Postmodernism and Culture

1. Postmodernism and Culture Contextualising Globalisation, Culture and Lifestyle Lecture IV Daniel Turner and Jenny Flinn

2. Why postmodernism? • Postmodernity – another ‘buzzword’ of the 21st century • Postmodern debate sets the framework for critical, theoretical and philosophical debates in many fields (inc globalisation) (Harvey, 2000) • Links to social processes and cultural forms • Yet summarising postmodernism is like: ‘trying to grab jelly in a clamp’ (Bryman, 1995) • ‘Do debates concerned with post-modernity amount to little more than a theoretical blind alley or do they have a significant contribution to make to our understanding of the social world?’ (Miles, 2001:83) • How does postmodernity impact upon the cultural industries?

3. Modernism • Links to the Enlightenment, Protestant Work Ethic and Industrial Revolution (Turner, 1991) • Triumph of rational thought (Miles, 2001) • Quest for freedom, order and certainty. • Modernist culture: “leisure as occupying an observable space and time in society” (Rojek, 1995:38) • Leisure as a social function fixed to work. • Identity fixed and certain and tied to local and historical context.

4. Postmodernism • Modernity: ‘is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity; it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish’ (Berman, 1982:15) • Failure of modernity (Macionis and Plummer, 1997) • ‘Incredulity towards metanarratives’ (Lyotard, 1984) • Post-modernity or postmodernity? • The collapse of certainty and boundaries

5. Postmodernism and Identity • ‘the onus for the construction of such identities increasingly falls on the shoulders of the individual’ (Miles, 2001:95) • A product of globalisation • Giddens (1991) the reflexive project of the self • ‘the snag is no longer how to discover, invent, construct, assemble (even buy) an identity, but how to prevent it from sticking’ (Bauman, 1996:24)

6. Postmodernity and Culture • The dominance of imagery and the end of the ‘real’ • Hyper-reality (Eco, 1986) • ‘our humanity is based on nothing more than our ability to consume spectacular simulations of reality’ (Miles, 2001, p87) • The collapse of boundaries and meaning – cultural stratification and significance is meaningless? • Pastiche, re-hash, retro, nostalgia, ironic consumption

7. Postmodernism and Consumption • ‘Strollers’, ‘players’, ‘tourists’ and ‘vagabonds’ (Bauman, 1995) • Baudelaire’s (1960) ‘fláneur’ • The consumption of signs and the ego-centricism of everyday life. • Consumption as a way of life?

8. Critiquing postmodernism • A western plaything? • ‘On what basis does representation purport to reflect how consumers really interact with MTV?’ (Miles, 2001, p99) • A meaningless theoretical buzzword? • The ironic meta-narrative?

9. Alternative conceptualisations • Postmodernism or Post-modernism? • High modernity (Giddens), Liquid Modernity (Bauman) • ‘The compulsive and obsessive, continuous, unstoppable, forever incomplete modernisation; the overwhelming and ineradicable, unquenchable thirst for creative destruction (or of destructive creativity, as the case might be, of ‘clearing the site’ in the name of a ‘new and improved’ design; of ‘dismantling’, ‘cutting out’, ‘phasing out’, ‘merging’ or ‘downsizing’, all for the sake of a greater capacity for doing more of the same in the future’) (Bauman, 2000, p28) • We need order, we want ‘fixed’ boundaries and rules. • Emergence of a risk society as a result of postmodern globalisation • Finding the ‘ontological anchor’ to everyday life? – identity • Finding the ‘safe’ form of risk and danger – consumption • Finding the ‘meaningful’ form of hyper-reality - culture