ABSTRACT
The theoretical perspectives surveyed – post-Marxism, structuralism, feminism – have been considered in terms of their different preoccupations in approaching the critique of society. One of the main attractions of the theory of postmodernity as simulated media culture, associated especially with the work of Baudrillard, is its specific delineation of new social processes that no longer operate according to the laws of industrial capitalism. Conventionally postmodernism denotes a transmutation of the aesthetic, detected by critics principally in the fields of literature, architecture, the plastic arts and philosophy. There is a sense in which Bauman initiates a postmodern recasting of the ordering ambitions of modernity, preferring to cobble together fragments of various modernist and postmodernist mentalities, orientations, dispositions and world views. Postmodernism no longer enjoys the cultural and political cachet it once did. Postmodernism has been explained as involving fragmentation, dislocation and dispersal.
