Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
condition. It is quite consistent to argue that we inhabit a postmodern society
without subscribing to postmodern thinking. What may be taken to be postmodern
lifestyles are manifested in hedonistic, self-centred (and maybe even decentred)
behaviours, in scepticism about definitive ‘truth’ claims, in ridicule and hostility
towards ‘experts’, in delight in the new, in pleasure in experiences, and in a penchant
for irony, pastiche and superficiality. All such may be taken as indicative
and even characteristic of postmodernity.
Zygmunt Bauman (b.1925) is the pre-eminent analyst of the postmodern
condition. Since the late 1980s he has published a remarkable series of studies
identifying and examining postmodern society. Though he marshals little empirical
evidence, his insights into contemporary society are perceptive. Bauman
depicts modernity as a time characterised by a search for order, a society seeking
stability and control under the aegis of nation states which looked after their
citizens, a period in which there was confidence in planning, and where it was
imagined that reason would bring about greater surety as to how we might best
arrange things. In contrast, postmodernity brings instability and insecurity, a
retreat of the state and the triumph of the globalising market which promotes
freedom of choice but leaves people apprehensive about their futures, suspicious
of reason itself and noticeably of the experts who make special claims for their
own access to it, replacement of control by the state by the ‘seductions’ of
consumerism, and a need for people to live with ambivalence and uncertainty
(Bauman, 1997). This ‘liquid life’ (Bauman, 2005) is one of constant reinvention
and possibility, full of potentials but with no criteria by which these might be
judged to be achieved and hence corrosively dissatisfied at every level, from the
intimate (Bauman, 2003) to the global where faith in a better future is absent
though it is widely acknowledged that humans are creating a changed environment
(Bauman, 2006).
Bauman sees postmodernity as related, if not reducible, to capitalism. Indeed,
the rip-roaring neo-liberalism that was unleashed by the collapse of capitalism
and the acceleration of globalisation is a key element of the consumerorientated
and flexible lifestyles that characterise postmodernity. Bauman is
somewhat unclear just how capitalism is connected to postmodernity, but his
acknowledgement of the market’s continued salience sets him apart from postmodern
thinkers such as Baudrillard who present postmodernism as a break with
all that went before. There are still others who argue more baldly than Bauman
that the postmodern condition with which we live today is a product of long-term
developments in capitalist relations. That is, there are underlying features that
may be identified by diligent scholars which help account for the changes we
have come to call postmodernism.
Some such thinkers hesitate to suggest a definite historical cause of the postmodern
condition. For instance, Fredric Jameson (1991), in a celebrated essay,
refers only to postmodernism as the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’. To Jameson
realist culture was a correlate of market capitalism, modernist culture (as in
Surrealism, etc.) is in accord with monopoly capitalism, and now postmodernism
is the culture with most affinity with consumer capitalism. Scott Lash and John
Urry (1987) present a similar mode of analysis, arguing that an emergent ‘service
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