Postmodernity as the Climax of Modernity: Horizons of the Cultural Future

Postmodernity as the Climax of Modernity: Horizons of the Cultural Future

ABSTRACT: Given that any society is endowed not only with a set of institutions but also with the particular pattern of self-reflection and self-description, postmodernity should be viewed as an epoch representing the climax of modernity and its self-refutation. Parting with traditional society, modernity represents the triumph of power-knowledge, the divorce between spheres of culture, the global social relations, the new institutions, the change in the understanding of space-time relations, the cult of the new, and the modernization process. While preserving the institutional set of modernity, the postmodern period casts into doubt the basic thought foundations of classical modernity. The horizons of the emerging cultural future should be viewed in the light of a positive synthesis of the postmodern reflexive pattern with the legacy of modernity.

The final of the 20-th century became an epoch of the radical reconsideration of the legacy of modernity. Beginning from the fifties, the new postclassical period of development of Western culture and society appeared as a specific reality that was more radically coined by the end of sixties-beginning of seventies when, with the growth of the feeling of a radical break with the past, a pattern of postmodernist cultural reflection obtained its definite popularity. Philosophers and historians of culture are intensively debating the question whether the coming of this period marked the end of modernity or its climax opening the horizons of the completely unknown future . In any event, the change of the pattern of cultural reflection looks very important and deserves special attention for it evidently reveals...

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