17 - Modernity and Postmodernity in a Transatlantic Perspective

Summary

Translated by Tradukas

THE CONCEPT OF POSTMODERNITY

Attempts to define the present epoch have identified the symptoms of a shift from modernity to postmodernity in the most varied phenomena. These range from urban planning and architecture to various stylistic features in literature, theater, film, music, dance, and painting, to MTV, CNN, and the Internet. Computers, microtechnology, cyberspace, and cyborg fantasies are deemed to be just as postmodern as the threat of nuclear and ecological self-destruction, the morbid projections of Generation X, or a hedonistic yuppie lifestyle. Neoliberal economic concepts such as globalization and deregulation have also been called postmodern. So, too, have the revisionist philosophies deriving from the crisis of reason and dialectics from the passing of historical metanarratives and the concept of the autonomous subject. A growing skepticism toward systematic thought and binary oppositions has led to the rejection of concepts and terms of reference such as origin, center, structure, and causality, which are seen as “arbitrary acts of modernity.” But traditional historical periodizations - romanticism, realism, modernism, the avant-garde, and postmodernism itself - have also been called into question on account of their elusive and blurred parameters.

Given the plurality of possible interpretations, it is hardly surprising that the new zeitgeist is often accused of being arbitrary and confused. But the simple fact that it is possible to use modernist categories to explain these phenomena clearly shows that it cannot be postmodernity itself that is responsible for this arbitrariness and lack of clarity.