Assessment of the Contribution of Postmodernism to Our Understanding of Society

Assessment of the Contribution of Postmodernism to Our Understanding of Society

The idea of the modern began as a way of describing the ideas and

behaviour that emerged during, and contributed to, the decline of

medieval society in Europe.

There were three main elements in modernity:

1. Economic: This involved the growth of the capitalist market

economy, the production of goods for profit and the emergence of wage

labour.

2. Political: The emergence of the centralised nation state and the

extension of bureaucratic forms of organisation.

3. Culture: A challenge to traditional forms of thought by

rationality, and an emphasis on scientific and technical knowledge.

Sociology, as a discipline, is a product of the cultural aspect of

modernism. Modernism is a distinct way of thinking about,

categorizing, and describing and explaining the world. The origin of

modern thinking, and of sociology, was the enlightenment of the 17th

and 18th centuries. On this basis we can look at Postmodernism.

Postmodernism opposes each of the assumptions of modernist thinking,

1. Relativism; there is no such thing as valid or invalid knowledge.

2. Death of the subject; knowledge as control rather than liberation.

3. Grand theories are inadmissible.

It is a complicated term, or set of ideas, that has only emerged as an

area of academic study since the mid-1980s. Postmodernism is hard to

define, because it is a concept that appears in a wide variety of

disciplines or areas of study, including art, architecture, music,

film, literature, communications, fashion, technology and sociology.

It tends to concentrate on surfaces rather than depth...

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...emphasis on efficiency

of systems. For example, in education there has been a switch from the

question 'what is the aim of educating children?',to the question 'how

can we improve the quality of the product we deliver to our clients?'

Philosophy takes a back seat to efficiency. And secondly the victory

of capitalism over the predictions of Marxism. The project of the

perfect society has been abandoned. Individual pursuit of goods and

services has replaced idealism. Unlike modern theorists such as Marx,

or more recently Parsons, postmodern theorists such as Baudrillard

don't even try to be scientific. He does not even pretend that his

work is right or true. Postmodernism has had a considerable impact on

social theory because it has asked fundamental questions about

everything that social theory used to take for granted.