Postmodernity

Although postmodernity is an intellectual construct, many critics argue that it provides the cultural logic that undergirds economic globalization—especially globalized free enterprise. The term postmodernity suggests that it is a late 20th-century replacement for 20th-century modernism, but there has always been an argument regarding whether postmodernity signified a shift to an entirely new paradigm or whether it was only some new expression of modernity itself, just as 20th-century modernism was viewed as a reaction to and extension of Enlightenment modernity.

There is little agreement on basic definitions of postmodernity, nor are there agreed-to neutral descriptions. What seems to endure as traits of the postmodern are an inevitable mediation of reality by humans but not a denial of reality; the absence of a universally accepted universal rule of judgment; [Page 1366]the arbitrary or imposed connection of word and world; a narrated/mediated view of self, time, reason, truth, morals, art, justice, history, and progress; a view of fact and objectivity as culturally affected; and a replacement of one ultimately discoverable reality with multiple realities that may be narrated variously over time.

In reference to globalization, there is very little of the postmodern that has not been adopted and massaged to suit the needs of a globalized free enterprise. One could say, as Fredric Jameson has, that postmodernity is the cultural logic of globalized capitalism—but only arguably so—in the same fashion that Enlightenment Modernity can be considered the cultural logic of the nation-state, colonialism, imperialism, vertical corporate organization, universities, the Cold War, and the scientific method.

This is an arguable contention because postmodern and its cognates have gone from vogue terms signifying some attempt to capture a movement beyond late modernity to shunned terms empty of meaning and reprehensible in their attack on meaning itself. Although the postmodern attitude and style in art and literature—postmodernism—is itself a discernible movement, postmodernity as a new paradigm representing a new global imaginary had found scant discursive accommodation and after 9/11 was dismissed. The charge here emerged from postmodernity's failure to offer criteria by which the terrorist attack could be universally judged as evil. Such failure implicitly argued for a possible rationality or moral justification for the attack. Thus, after 9/11 and the continued globalization of a free market capitalism totally unbridled after the collapse of the Soviet Union, postmodernity not only did not look like the cultural mind-set out of which globalization grew but also it seemed irrelevant, counterproductive, and insidious in regard to all aspects of globalization.

If one leaves the stage of contesting discourse and observes practices, it is possible to see how the postmodern attitude has, however, enabled globalization. Consider the expansion from personal, social, and national identity to difference and otherness. Our willingness to question the nature of our reasoning and the identity it creates has led to an equal willingness to consider their reasoning and the nature of their difference. Multiculturalism rests on this change in awareness as we no longer seek to colonize and imperialize within the superiority of our own rationality and morality. The concept of “opening new markets” and the subsequent growth in profits is enabled and enhanced by the postmodern opening of new credible realities, which itself is the result of opening identity beyond the borders of one's own culture. We consume rather than resist difference, a transformation that grounds the transnationalization of capitalism.

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