What makes us postmodern? Are our psychologies, our attitudes, our mentalities towards the world postmodern ones? Or are we still just modern?
To begin we have to briefly return to the last video’s question: what is it that makes us modern?
The modern attitude was characterized by a belief in progress and improvement, in self-reflection based on evidence. But it was also defined by new time and space technologies like the clock, maps, and measuring devices. This allows cooperation because they standardize the world and make it communicable to others. But they also make the world more complex. We have to specialize, choose which path to follow, and trust experts more than ever.
But I think one thing in particular typifies the modern attitude – control.
The sociologist Anthony Giddens described living in the modern world as being ‘more like being aboard a careering juggernaut rather than being in a carefully controlled and well-driven motor car’.
We can drive to some extent, but the juggernaut also threatens to career out of our control. It might not even be in one piece; the carriages, wheels, drivers, and desires of the passengers all push and pull the juggernaut in different directions, at different intensities and speeds.
But Giddens insisted we live in a modern world, not a postmodern one – does that mean that someone is still at the wheel?
First, we should ask what we mean by control. We might think of having control as being free to decide what to do, or having the power to act, to move things, to command people, objects, or ideas, to make plans and then carry them out.
Throughout the Medieval period, it was kings and noblemen – and to some extent the Church – that wielded the most power, that could command armies and make laws. Control was in the hands of a few.
Since the Enlightenment, things have become more complicated. On the one hand, control was democratized as more people participated in making decisions. As capitalism developed, businesses had more control over resources and workers. An intellectual elite emerged that, with the aid of developments like the printing press, had control over ideas. The people had some power, too – the power to vote, the power to protest, the power to influence laws through activism or trade unions. But above all, it was the state that had ultimate authority through its monopoly on violence. When pushed, the state had the final say.
Most obviously, states controlled infrastructure, some key industries like mining, and they controlled businesses and people through regulation.
To return to Gidden’s juggernaut metaphor, states literally laid the tracks, decided in what capacity they could be operated, and in some cases actually ran the trains.
Three things, in particular, have changed this: the fall of the Soviet Union, the emergence of neoliberalism, and globalisation.
All of these things have weakened state control and planning, disempowered the role of intellectuals in making decisions, and strengthened businesses and corporations. Globalisation, as we saw in the last video, means that things on one side of the world – the price of resources, the shutting of a factory, a Wall Street crash, the eruption of a volcano – has direct consequences for the other side of the world. People are pushed and pulled around like puppets.
Individuals and politicians have less control over these events. A state regulator has less power in threatening taxation or regulation of a large company if they threaten to move their operations – quickly and easily – to another country. Prices and plans are determined by mining, resource movement, or an unpredictable war. There are so many factors, effecting one another, that individuals and groups cannot possibly have command over them. Economies become unmanageable. We become impotent. There is no master blueprint, no metanarrative.
Sociologist Claus Offe writes that, ‘The dominant pattern might be described as “releasing the brakes”: deregulation, liberalization, flexibility, increased fluidity, and facilitating… transactions on… financial real estate and labour markets, easing the tax burden, etc’.
Transnational corporations wield unprecedented levels of power. They’re able to influence events more than governments both at home and abroad, and have larger budgets than almost every nation on earth.
As plans, blueprints, and metanarratives lose their legitimacy, the state loses its legitimacy to do anything too. And grand old philosophers like Kant, Marx, or Mill don’t have any postmodern equivalents.
Instead, it is left to the people to decide. We deregulate, privatise, and dismantle the last vestiges of decaying welfare states.
Postmodern life is like driving a car in traffic. The traffic depends not so much on one person’s control, but on a million unpredictable choices – turn left, slow down, crash, change direction, change location, pick-up, drop-off. Speed limits, regulation, driving tests – modern phenomena – have some effect, but ultimately the factors that make the most impact are the ambiguous and unpredictable ones. We could take the self-driving car as a literal representation of the juggernaut metaphor. Is anyone at the wheel? The postmodern answer is no.
Algorithms, code, mathematical modelling, and stock market trends having taken control out of the hands of real people, real flesh and brains. Decisions are no longer made in the town square or at council meetings or in board rooms but instead are manipulated and directed in cryptic corners of cyberspace.
But this process effects us personally too. We no longer have one single map – one single plan or blueprint, like the Ordinance Survey Map – but are bombarded with different maps, different apps. There’s no universally recognised system. We have a GPS app, a city mapper app, a tourist map, a virtual mixed-reality map. The same goes for media outlets, weather apps, recipes, photo apps, messaging apps – we’re inundated with choices. We become paralysed by choice.
Time becomes disjointed too. Simple work hours with an inside and an outside – symbolised by the clocking in system – become blurred. We work from home more, we work on holiday, we work in coffee shops, at family outings answering emails on our phones. Job security is more precarious as companies move their operations around. Family time, holiday time, work time overlap. We’re effected more by things outside our time zones, halfway around the world.
Modern media ordered us – provided schedules, a few choices – the library organised the books into schemas. Now everything’s on demand, there is no categorisation process, we create our own, we’re the curators of our own experience.
What does this mean for our postmodern attitude? In short, we find it difficult to plan, to organise, to predict. We are both more in control of some choices and less in control of others. Authority and guidance become less trustworthy. We’re no longer baby-sitted. Life is much more chaotic.
So, what happened to the advice? To those who knew what they were doing? The experts we used to trust?
Planning the future, organising people to build, produce, and develop, is, most fundamentally, a matter of communication. Effective communication with others requires, of course, a common language, standardised measurements, codes, categories and agreeing to doing things at specified times.
The philosophers, politicians, and aristocrats of the Enlightenment shared a loose vocabulary, a set of assumptions and goals which meant an alliance between the state, intellectuals and capitalists was possible. Information and ideas were exchanged through a ‘republic of letters’. Philosophers helped the state design prisons, workhouses, cities and gardens.
The philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed a prison. J.S. Mill was a member of parliament. Revolutionaries wanted to act out history based on Marx’s principles. Modern life was meant to fit together like a jigsaw.
This relationship has fractured. In postmodern society, tastes, values, designs, and ideas are so broad, diverse, specialised and subject to quick change, that agreement and consensus becomes impossible.
We search for advice – the top one hundred films, best lasagne recipe, must see tourist destinations, whether to wear masks, which car insurance – only to find that no-one agrees. One choice is as good as any other. Individuals are left wandering and searching on their own.
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, famous for trying to understand postmodernity, wrote, ‘One can learn how to express oneself as a modern, liberated, carefree woman; or as a thoughtful, reasonable, caring housewife; or as an up-and-coming, ruthless and self-confident tycoon; or as an easy-going likeable fellow: or as an outdoor, physically fit, macho man; or as a romantic, dreamy and love-hungry creature; or as any mixture of all or some of these’.
No one can become an expert in anything. There is too much information. Ever more specialization is key. You can no longer be a historian but must be a historian of ‘children’s fashion in Vienna in the 1880s’.
Scientific findings change from week to week. Red wine is bad, then good, then bad but for different reasons. Masks are effective, then they’re not, then they’re effective again.
What does this mean for our postmodern attitude? We don’t know who to trust. We have no guidance. We’re constantly searching. We’re wandering in the desert, as Bauman has put it. We have more control and choice in many areas but no yard-stick, no criteria for making those choices.
Does this lead to nihilism? To paralysis? To pessimism?
Is the postmodern world inherently pessimistic? Does a lack of control, a lack of legitimate advice, and a lack of leadership lead to a despondent psychology?
When data can be interpreted in countless ways, when any situation can lead to a variety of results, when ideas, beliefs, and values can no longer be adopted rationally, when there are no guarantees of improvement, and no more teleology, no goal that we’re moving towards, no heaven, no utopia, no scientific solution to every problem, every illness, every malady, where do we go from here?
Science has created a new risk for every problem it has solved. Good intentions have unintended consequences. Nuclear power? Nuclear accidents and nuclear waste. Fossil Fuels? Global warming, flooding, lung disease. Plastic bottles? Litter and the devastation of ecosystems. Hospitals? Superbugs. Cars? Road Accidents. Biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons become a pervasive threat, existentially hanging over our heads.
Chernobyl, the ozone layer, Aids, terrorism, Mad Cow Disease – all made worse because of globalisation. Tragic events, pandemics, climate change, and financial bubbles become magnified.
Where the Enlightenment was characterised by optimism, postmodernity might be said to be laced with pessimism.
Postmodernity has demonstrated that no matter how much we try to order our lives, order society, order our plans, something always slips through the gaps. Biases, prejudice, the outsider, the thing that doesn’t fit into the plan – all persist. Rather than universal global emancipation, we regress to isolated nationalisms, fear, and anxiety.
Values become contested.
Marriage, nation, family, work, tradition, nature – they no longer mean what they used to mean, they’re used, misused, reinterpreted, deconstructed, and rejected. They become empty shells.
Take just one example: marriage.
Traditionally, marriage was not about love but about economic necessity, community care, and reproduction.
Love – falling in love – is a very modern idea. Modern marriage becomes about improvement – joy, adventure, passion – while some elements of traditionalism are retained for their usefulness. The idea of ‘building a life together’ is a very modern one – planning, improvement, control.
In postmodernity the value of marriage itself becomes questioned, something to be discarded, and people want fewer or no children. Divorce rates skyrocket. Polyamory returns. ‘Alternative’ lifestyles become popular.
In the same way, work becomes the gig economy as companies prioritise flexible employment, quick turn-over speeds, the ability to flexibly move capital and operations as conditions change. Production is no longer about large scale Fordist factory lines but smaller swappable components – and this includes people.
As we become victims of unpredictability, speed, and pessimism, philosophies like stoicism return. We all become responsible for our own lives. Identity becomes difficult – change becomes more normal than stability.
What does this mean for our postmodern attitude? We live in an age of psychological extremes. Pessimism and excitement, stoicism and utopianism. Scientific possibility and scientific risk. We are schizophrenic.
So where are we going if there’s no plan?
Modernity means the planning and building of factories, housing, food, medicines, and products based on simple needs.
But for Bauman, postmodernity is defined less by production and more by consumption. You are not what you do but what you consume – we’re defined by our music tastes, the games we play, global trends, accessories, clothes, even health and fitness become personalised.
Postmodernity is driven less by reason and more by desire, by adverts that are designed to pull us in and activate a craving.
Bauman writes that, ‘Seductive impulses, to be effective, must be transmitted in all directions and addressed indiscriminately to everybody who will listen’.
Shopping malls, Las Vegas, Disney World: they all seem ordered but it’s a façade, designed to draw us in, to encourage the short-term pursuit of pleasure with no real long-term goal.
News gets traction through clickbait, through appeals to emotion, to shock and awe. We read the worst news because it is shocking or the best because it is heart-warming, and whatever’s in between gets lost. It’s either ISIS or cats.
Politics is left to desires too. We like big characters, joke-tellers, with charisma and screen-presence. We’ve moved from politicians making plans based on their own ideas to politicians being led by polling.
Bauman writes that, ‘The composition of political platforms and the making of decisions on controversial issues are guided by the advance consideration of the relative popularity of the intended move and careful calculation of the anticipated electoral gains and losses’.
For the rest of us, politics becomes a matter of ‘campaign politics’. Goals become fractured into divisible elements rather than any overall ideology or metanarrative – stopping a train line, banning trucks from the Alps, campaigning for a new road – micro level issues dominate. Again, global issues and international projects disintegrate into nationalism, isolation, and local independence movements.
We’re driven by issues that are personal to us, that tug on our heart strings, by news that makes us go either awwww or ugghh.
What does this mean for our postmodern attitude? We’re desensitised. We’ve seen the funniest cat video and the worst atrocities. Yet we’re still led by our desires, by our emotions, and the world is too. Yes, we’re still modern – we still try to think logically and rationally – but emotions have returned – we have to go with our gut, pursue what’s most pleasurable, we search for new tastes.
Okay, this all sounds quite negative. Difficulty in planning, predicting, a lack of control and trust, schizophrenia, less confidence in guidance. More responsibility placed on our shoulders, both to look after ourselves and make our own choices. We’re seduced by our drives, by advertising, emotions are as important as reason.
How can we possibly make sense of this? Where are we heading? Bauman has written that, ‘history has become a playground of the contingent, the unexpected, the fortuitous, the capricious, the under-determined and the unpredictable’.
For the moderns, time has a definite progressive orientation towards bigger and better, a forwards and backwards, a future and a past.
Built in the middle of the 19th century, Leeds Town Hall has the word ‘forward!’ engraved in it. The planners were in no doubt which way forward was.
Sartre – the last philosopher of modernity – was interested in building orderly, progressive, free, and rational life-projects.
Bauman writes that instead, ‘the dominant sentiment is now the feeling of a new type of uncertainty – not limited to one’s own luck and talents, but concerning as well the future shape of the world, the right way of living in it, and the criteria by which to judge the rights and wrongs of the way of living’.
He likens being postmodern to being either a tourist or a vagabond, always exploring or wandering, looking around the next corner. We no longer have definitive guided tours or sacred destinations – we’re not pilgrims – instead we’re more like modern explorers searching our own subjective experience, our own desires, our own place – colonial explorers of our own minds. We’re all nomads, wandering, deconstructing, looking for meaning and belonging.
Bauman writes, ‘Both socially and psychically, modernity is incurably self-critical: an endless, and in the end prospectless, exercise in self-cancelling and self-invalidating. Truly modern is not the readiness to delay gratification, but the impossibility of being gratified’.
The postmodern condition defies any single interpretation. It is dizzying, contradictory, and by its nature difficult to pin down. This has been one of many possible narratives, and one that at times has maybe seemed pessimistic, but postmodernity opens up as many avenues as it closes. We might have no guides, no priests, less legitimate leadership, but the steel cage of certainty and oppressive authority becomes more difficult to justify and sustain itself, too. We’re pushed and pull around by emotion, desire, advertising, and consumerism, but those same drives are the ones that sustain the drive to create new values, new ideas, and new ways of living. We’re schizophrenic, uncertain, wandering, yet the future is – possibly – more open that ever. Are we destined to balance the mentalities of modernity and postmodernity – are we both modern and postmodern at the same time? Or are we just at the edge of a new horizon? Or is something new about to make both attitudes a thing of the past?
Sources
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity
Anthony Giddens, Runaway World
Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity
Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity’s Discontents
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity
