styles and products that collapse into each other in kaleidoscoptic confusion. But while the new luminaries – first the French, but now also from many other parts of the world – have achieved fame and notoreity for their analyses of this image-centered, hyperreal world emerging from the ruins of the Enlightenment’s grand narratives, these themes are actually prefigured in the work of earlier European thinkers such as Simmel, Nietzche, and Heidegger . . . . The culture of postmodernity is taken to be evidence of linked social shifts, referred to as postmodernity.”

Lyon reaches back to the Reformation destruction of the medieval worldview to trace the beginnings of modern fragmentation: “Having once split the symbolic canopy of medievalism, the way was opened for further fragmentation. What Karl Marx noted as a feature of capitalism’s corrosive effects can be generalized in regard to modernity: the dismantling of venerable tradition, the restless search for new ways of doing things, produces constant change. So modernity’s triumphs – economic growth, urbanism, democratic polity, technoscience, globalism – turn out to be two-edged. From nineteenth-century Romantic reactions to twentieth-century postmodernism, questions are raised about the desirability and utility of the modern legacy. One outcome is Nihilism, with its many faces; helplessness, complacency, jouissance, ethical questing and so on. Once, Providence was doubted as a means of interpreting history, but now Progress, its secular counterpart, succumbs to the same fate. Modernity is going nowhere. On this account, we are in a postmodern condition.”

Daniel Bell’s work in the 1970s on the “postindustrial” information society/economy initiated discussion of how technological changes would restructure social and economic life: “Computers and telecommunications were central to this vision. But as the postindustrial was transposed into postmodern key, progress evaporated, leaving only the as yet little understood iconocentric and cybernetic world of data-processing, mass electronic surveillance, globalized networks and virtual realities. Increasingly, technique takes over. In health, welfare, education and politics, as well as in industry, managerialism reigns. Questions of purposes in education, life and death in medicine, and social goals in politics are reduced to performance criteria; ‘Can we manage?’ is the main question.”

This is a fine summary, but does raised questions about the “post” in post-modernity. Weber, after all, saw managerial efficiency and bureaucratization as one of the main manifestations of modern rationalization.