Postmodernity Features: 12 Major Features of

Postmodernity
Some of the major features of postmodernity are as follows:

Postmodernism is a cultural matter, that is, a matter of changes in arts.. The two can be said to
inform each other to such a degree, in reality, that they cannot be separated. What we do here is to
enumerate some of the major features of postmodernity in this article.

1. Cultural relations or the politics of culture:

Postmodern thought is against modern art and architecture. The modern art is considered to be
highly influenced by elitism. It indicates a decline in standards. The postmodern architecture
dwells in populism; it is a manifestation of cheap populism. Characterizing postmodern
architecture, it is argued that it is regressive rather than progressive, reactionary rather than radical;
a sell-out of all that architecture should stand for.

Glen Ward (1997) makes the following observations in characterizing the cultural aspects of
postmodernity:

We can make up your own rules; culture can no longer be administered, there is no legislation
about what can and cannot be consumed. Modernists would bemoan this as a slackening of
aesthetic criteria. Postmodernists would agree but would say ‘good thing too’. They would ask,
exactly whose criteria were they in the first place? And why should anybody have taken notice of
them?

Postmodernity actually came to the field of art sometime in 1980s. It was during this period that
huge, splashy things became fashion of the day. Postmodern art soon got associated with a
pluralist, ‘anything goes’ attitude and an obsession with the past. Old styles and techniques were
reshaped.

The end of reality: Baudrillard says it is a society of simulations:

It is sometimes said that theories of postmodernism proclaim the “end of the real”. This era of
postmodernism has developed communications and the electronic reproduction of sound, image,
and text. Television has often been central in this area. What is worse in this postmodern
development of communications is that there have emerged doubts about the relationship between
reality and representation.

Baudrillard has developed a theory which says that there is nothing real in this world. Instead,
there are simulations, that is, carbon copies of reality and worse enough, there is no original copy.
Signs and images float. Through the media, we do not purchase commodities, we purchase signs
and images. And, interestingly enough, we consume these signs and images.
Baudrillard says that the things available in the market are heavily charged by signs and images.
The two combined constitute the representation. These representations have no solid ground of
facts, reality or history. Consider the example given by Baudrillard:

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You are watching on a video tape of a contemporary film, an image of a woman smoking a
cigarette. She looks cool, seductive, and fairly dangerous. Her smoking gives her this sort of aura.
This is something about the way she lights her cigarette…. You find this an alternative image.
Perhaps you would quite like to look like that yourself.

Simulations, therefore, are the fake, counterfeit and unauthentic reality of society. In such a
situation we might assume simulations either duplicates or are emitted by a pre-given real. In a
sense we might think that simulations and reality have a necessary attachment. But, for Baudrillard,
this connection has long since swapped, so that simulation can no longer be taken either as
imitation or distortion of reality or as a copy of the original.

3. Postmodern society is multicultural and incoherent:

One of the differentiating characteristics of postmodern society is its multiculturalism. Our

national leaders, when make a public speech, often start with the phrase: “We the people of this
community…” By the term ‘we’ they convey the notion that we are common people, have common
lifestyle and common values.

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But such a phrasing would not be acceptable to postmodernists. They argue that the community is
never ‘one’. It has varying ethnicities, feelings, religious followings and linguistic learning’s. It is
never possible to think of a community as a large family. There is enough fragmentation in a
society.

Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984), report commissioned by Qubec’s Counseil des
Universities, is a wonderful document on the state of scientific knowledge and information.
Lyotard finds out the grounds of knowledge and informs us how it controls the society. He says
that science is never a superior form of knowledge. It cannot find permanent answers to everything;
it only comes up with temporarily valid opinions, and seeks to solve merely immediate, local
problems.

There is splintering of knowledge because human beings in a society are never uniform. They are
multicultural, multi-ethnic. Thus, the science which is developed and created in postmodern
society is not coherent. It can no longer be valued for the contribution it makes towards human
progress.

Postmodern science has given up the idea that one day the sum of all knowledge will add up to a
state of perfect information. Lyotard strongly believes that postmodern science has become a mass
of incompatible little things with no goal other than to generate further research.
4. Rejection of metanarratives:

Postmodernists have no love left for the past. In the Indian situation, postmodernity if it is there, it
would at once, as Yogendra Singh would agree, abandon indologists who make all sorts of
generalization on the basis of scriptures and epics. As the postmodernists in Europe and U.S. reject
metanarratives, so will the coming postmodernists in India reject G.S. Ghurye, M.N. Srinivas and
other sociologists of this category.

As a matter of fact, when we are entering a postmodern age, one of its most distinctive
characteristics is a loss of rational and social coherence in favour of cultural images and social
reforms and identities marked by fragmentation, multiplicity, plurality and indeterminacy.

Viewed from this perspective postmodernism totally rejects metanarratives. When postmodernism
represents fragmented culture, how difficult it is for such metanarratives to survive in
contemporary society. Postmodernists have explained the concept of metanarratives.

The foundational thinkers have developed their theories which are universal and can be applied to
all the societies of the world. For instance, Durkheim’s theory of suicide has general application
for India and also Europe. Similarly, capitalism is the byproduct of religious ethics as propounded
by Max Weber.

Marxian economic determinism has universal application. And, with the same logic, functional
theory and methods have uniform applications notwithstanding the specificity of social. These
theories are, therefore, labelled as totalizing.

When the society is plural, multi-ethnic and fragmented, how metanarratives can explain its
structure and function. These narratives miserably fail to identify any fundamental truth
underpinning human society. They have anti-foundational attitude in their approach.

5. Postmodernity is deconstruction: Derrida’s post-structuralism:

Postmodernity is multi-dimensional. Each author has defined it from his own theoretical
perspective. Jacques Derrida is a poststructuralist and is, therefore, postmodernist also. He
characterized postmodernity by the concept of deconstruction and difference.

Derrida actually initiated the movement of deconstruction after reading Martin Heidegger in
1960s. This has influenced postmodernist way of thinking: “Deconstructionism is less a
philosophical position than a way of thinking about and reading texts: writers who create texts or
use words on the basis of all the other texts and words they have encountered, while readers deal
with them in the same way. Cultural life is thus viewed as a series of texts intersecting with other
texts producing more texts. This inter-textual weaving has a life of its own.

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Whatever we write conveys meanings we do not or could not possibly intend, and our words cannot
say what we mean. It is vain to try and master a text because the perpetual interweaving of texts
and meaning is beyond our control. Language works through us. Recognizing that, the
deconstructionist impulse is to look inside one text for another, dissolve one text into another, or
build one text into another.”

Derrida is basically a poststructuralist and his postulate of deconstruction is therefore structural

construction. He argues that though deconstruction digs up the hidden suppressions and exclusions
upon which texts are constructed, it is far from being an act of interpretation in the normal sense.

Deconstruction does not mean trying to root out what a text is ‘really saying’. On the contrary, it
tries to show that the grounds from which texts and theories seem to proceed are always shifting
and unstable. One way it achieves this is by recognizing the active role played by the invisible or
marginalized in any text. Another is by exposing a text’s system of imaginary oppositions.

6. Postmodern social identity is constructed by images:

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In the present era where we have reached postmodernity, the problem of the identity of individual
is passing through a severe crisis. The identity of the individual has gone through a serious
transformation. In ancient Indian society, the individual identity was fixed or ascribed.

One is born as a Brahmin, he is a vegetarian for being a Brahmin, he is also assumed to be a learned
person, his position in his kin group was predetermined. His enemy ties were also largely of his
past. The traditional identity elsewhere as in India also witnessed change during the modern period.

The possibilities of expanding identity witnessed within this period. Modernity involved the belief
that rejecting the shackles of tradition was a step forward towards human emancipation.

Postmodernism gave a new dimension to the expansion of individual identity. During this period,
social life is faster and more complex than it was in modernity. More and more demands are placed
on the individuals, more and more identities are paraded before individuals and they have to juggle
hard with the rapidly expanding number of roles as society starts to fragment.

Identity has now become an issue. In place of the serious modernist search for the deep, authentic
self, the individuals have a recognition, and sometimes a celebration, of disintegration, fragmented
desires, superficiality, and identity as something you shop for image is now all that matters. One
of the major characteristics of postmodernity is, therefore, to win over the crisis of self-identity
formation.

7. Foucault: Knowledge-power relationships are major attributes of post-modernity:

Michel Foucault is known for giving postmodernity a distinct identity. If Lyotard characterized it
by the rejection of metanarratives, Baudrillard identified it with simulations, i.e., signs and images
and Derrida introduced it with deconstruction. Foucault attributed it with knowledge and power.
He argued that there are several social institutions in the society including penal system, psychiatry
which deals with the activities of men. Foucault believed that none of these institutions is neutral
or independent. All these are tied up in the complex of power in our society.

The power, all through the history of mankind, is exercised through surveillance, monitoring and
other forms of regulation of people’s lives. For Foucault, the modern-day notion of the self is
bound up with, and inseparable from, the workings of such institutions, and so none of us can
claim to stand apart from the exercise of power.

He does not provide a theory of how naturally free human individuals are oppressed from above
the laws of any one dominant class or group. Instead, he proposes that humanity is simply an idea
and, that, like any other idea, it has a history.

The history of all social institutions is the history of power relations. And, where does power come
from? Power originates from knowledge, that is, expertise. In the postmodern period it is the
knowledge-power relationship which controls and governs the society.

8. “The Death of the Author”: The slogan is the idiom of postmodernity:

The postmodern society, which is known for its plurality, diversity, multi-ethnicity and
fragmentation, is also understood for having varying interpretations of the writings of authors.
Take an instance from Indian Hindi fiction writer Munshi Premchand. Premchand all through his
stories and fictions wrote about the Indian peasantry, which lived in poverty and died in poverty.

Today, there is no reason to assume that Premchand is exactly interpreted in this way. The present
peasantry is the outcome of green revolution and benefits from agricultural development
programmes. The postmodernists argue that a text (and for that matter, a novel, story or a poem)
moves form history, geography, and culture. It is in this context that there is death of an author in
postmodern period. But this requires a little elaboration.

In 1968, Barthes published a short essay called The Death of the Author in an obscure Parisian
literary journal. In 1977, the essay resurfaced in an English translation in the collection of Barthes’
essays called Image-Music-Text. Its original publication in French journal went unnoticed but its
translation reached to wider public.

It triggered a tidal wave of comment. Overnight it became a slogan of postmodernity. Barthes

wants to convey through his slogan that it is the language which speaks, and not the author. There
exists in individual author an idea, experience, sensation, or mental state. This occurs in the author
independently of any verbal or visual language.

It does not signify anything yet. It just is. Now, the author expresses his ideas by manipulating
language. In other words, his ideas are put into signs, words, images, etc. At the third stage, the
readers get the meaning of the author. The meaning is interpreted differently by the readers as they
are themselves fragmented.
In this process, the real meaning of the author fades and it is his death. The lesson of Barthes’
essay is that you cannot have an idea without any already existing signs in the form of language.
In other words, we cannot have a language less thought. Our ideas are restricted to what our
language has made available to us. Postmodernity is very much influenced by linguistics. It is the
language which speaks, and not the author.

9. The transformation of Marxism in postmodernity:

Postmodernists in a larger way have established that the present world has come to such a stage
where there seems to be no alternate to capitalism. Marxism died in 1989 with the disintegration
of Soviet Russia. Marxists have tended to see social class as the key site of oppression, and the
resulting conflict between dominant and subordinate classes as the basis for future revolution. In
this view faith is put in the proletariat as the universal class (workers of the world unite) which
will lead the way to socialism. Marx also advocated the theory that “the economic structure
determines the social and cultural life”.

The whole Marxian thesis of the revolution for socialism has been transformed by the Marxist
postmodernists. They have challenged the idea that any one class, structure or factor can single-
handedly explain history or bring about change. The ideas of Foucault, Baudrillard and others
reject Marx.

The post-Marxist tendency of these authors seeks a less reductive view of history and society and
try to formulate a more radical version of democracy than Marxism has often provided. It aims to
address political theory to a more chaotic social landscape full of fluid identities and diverse social
groups. It asks whether revolution is still possible in an age apparently without agreed values, and
whether radical gestures can have any effect in a world which seems able to absorb all attempts at
subversion.

10. Farewell to class war:

Social formations have undergone massive change due to modes of production. The society has
gone through Fordism to post-Fordism and mass production to flexible production. It has become
a consumer society. It is more capital-intensive than labour-intensive. Peter Berger argues that in
the postmodern society, the place of industrial labour has been taken over by the knowledge class.

This class is highly paid and occupies a place of status in this society. It is said that such a
development in industry has ended the primacy of class-based politics. Add to it the increase in
social pluralism and multi-polity of social groups. Jameson, a Marxist, also admits that one of the
most profoundly social phenomena is the emergence of a whole range of small-group, non-class
political practices – micro-politics.

These groups give rise to new social movements such as that of women, ecologists, regional
autonomists which take the role of class war. And, here is the farewell to class conflicts. The days
of labour unrest have now become the thing of the past.

11. Goodbye to systemic approach:

Foundational theories of Durkheim, Marx and Weber have their boundaries limited to system.
Parsons’ theory of system is a typical example of boundary maintenance. A system is a complex
unit of some kind, with boundaries within which the parts are connected, and within which
something takes place. Parsons distinguishes three systems: the cultural, the personality, and the
social.

The cultural system includes the values and norms which influence the individual’s choices. The
personality system involves individual’s motivations and need-dispositions that govern, along with
the norms, the choice they make. The social system is based on the interrelations between actors.
With the social system Parsons looked at roles, equilibrium and the pattern variables.

System has least possibility of change outside it. It has a strong tendency to pattern maintenance.
This approach, that is, the whole system theory is rejected by postmodernists. Its inherent tendency
is flexibility. And, flexibility is against system. What is this postmodern flexibility? Postmodernity
made a shift from mass consumption of Fordian type to flexible production.

In this shift, there is a new pluralism of products, and a new importance for innovation. In
postmodern society flexible manufacture is linked with innovative organization. In this shift the
focus is on the needs of the customers. And, the customer’s needs are ever changing. The
production changes with the needs of the customers.

For example, General Motors took nine hours to change the dyes on its presses in the early 1980s.
The Toyota have lowered the time to two minutes. The history of demand flexibility and innovation
in production clearly states that the postmodernity is against any theory of system.

Add to it, the rejection of metanarratives. Metanarratives are based on system theory.
Functionalism and conflict theory are, in fact, system narratives. Postmodernity, at least,
negatively has vehemently rejected system approach to society.

Its efforts to theorize the present broken world, on the other hand, has yet not yielded any hopeful
result. But, the battle is ongoing. Whether postmodernity succeeds to build a new social theory or
not, it is certain it has made a goodbye to system approach

12. Postmodern science is little science:

During the postmodern period, once upon a time, big science has become little science. Around
18th century onwards, i.e., modern times, faith was placed in science as the source of
enlightenment. For instance, instead of answering to religion as the guarantee of truth, political
and economic fields claimed to have the standing of science.

In sociology, all the founding fathers, Comte to Merton, tried to develop and establish it as a
discipline. It was assumed that scientific knowledge could (1) get behind mystification, and
superstition; (2) reveal the facts about the world, and (3) lead human beings to a brighter day. It
was further belied that science is progressive and universal.
Lyotard and a few other postmodernists demystified some of these assumptions of science. Lyotard
was, in fact, officially appointed to find out the state of knowledge of science. He claims that
around the end of the Second World War, these myths had collapsed.

It is the science which is responsible for the destruction of our environment; it is science which
has created chemical weapons and this leads us to believe that science may be anything, but surely
not progressive. Approaches like ‘chaos theory’, quantum mechanics have highlighted uncertainty
in measure. Because of these it has become harder to see science “as the activity of a rational mind
confronting a concrete reality”.

A new development has taken place in the post-industrial production. Research has made a place
in commercial enterprise as a result of which there has been rapid growth of computerized means
of information processing.

The outcome of this has been that theories and discoveries are now judged on the basis of
performance and efficiency rather than truth or purpose. Scientists are now primarily interested in
putting out work which will both generate further research finding and add to their own power and
prestige within the academic ‘market place’.