Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
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For this reason we need not be overconcerned about limiting postmodernism
to the realm of culture, since its practitioners themselves show no similar
compunction. Quite the reverse, postmodernism as an intellectual movement and
as a phenomenon we meet in everyday life is announced as something radically
new, a fracture with modernity itself. Let us say something more about it.
Intellectual characteristics of postmodernism
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Seen as an intellectual phenomenon, postmodern scholarship’s major characteristic
is its opposition to what we may call the Enlightenment tradition of thought
which searches to identify the rationalities underlying social development or
personal behaviour. Postmodernism, influenced heavily by Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844–1900), is deeply sceptical of accounts of the development of the world
which claim to discern its growth, say, in terms of fundamental processes of
‘modernisation’, and it is equally hostile towards explanations of personal behaviour
that claim to be able to identify, say, the foundational causes of human
‘motivation’.
Postmodernism is thoroughly opposed to every attempt to account for the
world in these and similar ways, all of which seek to pinpoint rationalities which
govern change and behaviour. The presumption of Enlightenment thinkers that
they may identify the underlying rationalities of action and change (which may
well go unperceived by those living through such changes or acting in particular
ways) is a focus of dissent from postmodernists.
This dissent is generally voiced in terms of hostility towards what postmodernists
call totalising explanations or, to adopt the language of Jean-François
Lyotard, ‘grand narratives’. From this perspective all the accounts of the making
of the modern world, whether Marxist or Whig, radical or conservative, that claim
to perceive the mainsprings of development in such things as the ‘growth of civilisation’,
the ‘dynamics of capitalism’ and the ‘forces of evolution’, are to be
resisted. It is undeniably the case that these and similar analyses are endeavouring
to highlight the major trends and themes – the main rationalities – of human
development. Postmodern thinkers resist them on several related grounds.
The first, and recurrent, principle of resistance is that these accounts are the
construct of the theorist rather than accurate studies of historical processes. Here
scholars who adopt the Enlightenment presumption that the world is knowable
in a reliable and impartial way are challenged. Their identification of rationalities
stands accused of being an expression of their own perception rather than a
description of the operation of real history. This criticism is a very familiar one
and it is axiomatic to postmodern thought. In brief, it is the charge that all
external claims for the validity of knowledge are undermined because scholars
cannot but interpret what they see and, in interpreting, they are unavoidably
involved in constructing knowledge.
The second and third points of resistance show that this is not a trivial philosophical
objection. This is because the grand narratives which lay claim to
demonstrate the ‘truth’ about development reveal their own partialities in so far
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