Postmodernity

Definition

A Discussion on Defining Postmodernity

Otto Paans:

"There seems to be a broad consensus that either

(i) postmodernity as a whole is a reaction against the extremes of modernism in all spheres of life, such as artistic practice, scientific views, and industrial production, or

(ii) postmodernity is the combination of modernity with a host of other factors that mitigate or diversify modernism’s extremes.

This recombination defies narrative logic, questions conventional forms of knowledge production that developed during modernism, creates new forms of social organization and a anticipates new, flexible economy. Alternatively, terms like “Empire,” “post-industrial society,” or “multinational capitalism,” are used to describe a new and still developing world order.

One of its most salient features is highlighted by David Harvey:

- I begin with what appears to be the most startling fact about postmodernism: its total acceptance of the ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity, and the chaotic that formed the one half of Baudelaire's conception of modernity. But postmodernism responds to the fact of that in a very particular way. It does not try to transcend it, counteract it, or even to define the 'eternal and immutable' elements that might lie within it. Postmodernism swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the chaotic currents of change as if that is all there is.

Alternatively — and this line of thinking coheres with my outlook— postmodernity is regarded as a transformation of modernity. For instance, Charles Jencks maintains that postmodernity is modernity combined with a number of additional factors that diversify it. For example, in architectural design, the modernist emphasis on functionalism and aesthetic austerity is, in postmodernity, enriched with an exuberant and deliberately ironic aesthetic, while the modernist, functionalist modes of thinking are still alive under the colorful surface. A slightly different interpretation of this transformation is provided by the sociologist Ulrich Beck. His thesis of “reflexive modernity” entails that the ceaseless development and acceleration of modernity starts to affect the process of modernization itself. Modern society becomes an object of concern for itself. In a reflexive gesture, the process of modernization changes its own functioning and future development. Consequently, a global risk society emerges, in which old securities disappear and individuals are “condemned to be free.”6 That these concepts of “liquid modernity” or “reflexive modernity” lead easily to bold statements can also be discerned in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s hallmark study, The Postmodern Condition.

Notably, his claim that the “metanarratives” of history had ceased to function was taken as a mission statement of postmodernity, but it can also be read as simply a diagnosis that modernity had reached a new stage. The subtitle of the Postmodern Condition is “A Report on Knowledge,” and indeed, a significant part of the book is about knowledge-production during a time when computers, automation-of-information, and digitalization more generally, took over. In this process, job prospects, education, institutional structures, and the role of “knowledge procedures” changed in ways that were unprecedented. Lyotard’s assertion that the “metanarratives” were obsolete was not a political assertion in the sense that he advocated a new era of political engagement. Rather, it was the diagnosis of a historical situation: none of the existing metanarratives could do justice to the fluidity of the present. That Lyotard overplayed his hand here is clear: to judge that the metanarratives are obsolete is to place oneself in an external, extra-historical position. Moreover, if the claim is that all metanarratives anywhere are obsolete, one thereby creates a new narrative, assuming that it has universal validity. However, this statement reflects something of the overwhelming transformation of reality that was underway. If many old certainties melt into air, the response may be to exclaim that all hitherto developed ways of thinking are insufficient to comprehend what is happening.

If the traditional ways of thinking are obsolete, ineffective or insufficient, then a new set of intellectual strategies, tactics, and modes expression need to be invented. Thus, postmodernity exploits the fragmentation, disjointedness, and incoherence to which it bears witness, employing them as tools in a strategy for comprehension and sensemaking in a world that is perceived as being out of joint. Consequently, this choice is reflected in artistic and cultural production. Tactics like collage, pastiche, bricolage, and mixed media (and more recently “transmediality”) claim pride of place, suggesting themselves as the expressive tools that will succeed in capturing the cultural currents of today."

(https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/e2a905_aa59f14974e145fc9389843caa688b9e.pdf)

Discussion

Venkatesh Rao:

"Postmodernity is both a class of world processes that fall short of defining a world-machine proper (certain strains of post-colonial nationalism for instance), and an attempt to theorize and construct the world entirely in terms of adversarial responses to modernity. As such, postmodernity encompasses both natural modes of alterity (a postmodern term of art) and intellectual-political projects that attempt to make those modes legible and rugged, while simultaneously making the dynamics of the modernity machine fragile and vulnerable to attack.

For our book club, we will use “postmodern” in the broad, loose sense used in popular discourse, covering everything from the original french theorists to more recent American Marxist flavors. We will also use the term for historical processes (such as say independence movements, language/culture revitalization movements, various feminisms and late-stage manifestations in the environmental and social justice movements) that are usefully described by postmodern intellectual perspectives primarily because they constitute themselves with reference to those perspectives. It is worth noting that postmodern intellectual perspectives have been much more constitutive of world-processes in the last century than late modern ones, which have largely emerged as post-hoc narratives of decline processes already underway.

Postmodernity features proportions of energy and intelligence that are the opposite of those exhibited by late modernity. It is an intelligent ghost rather than an energetic zombie. It organizes very little of the energy of world processes today (though it lays claim to a great deal through energetic labeling and map-making), but the intellectual currents associated with it are still extraordinarily strong, decades past their peak. To the point that if you presume to think about world processes at all without using their preferred terms of reference (or worse, using and abusing them partially where useful), they will send representatives to knock on your door in the dead of the night and lecture you.

Unlike divergence, postmodernity does contest the civilizational space organized by modernity (it can conceive of no other), and is therefore in a zero/negative-sum relationship to late modernity. Postmodernity tries to override the logics that late modernity tries to perpetuate.

Principle: The postmodern project, I believe, is essentially complete and has been largely successful as an analytical and political project.

There is much to be learned by studying its discoveries and history. But there’s not much point to continuing the postmodern project, either through constituting world processes by its logic, or keeping the associated intellectual currents going. They’ve made all the discoveries they are going to. The paradigm is exhausted.

Equally, to the extent there are things to dislike about postmodernity, there is no point fighting it, as late modernity likes to do, because on most consequential matters where postmodernity pursued clear objectives, it has already won in ways that cannot really be undone or reversed.

One entailment of this position: the still-ongoing battle between reactionary politics and wokism is something like a cage match between an energetic zombie and an intelligent ghost in the mental model we’ll be adopting for the book club.

To the extent the concerns of either side remain live and consequential ones, we will look elsewhere for meaningful phenomenology to think about. Our assumption will be: If the divergence machine “solves” for social justice or environmental stewardship for example, we should not expect the mechanics to look anything like the ones postmodernity as a constitutive force briefly powered. Equally, if the divergence machine “solves” for some recognizable continuation of things like ethnic or racial identity and nation-state-based culture and traditions, it will look nothing like the solutions of the modernity machine in its late-modern perpetuations and life-extensions.

Our go-to move will be to treat the current war between Late Modernism and Postmodernism as noise to be filtered out as we attempt to decipher the workings of the divergence machine. We might retain problems posed by those perspectives, but likely not any proposed solutions. We will treat both as spent perspectives, as far as their creative constitutive capacities go.

Our attitude towards the intellectual legacy of postmodernity (in the narrow sense of a set of twentieth-century intellectual currents) will be cannibalistic: An occasionally useful source of frames and terms, and a historically consequential set of world processes through part of the twentieth century. Think raw material, not authority or influence. Ghosts can’t defend their corpses after all, or they wouldn’t be ghosts."

(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-divergence-machine)