But 'culture' has another, quite different, aesthetic usage. To arbiters of taste, culture means 'the higher arts', or, to quote Eagleton again: "perfection, sweetness and light, the best that has been thought and said." If you are interested in the second usage, skip to 'cultural relativism', below, and move on to the postmodernism file in this folder.

Most people still use the word 'modern' when they are writing or talking about contemporary social life, and all but the most recent sociological texts assume that we are still living in the modern age which emerged from the religious and political upheavals of the 16th and 17th centuries:

and ‘freedom under the law’.

identity. (Throughout the modern period this view came under

philosophical scrutiny – from Kant to Foucault – a lot of it highly

sceptical. And most sociologists insist that individual identities are

'socially constructed'. However, the notion of ‘individuality’ continued to

receive popular approval.)

belief that became so strong that people without well-integrated

personalities were regarded as being mentally ill.

Education of the Human Race that human history was leading to

through reason and scientific enquiry in accordance with the ideas of 17^th

and 18^th centuries philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes, Hume and

Locke. (A belief in ‘progress’ logically implies another modern belief: that

others.

the world and human action within it.

the existence of certain absolute truths.

original sin and the inference that we are born to suffer.

Item B

Historical period Mode of production

Pre-historic Hunter-gatherer

Graeco-Roman Slave labour

Pre-modern ( - C16) Peasant / Feudal

Modern (C17 - 1960?) Capitalist

Postmodern (1960? - ) Post-capitalist

RAW MATERIAL : Natural resources Information

MAIN PRODUCT : Industrial goods Information

RULING CLASS : Bourgeoisie Technocrats

PRINCIPLE ASSET : Capital Technical Knowledge

Summary comment

'Postmodern' has subsequently become a widely used, catch-all term which embraces just about everything new. Some cultural critics use the word as little more than a stylistic adornment. What follows is an analysis of some contemporary phenomena; it’s debatable whether or not they justify the notion of postmodernity.

In the mid-C20, some philosophers, most notably Karl Popper, began to question the validity of meta-narratives. Popper said that it is impossible to accommodate a range of phenomena within any single meta-narrative (or 'totalising theory') without stripping each phenomenon of at least some of its complex elements - a process known as reductionism.

Jean-Francois Lyotard said that the defining feature of postmodernity is "incredulity towards meta-narratives". He believed that progress in scientific enquiry has, paradoxically, invalidated the view – held by most scientists – that a systematic knowledge of phenomena is possible. For example, chaos theory suggests an interplay between variables which is so complex as to defy holistic analysis.

But Anthony Giddens says that the view that a systematic knowledge of human action is impossible is "unworthy of serious intellectual consideration" and points out that Lyotard’s notion of epochal change – from modernity to post-modernity – makes no sense outside a systematic (linear) view of historical development. Lyotard’s thesis, says Giddens, is self-refuting.

Some postmodern theorists – 'postmodernists' – say that the notion of history as a linear process, with one epoch following another, is flawed because history is a hotchpotch which can't be sliced up into chunks. The most important elements of human life – love, happiness, aesthetic pleasure, truth, freedom – transcend historical boundaries and defy systematic analysis. (But see Giddens’ observation in Item D, above.)

Time will tell.

Like all ‘big history’ theses, Huntington’s relies on gross generalisations, in this case about the nature of cultures, which Huntington presents as monolithic entities, each insulated from the others. In the real world, as Said points out, there is exchange, dialogue, hybridity and mingling: "There are no insulated cultures or civilisations."

Max Weber said that in 'pre-modern' societies people are on the whole superstitious and fatalistic, but that in post-Reformation Europe we began to assume that science and rationalism could 'reveal the truth' and defeat ignorance, disease, injustice and oppression. This optimistic assumption – sometimes known as 'utopianism' – can be seen as the over-arching metanarrative of modernity.

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According to Sir Howard Newby, science is more powerful than at any time in history but, far from explaining nature’s mysteries, it seems to be making the world riskier. Newby, speaking at Leicester on the opening day of the world's oldest science festival in 2002, said: "Nasa can now land a probe on an asteroid. A geneticist can tell from the DNA in a strand of hair at birth whether a child will contract Huntington's disease in middle age. More generally it has been estimated that the sum total of scientific understanding in the past 50 years has been greater than in all previous history. Yet for all that we seem to know, the world appears to be an increasingly uncertain place."

Newby, who is president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, called his address The dream of reason brings forth monsters, after an early-C19th etching by Goya which expressed the artist’s feeling that the enlightenment had, paradoxically, made society more frightening than ever. Sir Howard said that this paradox remains just as resonant today, and that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington had brought the issue into sharp focus: "If anything, we have succumbed to a lack of faith in the notion of social progress and a suspicion amounting to an assertion that the growth of knowledge does not guarantee human happiness – rather the reverse. An increasing proportion of the population seems to distrust rational inquiry to establish both the facts and the uncertainties; rather they prefer their instincts, or even to celebrate anti-intellectualism."

This negativity towards the scientific method, said Newby, is in turn impacting on scientists whose core believe is that dispassionate research makes life better. Faced with popular hostility, they have begun to regard society – the wider public – as a mischievous irrelevance, something which hinders scientific progress. So the scientific community has retreated from engagement with society and society has disengaged from the world of science. The public feel that their role has become that of the hapless bystander, or at best the beneficiary of advances which the scientific community believes that it ought to want. The public once trusted scientists, and scientists could speak with authority. Now trust and authority have been eroded.

"We are dangerously close to Goya's nightmare of reason creating monsters here," said Newby. A litany of recent alarms – nuclear power, overpopulation, pesticides and cancer, the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, cloning, genetically modified foods and so on – have fuelled public anxiety. And the pace of technological change has created a sense of heightened uncertainty, even though the world is in reality a much less risky place for its inhabitants than it was 100 years ago. "Risk, uncertainty, vulnerability, trust – this seems like a lexicon of the human condition as we move into the 21st century," he said. "Ever since the enlightenment we have been prepared to believe that human progress can be achieved via the pursuit of knowledge. Now there are many who have their doubts. The debate over risk is in part a debate over the contemporary state of the human condition."

Part of the problem, said Newby, is that public understanding of what science can and cannot deliver has a long way to go: "The public stands in awe of the products of recent scientific progress. But science is not magic, and the scientific community does not possess a collective magic wand. Modern science has not removed human fallibility."

[Source: Howard Newby, The dream of reason brings forth monsters, The British Association Festival, Leicester, 9^th September 2002]

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Item G

Moral relativism can be seen as an unavoidable product of postmodern anti-foundationalism: absolute moral judgments have been replaced by ‘opinions’. Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher say, with dismay, that wholly to embrace moral relativism is to acknowledge that "even the assessment of a mass deportation and genocide becomes a matter of taste."

However, Jean-Francois Lyotard suggests a new type of foundationalism. But it is a version which offers nothing to moralists. In future, writes Lyotard, "legitimacy [will] reside . . . in the technological" despite its indifference to notions such as truth and justice. Indeed, "anything not translatable [into computer language] will be abandoned."

Lyotard's observation seems designed to irritate anyone with even the faintest attachment to the humanistic values of modernity (justice, truth, fairness, compassion . . .). Jurgen Habermas' essay Modernity: an incomplete project, which can be found in 'Postmodern Culture’, 1986, edited by H Foster, is a cogent attack on Lyotard's brand of nihilism.

Note: Within philosophy and the social sciences, anti-foundationalism is sometimes referred to as ‘postmodernism’ and anti-foundationalists are sometimes called ‘postmodernists’. The moral relativism of postmodernists brings them into conflict with Marxists who see the job of sociology as not only to describe social relations but also to inform social policy:

The notion that cultures are incommensurable was first put forward by Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) in the C18, so perhaps it doesn’t belong here. But the idea that it is impossible to judge one society as being better than any other – that all cultures are equally valuable and are not susceptible to critical comparison – had little popular support until recently. The doctrine is a logical product of anti-foundationalism (see above). Roger Sandell’s The Culure Cult: Designer tribalism and other essays (Westview, 2002), is highly critical.

Cultural relativism is the aesthetic counterpart to moral relativism. Just as moral relativists deny that there is any foundation for the view that one form of behaviour is 'better' than another, cultural relativists refute the claim that some cultural products are superior to others.

In the modern era, there was (is?) a widely held distinction between 'high' (or ‘elite’) and 'low' (or ‘popular’) cultural forms:

Andy Warhol's 'Factory Art' is perhaps the best known attempt at subverting this distinction. Through its silk-screened reproductions of icons, such as Marilyn Munroe, its facsimile paintings of soup tins, its crude 'home movies' and its piles of Brillo boxes, Warhol's Factory challenged the notion that there is a line between the commercial and the aesthetic. "Art? Isn't that a man's name," said Warhol, and his refusal to accept the notion of 'Art' with a capital

'A' has been taken up by postmodern cultural critics:

Postmodernists such as Bill Sugrue and Calvin Taylor describe the distinction between high and popular culture as "elitist" and challenge "all notions that we can discriminate between . . . cultural artifacts" – postmodernity features a multiplicity of cultural forms, all of which are equally valid.

This viewpoint is known as 'cultural relativism'. To the postmodernist, .the 'modern' idea that it is possible to identify objective criteria by which a work of art can be judged was misconceived: the notion of high culture simply reflected the interests of the elite (i.e. those in power). For this reason, postmodernists use the term 'elite culture' – rather than the value-laden term 'high culture' – when describing work held in high esteem by the 'art establishment'.

Summary comment

So, to postmodernists like Sugrue and Taylor, when it comes to the arts (music, literature, painting, drama . . .), everything is subjective: just a matter of personal taste – Tracey Emin's 'unmade bed' is as much a work of art as

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Picasso's Guernica. In fact Emin's art is, if anything, more valid than Picasso's because she is demystifying the job of the artist; undermining the

elitist notion of 'artistic genius': art stripped of its pretensions can be seen for what it really is – a job of work intrinsically no different from the work of non-artists. And once we get rid of the stuffiness of high culture, stop being in awe of 'the great artist', we can start enjoying art rather than being intimidated by it. In Sugrue’s and Taylor's words, critics of popular

The proliferation of pap (ephemeral, trivial and tatty cultural products) is one of the most striking features of contemporary life: The Daily Sport, boy bands, Big Brother and The Jerry Springer Show are classic products of the postmodern pap industry. The kitsch artist Jeff Koons summed it up when he presented himself as a punk school teacher standing in front of a blackboard bearing the message EXPLOIT THE MASSES, BANALITY AS SAVIOUR.

If you’re interested in the idea that culture exists on different levels, you might start with T.S. Eliot's Notes towards the Definition of Culture and move on to Richard Hoggart's The Way We Live Now (1996). Perhaps the best antidote to Eliot's disdain for mass culture is John Carey's (1992) The Intellectuals and the Masses. The contribution of Black and Asian culture to popular western culture is looked at in the ethnicity file in the social differentiation folder.

In the early chapters of Capital, Karl Marx showed how capitalism was turning human relations into a cash nexus, rendering one human being as an object, or commodity, in the eyes of another.

Frederic Jameson argues that the process of commoditization has been both prolonged and pernicious, so that all things – not only human relations – are deemed to have value only after they have been transformed into commercial products. Jameson is particularly concerned about the way in which "aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally". But the notion of commoditization can also be applied to other cultural forms which were once considered to have a value that transcended the market place. One of Naomi Klein’s targets in her seminal work, No Logo, is the way in which ‘branding’ – a prime signifier of commoditization – has been creeping into areas most people feel should be above and beyond commerce, such as hospitals, educational establishments and other public services and spaces.

Some writers see cultural multiplicity as a positive social development:

The French postmodernist, Jean-Francois Leotard asserted that multiplicity is desirable because 'invention is always born of dissention'. And there is little doubt that there is now more choice than at any time in the past. Individuals can make a selection from a variety of family types, religions, moral codes, leisure pursuits, political movements, musical forms, youth styles and forms of sexual expression. Anything goes.

Cultural pluralism has increased the scope for difference and 'otherness' which, according to Huyssens, has benefited those such as ethnic minorities and gays who in the past have been 'othered' or excluded from notions of normality. Gilligan welcomes the plurality of postmodernity because it allows sub-cultural groups to both develop their own forms of expression and place them in the public domain.

In The Risk Society (Sage, 1992), Ulrich Beck claims that we now inhabit a risk society. As our lives become increasingly unsettled by technological change, the fundamental organisational principle of most lifestyles becomes the avoidance of risk. In Culture of Fear (Continuum, 2002), Frank Furedi points out that objectively we are healthier and safer than we have ever been. But we are also more alarmed than ever by what he calls the ‘theoretical risks’ attached to MMR vaccines, mobile phones, long-haul air travel, GM foods and so on. And this fear of danger from without means that people have stopped believing that they have control over their own lives: "the new role models are those who can suffer," says Ferudi.

• Theming.
• De-differentiation of consumption (the mall as a place of entertainment, the leisure park as a place for shifting goods).
• Merchandising (selling spin-offs).
• The use of 'emotional labour' (smile at the punters).

• Efficiency (get their money and get them out).
• Calculability (it's the amount that matters - large fries, A level points, throughput of hospital patients . . .) If it can't be counted, it doesn't count.
• Predictability (it's got to be the same everywhere – the Big Mac, the literacy hour, oh so smooth, oh so boring nitrokeg beer . . .).
• De-skilling (all you have to do is turn the machine on and off, teach phonics, tick the box . . .).

Throughout modernity, philosophies (from Descartes' Cogito ergo sum to Sartre's existentionalism) relied on the possibility of the autonomous, self-conscious, self-determining, rational self. Baudrillard says that a world dominated by images has robbed each of us of this possibility. We are no longer in control of our existences.

However, it's possible to draw very different inferences from recent advances in information technology, and to conclude that the scope for existential choice has been enhanced rather than eliminated :

(a) We can now 'surf' and 'zap' our way to more information and entertainment than at any time in the past. As Lyotard observes, knowledge in the postmodern world ceases to be 'simply a tool of the authorities'. That governments fear the freer flow of information through non-centralised communication networks is shown by their desire to control the internet by means which came close in the U.S.A. to breaching the First Amendment before the intervention of the courts.

(b) Sociological research into 'uses and gratification' indicates that consumers manipulate the mass media to suit their own ends, and recent innovations - such as interactive video - would seem to have enhanced their ability to do so. Aficionados of cyberspace – in or out of their teledildonic suits – claim that they control the medium and are not controlled by it.

SIGNIFIER SIGNIFIED

The dominant voice in the early years of postmodernist thinking was Michel Foucault, who argued the merits of 'proliferation, juxtaposition and disjunction'. [Foucault M, 1972, The Archeology of Knowledge] The most chic of the postmodernists was Jean-Francois Lyotard, and when an English translation of his The Postmodern Condition : a Report on Knowledge was published in 1984 the concept of 'postmodernity' entered the lexicon of British sociology. At a time of apparent social fragmentation, it is not surprising that Lyotard captured the sociological imagination: to paraphrase David Harvey, he wallowed in the chaotic currents of change. [Harvey D, 1990, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1990]

• Is history a linear process or a hotchpotch? And if it isn’t linear, is the concept of ‘postmodernity’ itself a logical absurdity, suggesting as does a linear progression from modernity?

• Have we become detached in the present or do postmodern cultural forms help us to engage with the past?

• Has the impact of developments in the media and information technology been benign or deleterious (Lyotard v Baudrillard)?

• Are the benefits of globalisation outweighing the costs?

• Is the dynamic of globalisation centralising or decentralising?

• Are social groups becoming less cohesive or is it that traditional networks are giving way to new communities?

• Have cultural developments been destructive of the self or liberating?

• Are we increasingly mere 'subjects', or have recent developments increased our reflexive powers?

• Is the proliferation of consumer goods making members of society more conformist and passive or more discriminating and potentially rebellious?

• Might postmodernity revitalise folk, or will it bolster mass culture?

• There's nothing new about intertextuality – for example Ulysses is regarded as a classic modern text even though Joyce juxtaposes elements from the literary novel with steamy romantic fiction and journalism.

• The idea that events cannot be sequentially ordered (history as a hotchpotch – see above) is hardly original. JB Priestley, for one, was obsessed with the idea that time does not run smoothly from A to B – a central theme of his most famous play, An Inspector Calls, is that human narratives are non-linear.

• People have always believed that society is less cohesive than it was in their grandparents' day.

• Globalisation was a feature of empire (and Marshall Mcluhan came up with the idea of a 'global village' over forty years ago).

"What appears on the one level as the latest fad, advertising pitch and hollow spectacle is part of a slowly emerging cultural transformation in Western societies, a change in sensibility for which the term 'postmodern' is actually, at least for now, wholly adequate." – Huyssens A, 1984, Mapping the post-modern, 1984, in New German Critique, 33

Pick a view

"We are surrounded by an ecstasy of communication and that communication is sickening." – Jean Baudrillard, La Societe de Consommation, 1970