Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
Dadaism, Surrealism, Atonalism and so on – which themselves stood in opposition
to classical culture. Modernism refers to a range of movements in painting,
literature and music which are distinguished from classical forms in that the
latter were committed to producing culture which was determinedly representational.
Think, for instance, of the ‘great tradition’ of nineteenth-century realist
English novelists (Dickens, Eliot, Hardy), all dedicated to telling a story which
was clear and evocative, ‘like real life’, or consider so much painting of this era
which was portraiture, aiming to produce accurate likenesses of their subjects.
Modernist writers such as Joyce and painters such as Picasso broke with these
predecessors.
With regard to postmodernism there are at least two difficulties to be encountered
here. The first concerns the matter of chronology. Modernity commences
around the mid-seventeenth century in Europe, while Modernism is very much
more recent, and that which it opposed – classical culture – was itself a product
of the period of modernity. With modernity predating Modernism, plus modernity
being a concept that embraces an extraordinary range of changes from
factory production to ways of thought, the question of Modernism’s relationship
to modernity is problematical and is at the least a source of serious conceptual
confusion. Is modernism/postmodernism a subsidiary element of the modernity/
postmodernity divide?
The second problem is that postmodernism – as we shall see – does not
announce a decided break with Modernist cultural principles, since at the core
of postmodernism is a similar refusal of representational culture. Were one to
restrict oneself to a cultural notion of postmodernism it would be possible to
argue that the implications of the ‘post’ designation are relatively minor, restricted
to relatively few areas of life and in all essentials building upon the premises of
Modernism. Such a conception is much less grand and ambitious than the
announcement of postmodernity which rejects modernity tout court.
Distinguishing modernity/postmodernity and modernism/postmodernism
might appear useful in so far as it could allow us to better understand the orientation
of particular contributions to debates. Unfortunately, however, it is of little
practical help because most of the major contributors to the debate about postmodernism,
while they do indeed focus upon cultural phenomena, by no means
restrict themselves to that. Quite the contrary, since for them the cultural is
conceived to be of very much greater significance now than ever before, they
move on to argue that postmodernism is a break with modernity itself. Hence
very quickly postmodern thinkers move on from discussions of fashions and
architecture to a critique of all expressions of modernity in so far as they claim
to represent some ‘reality’ behind their symbolic form. For example, postmodern
thinkers reject the pretensions of television news to ‘tell it like it is’, to represent
‘what’s really going on’, just as quickly as they reject the pretensions of social
science to amass incrementally accurate information about the ways in which
people behave. From the cultural realm wherein it punctures claims to represent
a reality in symbolic forms to the presumptions of thinkers to discover the major
dimensions of change, postmodernism insists on the radical disjuncture of the
present with three centuries and more of thought.
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