Postmodernity

Conceptual Overview

Postmodernism owes one conceptual foundation to Harold Garfinkel, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckman, who exposed the socially constructed nature of social reality, its negotiability, and grounding in language and social conventions. Another support comes from Hans-Georg Gadamer's notion of life-world as a communally produced assembly of meanings and abandoning the search for universal truth. Postmodernism is often understood as revolt against modernism, which is characterized by rationality, functionality, and efficiency. For example, in modernist architecture, buildings represented a certain degree of functionality maximizing efficiency. Rational design for a rational society was the motto for modernity. While optimizing resources, modernist housing projects became symbols of alienation and dehumanization. Mom and Pop stores went [Page 1284]out of business, and Wal-Marts and Targets took their place in suburbia. Postmodernity revolted against such totalizing forces and wanted to reverse course, hoping for a heterogeneous world where multiple worldviews are affirmed and celebrated without privileging one over the other.

There are many influential writers in postmodernity. French social philosophers Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, social critic and political philosopher Fredric Jameson, and French deconstructionists Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault may be the most recognizable among them. Providing a synthesis of their theories or views is not feasible in this forum. Hence the goal here is to summarize what is generally accepted as one of the most representative views of postmodernity, the one from Lyotard.

In 1984, an occasional text, La Condition postmoderne, originally written in 1979 by Lyotard at the request of Consel des Universite's of the Quebec government as an interim “report on knowledge,” was translated into English (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge) and became an instant landmark work in consolidating the arrival of postmodernism.

For Lyotard, postmodernity signifies a loss of confidence (delegitimation) in the modernist ideals of progress and emancipation, and incredulity toward what he called grand narratives of modernity. He challenged both the metanarrative of emancipation and unified knowledge of modern science. Examples of the former are (1) the Enlightenment narrative of emancipation through knowledge and equality; (2) the capitalist narrative of emancipation from poverty through industrial development; or (3) the Marxist narrative of emancipation from exploitation through empowering labor. The latter, the metanarrative of unification of knowledge, is best represented in social and organizational sciences in the Parsonian systems theory, which neglected pluralism.

Postmodernity is characterized by a rejection of these totalizing perspectives on history and society and by an abolition of representation in general. Works of art (or authorship) are not an expression of a single idea or some profound meaning. Theories or models where the interpretive schemes also involve a model of representation are criticized, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's and Karl Marx's dialectical model of essence and appearance, the hermeneutical model of the inside and outside, and the Freudian model of latent and manifest. Postmodernists do not like to narrate grand stories about the world, but only “small” stories from heterogeneous positions of individuals and plural social groups. In this context, Lyotard hoped that postmodern knowledge would expand our appreciation for differences and increase our capacity for tolerance.

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