Modernity Modernity came into being with the Renaissance. Modernity implies “the progressive economic and administrative rationalization and differentiation of the social world” (Sarup 1993). In essence this term emerged in the context of the development of the capitalist state. The fundamental act of modernity is to question the foundations of past knowledge.
Modernization “This term is often used to refer to the stages of social development which are based upon industrialization. Modernization is a diverse unity of socio-economic changes generated by scientific and technological discoveries and innovations...” (Sarup 1993).
Modernism is an experiment in finding the inner truths of a situation. It can be characterized by self-consciousness and reflexiveness.
Postmodernity Logically postmodernism literally means “after modernity. It refers to the incipient or actual dissolution of those social forms associated with modernity" (Sarup 1993).
Postmodernity concentrates on the tensions of difference and similarity erupting from processes of globalization: the the accelerating circulation of people, the increasingly dense and frequent cross-cultural interactions, and the unavoidable intersections of local and global knowledge.
Contrast of Modern and Postmodern Thinking |
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Modern |
Postmodern |
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| Reasoning | From foundation upwards (book learning and linear thought) |
Multiple factors of multiple levels of reasoning. Web-oriented. (use of the web and collaborative/diverse thought) |
| Science | Universal Optimism (the sky is the limit) |
Realism of Limitations (limits exist) |
| Part/Whole | complex system can be explained by reduction to its fundamental parts (taking things apart) |
design is often argued to be an holistic enterprise (looking at the complex relationships) |
| God | through science and technology humanity is on a path of upward progress science has disproved the existence of God (express great confidence in the reasoning powers of mankind, and the empirical scientific method) |
denies the existence of an objective reality reality is in the mind of the beholder
(science is abstract) |
| Language | Referential (specific to an end)
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Meaning in social context through usage (meaning can be re-created) |
"Modernity" takes its Latin origin from “modo,” which means “just now”. The Postmodern,, then literally means “after just now” Appignanesi and Garratt 1995). Points of reaction from within postmodernism are associated with other “posts”: postcolonialism and poststructuralism.
Leading Figures
Jean-Francois Lyotard
“The Postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations--not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable.”
Jean Baudrillard
Baudrillard states that we live in a world of images but images that are only simulations. Baudrillard implies that many people fail to understand this concept that, “we have now moved into an epoch...where truth is entirely a product of consensus values, and where ‘science’ itself is just the name we attach to certain modes of explanation,” (Norris 1990: 169).
Jacques Derrida
Derrida directly attacks Western philosophy's understanding of reason. He sees reason as dominated by “a metaphysics of presence.” Derrida agrees with structuralism's insight, that meaning is not inherent in signs, but he proposes that it is incorrect to infer that anything reasoned can be used as a stable and timeless model.
Michel Foucault
Foucault postulated that everyday practices enabled people to define their identities and systemize knowledge. Foucault’s study of power and its shifting patterns is one of the foundations of postmodernism. Foucault is considered a postmodern theorist precisely because his work upsets the conventional understanding of history as a chronology of inevitable facts.
Schematic Differences between
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Modernism |
Postmodernism
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purpose |
play |
design |
chance |
hierarchy |
anarchy |
art object, finished word |
process, performance |
distance |
participation |
creation, totalization |
deconstruction |
synthesis |
antithesis |
presence |
absence |
genre, boundary |
text, intertext |
semantics |
rhetoric |
word substitution is based on similarity |
word substitution is based on contiguity |
selection |
combination |
depth |
surface |
interpretation |
against interpretation |
narrative |
anti-narrative |
symptom |
desire |
paranoia |
schizophrenia |
God the Father |
The Holy Ghost |
Metaphysics |
irony |
(SOURCE: Hassan "The Culture of Postmodernism" Theory, Culture, and Society, V 2 1985, 123-4.)
What is next?
"pseudo-modernism" -signifies a return to many of the characteristics of modernism, while combining specific elements of postmodernism
-conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or the cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product.