Modern and postmodern

What is the modern, and the postmodern? And, why does this matter? What was the controversy about? For it was a controversy; and like others it may have generated more heat than enlightenment. Postmodern versus modern was the key debate in social theory from the 1980s on. In retrospect, it might be seen as a symptom of significant transformations within modernity itself. Likely it represented the anxiety of our age in that moment, and the need to name it. In an even larger proliferation of ways, we now mostly call this anxiety “globalization,” though even the heat has gone out of that, too; what originally concerned us as globalization was loss, which now increasingly has been turned into the hope of “gain,” that even the wretched of the earth will cheer up if they drink up. What was the fuss about? There was a sense among intellectuals, anyway, that our world was changing; that

there was a sea change, that the old modern ways would no longer do, that if we were still modern we should choose no longer to be. There was a sense of restlessness, of the need to begin anew. The controversy over the idea of the postmodern was clearly one over naming, over

naming our worlds, and ourselves, and of performing this act negatively, against the image of the postwar boom, Fordism, suburbia, the one-dimensional society of that abundance that grew into the 1960s and kept growing thereafter. Whether the postmodern itself is in any way responsible for this or not, the anxiety has in the meantime often turned into celebration, skepticism, into indifference as the progress-narrative of modernity is enthusiastically embraced throughout the world, not least in China and India. What this signals is that the idea of modernization still remains moot. The notion of progress through growth and development has somehow been revived unscathed even though the ecological scene has darkened considerably. Meantime, the semantics of modernity and modernism, kindred yet not identical, also still survive to extend the conceptual confusion. Conventionally, modernity is understood as a philosophical or sociological term which

refers to the idea that we moderns make ourselves, that societies self-constitute their forms, structures, institutions, and relationships. We make our worlds, large and small. And if we do not like the results, we believe we can remake them. Even if we fall easily

back on reassurances about evil and human nature, we know that we can do better, that our social arrangements are at least in principle open. Anticipated by humanism, championed by the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment, modernity is viewed as coming historically closer to us with the Age of Revolutions-Industrial, French, American. Modernity comes to mean industrial, though modernization also means more than that, and modernization theory often presumes that industrialization brings all the other advantages of liberal-democratic development with it (not so). Modernism, in contrast, is less often identified as the culture of modernity than as the

aesthetic movement that becomes especially visible around the First World War and mainstreamed with more prominence into the 1960s. Associated in writing with Woolf and Joyce, in architecture with Corbusier, international style, and functionalism, in art with Picasso and Dada, modernism has a whole series of later correlates in industry, reflecting standardization and sleek design, from aerodynamic cars to flying refrigerators. Its high point can be best seen in an artist like Warhol, where avant-garde and mass consumption of repetitive icons merge. Coca-Cola rules (Gideon 1948; Conrad 1998; Gay 2008). The postmodern is usually identified as a reaction against modernism, rather than

modernity. In architecture, for example, functionalism is replaced by novelty, folly, dual-coding, ornament, pastiche; but these features might also be viewed as playfully (or earnestly) modernist. The postmodern involves an aspect of “up yours!” which results in the wider sense that “anything goes!” Semantically, the postmodern might then be identified as the critical rejection of tradition, rather than of modernity; but then there are also earlier traditions of the rejection of modernity, such as romanticism, which complicate all this reception and controversy. The postmodern also coincides with a Western sense of “being after”; there are many

posts, including postindustrialism, postcapitalism, postsocialism, postnationalism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism. The idea of the critique of progress might more precisely be called post-Enlightenment. But this then begs the question whether any of us can step out of modernity, especially in the West. To reject the modern may be impossible, not least because modernity is always anyway a mixed form, itself necessarily combining cultures of past, present, and future. And it is always changing. Modernity might be what Habermas called the unfulfilled project because it is unfulfillable; we are always carrying different traditions, some chosen, some inherited (Habermas 1989). Or as Bruno Latour put it, in a different register, we have simply never been thoroughly modern at all (Latour 1993). “Modernity” always necessarily includes the “premodern,” and the postmodern cannot escape either of these. Central to all of this, finally, is the idea of the decline or exhaustion of the West. If we

do not progress, we decline, or else we are doomed to repetition. Each of the three scenarios is plausible. At best, we understand the world better, but no longer claim to know how to better it. Yet the new still continues; innovation and creation still persist. The postmodern is, or was, not only a refiguration of romanticism, reacting against its own image of modernity as hard-headed Enlightenment, but it was also that (Beilharz 1994; Murphy and Roberts 2004). This much by way of introduction. In order better to map the controversy, we

need to enter the labyrinth of some of its key arguments and sensibilities, here by visiting the views of some of its more eloquent and central interlocutors: Jean-François Lyotard, Ferenc Fehér and Agnes Heller, Zygmunt Bauman, Fredric Jameson, and David Harvey.