Under the post-modern onslaught, all boundaries and distinctionsrapidly fall. Some of the losses associated with the collapse of traditionaldistinctions have been trivial, but others have been earthshaking, and thereseems to be no way to distinguish between the two in a post-modern context.People no longer know where the lines fall.
Some sociologists believe we are now moving into a new and verydifferent type of society. The social change, that began to accelerate 300years ago, has continued at such a pace that the theories and assumptions wehad about modern society no longer explain the society we find around us.
The main characteristic of postmodernism seems to be a loss offaith in the ideas of the Enlightenment. It is argued by postmodernists thatpeople have become disillusioned with the idea that we can use science andrational thought to make the world a better place. People have becomedisillusioned with the idea of progress. There is greater understanding ofnegative effects of so-called ‘progress’, such as pollution, environmental damageand damage to human populations.
We are also seeing the disappearance of old certainties. In the pastgender roles, ethnic differences, social class differences were all clear cutand people generally conformed to societal expectations. Today the olddistinctions are blurring and people choose who they want to be, and how theywant to behave.
Postmodernists also argue that other characteristics of modern societiesare disappearing. The big production companies making vast quantities of the same product are becoming more diversified and there has been a growth of small companies producing goods for very specialized markets. New social movements are connecting people across traditional class and ethnic boundaries; movements such as gay rights, environmentalism, feminism, and new religious movements. The significance of nation states is in decline. Today many multi-national companies are larger and have more power than most countries, and within countries more provision is being privatized and less is provided by the state. Employees are less likely to have long-term careers and jobs for life, employment is more uncertain and there has been a big increase in part-time, temporary and agency employment.
Despite all this evidence, the concept of apostmodern society is a very controversial one. Many sociologists accept thatsociety is changing a great deal but do not accept the term postmodern. Somesociologists, including AnthonyGiddens, prefer to describe society as in a stage of ‘late-modernity’.
Modernism always celebrated the new andconsidered ideas from the past to be ‘old-fashioned’. Postmodernism borrowsfrom the past and combines a wide range of styles together — a ‘pick and mix’approach. A good example of a postmodern building is a shopping centre calledthe Trafford Centre, in Manchester. This looks like St Paul's Cathedral fromthe front, a Norman castle from the back, inside one section is the deck of anocean liner, and in another is a Victorian palm house.
Distinctions between the cultures of thedifferent social classes have been blurred, for example by the use of opera asa theme tune for the football world cup. The process of globalisation has alsomeant the blurring of traditional cultural boundaries. Today Coca-Cola can befound in the remotest regions of the world.
Contemporary, or postmodern, society ischaracterized by a newfound ability to control the world of nature and worldsof illusion. It immerses people in a virtual environment of images andsimulations, and encourages the acting out of desires, including desires thatonce seemed off-limits to action and experience. Ultimately, it seeks to turnreality into a simulation and make simulations seem real, so humanity will havethe ability to control and create its surroundings at will.
How does postmodern society use this newfoundpower? It certainly has used it to enormous good. But it has also used it tocreate an emerging worldwide culture in which images, simulations, story lines,performances and rhetoric are employed to manipulate the public and sell itproducts, phony candidates and false ideas. Thus postmodern society turnsout to be a realm of illusion in more than one sense.
Stephen Connor says that the «concept ofpostmodernism cannot be said to have crystallized until about the mid-1970's…”.Modernity had received some strong criticism, and it was becoming more and moretenable to assert that the postmodern had come to stay, but it took some timebefore scholarship really jumped on the bandwagon. At this point it isimportant to distinguish between postmodern and postmodernism. Postmodernrefers to a period of time, whereas postmodernism refers to a distinctideology. As Veith points out, „If the modern era is over, we areall postmodern, even though we reject the tenets of postmodernism.
So exactly what is postmodernism? The situationis profoundly complex and ambiguous. But basically speaking, postmodernism is anti-foundationalism,or anti-worldview. It denies the existence of any universal truth orstandards. Jean-Francois Lyotard, perhaps the most influential writer inpostmodern thought, defines postmodernism as “incredulity towardsmetannarratives.» For all intents and purposes, a metanarrative isa worldview: a network of elementary assumptions… in terms of which everyaspect of our experience and knowledge is interrelated and interpreted.Metanarratives are, according to postmodernist scholar Patricia Waugh,«Large-scale theoretical interpretations purportedly of universalapplication.» The postmodernist's, it would seem, would tolerate having acoherent worldview so long as it is kept from being asserted as universal inits application. This is not the case though. The goal, so to speak, ofpostmodernism is to not only reject metanarratives, but also the belief incoherence. Not only is any worldview which sees itself as foundational for allothers oppressive, belief that one may even have a coherent worldview isrejected as well. Nevertheless, there are many worldviews around today, and thepostmodernist finds it to be his responsibility to critique, or«deconstruct» as they call it, such worldviews and «flatten themout,» so to speak, so that no one particular approach or belief is more«true» than any other. What constitutes truth, then, is relative tothe individual or community holding the belief.
As we have seen, for the postmodern thinker,there are no absolute truths or foundations to work from. Properly speaking,then, postmodernism is not a worldview per se; it does not attempt to constructa model or paradigm that orders reality; reality alludes attempts at conformityfor the postmodernist, and so he deconstructs all attempts at creatingsuch absolute foundations. Modernity and Christianity debated as to which viewwas true; postmodernism attacks both Christianity and modernity because theyclaim to be «true.» Christianity affirms certain necessary beliefsthat must be assumed in order to make sense out of the world (e.g., that thetriune God exists, that he is both transcendent and immanent, that the Bible ishis Word). Postmodernism rejects the idea that reality makes sense in anyabsolute fashion, and reduces any construction to personal or cultural bias.Truth is a social construct, pragmatically justified, so as to make it one ofmany culturally conditioned approaches to the world. Postmodernism, then, isnot so much an orthodoxy (a positive belief system or worldview), as itis an orthopraxy (a series of methods for analysis).
In continuing to removethe possibility of any ultimate knowledge, postmodernism confuses thetraditional distinction between the subject of knowledge (the knower) and theobject of knowledge (the thing being known). Man does not sit back andpassively receive knowledge about the world; rather, man's interpretation is,ultimately, the way the world actually is, as it is revealed to him, orto a culture. This confusion of subject and object has earned postmodernism thelabels of nihilism and relativism. Logic, science, history, and morality arenot universal and absolute; they are the constructs of our own experience andinterpretations of that experience.
Why do the postmodernists draw these conclusions?As we saw above the idea that reality was orderly and that man was simply apassive observer was called into question. Kant's «CopernicanRevolution» in philosophy argued that the mind «brings something tothe objects it experiences… The mind imposes its way of knowing upon itsobjects.” It is the object that conforms to the mind, not the mind to theobject. It would seem then that reality is what we perceive it to be. CharlesMackenzie observes:
If in knowing an object the human mind virtuallycreates knowledge, the question has been raised then, What is the externalworld when it is not being perceived? Kant replied that we cannot know athing-in-itself (ding an sich). The world, as it exists apart from ourexperience, is unknowable.
As such reality, as it really is, is unknowable.The „thing in itself,“ cannot be known. The only thing that can beknown is our personal experience and our interpretation of that experience.Since each person's experience is all that can be known, it cannot be concludedthat man can know anything in any absolute sense. All one has is his ownfinite, limited experience. Logic, science, history, and ethics are humandisciplines that must, and do, reflect human insufficiency and subjectivity.
Another reason the postmodernists draw theseconclusions comes from the fact that the existentialists, with their rejection ofrationalism and empiricism, focused philosophy on the human experience,especially as it is communicated through language. Language is the way manexpresses these experiences of the world, therefore to understand the world, asbest we can, we must look to what is said about reality. But subjectivism isall we can have since the best we can do is experience and interpret whatothers have experienced and interpreted reality to be, and so the spiralcontinues downward. Thus, for the postmodernists, any assertion of absoluteknowledge is seriously questioned and ultimately rejected. Therefore history isseen as a series of metaphors rather than an account of events as they actuallyhappened. After all, the one recording the events was writing and recording theevents as he saw them. Someone else may have seen it differently hadthey been there. In issues of morality no one particular view is seen asfoundational. Rather, each culture's, and ultimately each individual's, view onethics is just as valid as the next. This view is the basis for the assumptionsof „Multiculturalism,“ and the „Political Correctness“movement in today's society. Rather than affirming any one morality asabsolute, every person's moral persuasion is to be respected no matter what itis, and language must be revised so as to not favor any one outlook and thusoffend another.
Irving Kristol, a fellow at the AmericanEnterprize Institute, describes the current time as „a shaking of thefoundations of the modern world.“
Allen says: A massive intellectual revolution istaking place that is perhaps as great as that which marked off the modern worldfrom the Middle Ages… The principles forged during the Enlightenment …which formed the foundations of the modernmentality, are crumbling.
The collapse of Enlightenment Humanism isimminent, and the attacks on it are from all angles. From religiousconservatives to scientific liberals, the desire to overhaul thepresuppositions of modernity is a shared goal, although the motives differgreatly. Christians welcome the opportunity for credible public discourseconcerning their faith, and many scientists are eager to see a shift inscientific outlook that will account for the anomalies that modern science hasavoided. These are exciting times, times when the church should be alert.
In a postmodern world Christianity isintellectually relevant. With the demise of the absoluteness of human reasonand science, the super-natural, that which is not empirical, is once again opento consideration. The marketplace of ideas is wide open, and opportunitiesabound. It is important that the church understand these important times inwhich it finds itself. But in addition to opening the door once again to theChristian faith, postmodernism, with its critical apparatus, has a few lessonsfor the church to learn.
What is interesting is that postmodernism strikesat the very same thing God did: language. Without language, logic and scienceare meaningless; they have no application. As we have seen, its each man forhimself in his own private world. The arrogant, pseudo-unity that man hadclaimed to find was now just one of the many ways of looking at things. Logicand science were now relative to cultural interpretation. Like the people atthe Tower of Babel, modern man has been fragmented and scattered. There is nocenter of discourse any longer.
In this light perhaps the most significantcontribution of postmodernism is that it reminds us of our finitude. It remindsus that God is creator and we are his creation. It tells us that he must be thebeginning of all of our thinking, that apart from him we could know nothing.
For our personal life, postmodernism shows us thefutility of autonomy. It forces those of us who know Christ back to the basicsof depending on Christ for everything, whether it is salvation or standards.That in him we have meaning and purpose for our lives; he is the vine, we arethe branches, and apart from him we can do nothing.
To sum it up, postmodernism need not be seen as amortal enemy. In many ways it drives us back to complete and total dependenceon God. It reminds us that he is the foundation for every area of life, whetherit is logic or law. It shows us that there exist no neutral, impartial domainsthat we can lean on in addition to him. Postmodernism points out that we allhave presuppositions, and that no one is unbiased. We all bring our assumptionsto our experience; each fact about the world is theory-laden. The question thenbecomes, „Which presuppositions are true?“ The answer is clear: theChristian worldview is true. It alone is the only escape from subjectivenihilism, for it alone provides the necessary foundations to make the factsintelligible. This being the case, the Christian is able to glean what is goodfrom postmodernism, and reject the extremes.
Individualidentity is fundamentally dependent on the mediation of the others. The selfappears to be dependent on the other in its being. It is through intercoursewith others that one finds one’s self. I am, says Hegel, a being in myself, butonly by myself through another. The individual perceives himself, in aninseparable way, in relation to the others and in relations to himself, butwithout the intervention of the others he would not be able to perceivehimself.
Apart from beingdependent on the intervention of the others in producing his own understandingof himself, the individual is dependent on creating a positive image of himselfin order to endure himself and his surroundings. First and foremost, thepositive image of self-esteem should be brought about by and in the individualhimself, but it is dependent on the others’ gaze. Self-esteem is createdthrough action and negotiation with others, by committing oneself, by playing arole for the others and for oneself. In other words, built in to the identityas a process is a striving for self-esteem, and this self-esteem is shaped bydoing. Thus, identity is not only a matter of evoking an image of oneself. Oneseeks other people’s respect and confidence. In order to become something inone’s own eyes one must feel appreciated by others for what one is and what onedoes. It is not only a matter of just being there, but of being of importance,of making a difference.
As a result of these ingredients — technology,human ingenuity and our own needs and desires — we have created a society inwhich much of the culture and politics, as well as the economy, is gearedtoward mass producing, and consuming, simulations. It is a society in whichmany simulations are intended to be mistaken for the real thing. But it is alsoa society in which simulations that were never meant to be misleading often endup being mistaken for what they resemble, by accident, thus making simulationconfusion, like pollution and traffic jams, another unintended, and toxic,byproduct of technology.
Fortunately, as simulations extend their reach,we are developing new survival skills that help us to unmask illusions.
In societies where modern conditions ofproduction prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
The images detached fromevery aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this lifecan no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in itsown general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation.The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of theautonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general,as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of thenon-living.
The spectacle presentsitself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrumentof unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector whichconcentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that thissector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and offalse consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an officiallanguage of generalized separation.
The spectacle is not acollection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
The spectacle cannot beunderstood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniquesof mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung whichhas become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has becomeobjectified.
The spectacle grasped inits totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode ofproduction. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration.It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specificforms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainmentconsumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. Itis the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in productionand its corollary consumption. The spectacle's form and content are identicallythe total justification of the existing system's conditions and goals. The spectacleis also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupiesthe main part of the time lived outside of modern production.
Separation is itself partof the unity of the world, of the global social praxis split up into realityand image. The social practice which the autonomous spectacle confronts is alsothe real totality which contains the spectacle. But the split within thistotality mutilates it to the point of making the spectacle appear as its goal.The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the rulingproduction, which at the same time are the ultimate goal of this production.
One cannot abstractlycontrast the spectacle to actual social activity: such a division is itselfdivided. The spectacle which inverts the real is in fact produced. Livedreality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle whilesimultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positivecohesiveness. Objective reality is present on both sides. Every notion fixedthis way has no other basis than its passage into the opposite: reality risesup within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienationis the essence and the support of the existing society.
The concept of spectacleunifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena. The diversity andthe contrasts are appearances of a socially organized appearance, the generaltruth of which must itself be recognized. Considered in its own terms, thespectacle is affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all humanlife, namely social life, as mere appearance. But the critique which reachesthe truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of life,as a negation of life which has become visible.
To describe the spectacle,its formation, its functions and the forces which tend to dissolve it, one mustartificially distinguish certain inseparable elements. When analyzingthe spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacularitself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of thevery society which expresses itself in the spectacle. But the spectacle isnothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economicformation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which weare caught.
The spectacle presentsitself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It saysnothing more than „that which appears is good, that which is good appears.The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in factit already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopolyof appearance.
The basically tautologicalcharacter of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means aresimultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire ofmodern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathesendlessly in its own glory.
The society which rests onmodern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it isfundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle, which is the image of theruling economy, the goal is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aimsat nothing other than itself.
As the indispensabledecoration of the objects produced today, as the general exposé of therationality of the system, as the advanced economic sector which directlyshapes a growing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is the mainproduction of present-day society.
The spectacle subjugatesliving men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them.It is no more than the economy developing for itself. It is the true reflectionof the production of things, and the false objectification of the producers.
The first phase of thedomination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of allhuman realization the obvious degradation of being into having.The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated resultsof the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing,from which all actual “having» must draw its immediate prestige andits ultimate function. At the same time all individual reality has becomesocial reality directly dependent on social power and shaped by it. It isallowed to appear only to the extent that it is not.
Where the real worldchanges into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effectivemotivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle, as a tendency to make onesee the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longerbe grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sensewhich the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the mostmystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-daysociety. But the spectacle is not identifiable with mere gazing, even combinedwith hearing. It is that which escapes the activity of men, that which escapesreconsideration and correction by their work. It is the opposite of dialogue.Wherever there is independent representation, the spectacle reconstitutesitself.
The spectacle inherits allthe weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which undertook tocomprehend activity in terms of the categories of seeing; furthermore,it is based on the incessant spread of the precise technical rationality whichgrew out of this thought. The spectacle does not realize philosophy, itphilosophizes reality. The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculativeuniverse.
Philosophy, the power ofseparate thought and the thought of separate power, could never by itselfsupersede theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of thereligious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religiousclouds where men had placed their own powers detached from themselves; it hasonly tied them to an earthly base. The most earthly life thus becomes opaqueand unbreathable. It no longer projects into the sky but shelters within itselfits absolute denial, its fallacious paradise. The spectacle is the technicalrealization of the exile of human powers into a beyond; it is separationperfected within the interior of man.
To the extent thatnecessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle isthe nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothingmore than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.
The fact that thepractical power of modern society detached itself and built an independentempire in the spectacle can be explained only by the fact that this practicalpower continued to lack cohesion and remained in contradiction with itself.
The oldest socialspecialization, the specialization of power, is at the root of the spectacle.The spectacle is thus a specialized activity which speaks for all the others.It is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself, where allother expression is banned. Here the most modern is also the most archaic.
The spectacle is theexisting order's uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue.It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management ofthe conditions of existence. The fetishistic, purely objective appearance ofspectacular relations conceals the fact that they are relations among men andclasses: a second nature with its fatal laws seems to dominate our environment.But the spectacle is not the necessary product of technical development seen asa natural development. The society of the spectacle is on the contrarythe form which chooses its own technical content. If the spectacle, taken inthe limited sense of «mass media» which are its most glaringsuperficial manifestation, seems to invade society as mere equipment, thisequipment is in no way neutral but is the very means suited to its totalself-movement. If the social needs of the epoch in which such techniques aredeveloped can only be satisfied through their mediation, if the administrationof this society and all contact among men can no longer take place exceptthrough the intermediary of this power of instantaneous communication, it isbecause this «communication» is essentially unilateral. Theconcentration of «communication» is thus an accumulation, in thehands of the existing system s administration, of the means which allow it tocarry on this particular administration. The generalized cleavage of thespectacle is inseparable from the modern State, namely from the generalform of cleavage within society, the product of the division of social laborand the organ of class domination.
Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. The institutionalizationof the social division of labor, the formation of classes, had given rise to afirst sacred contemplation, the mythical order with which every power shroudsitself from the beginning. The sacred has justified the cosmic and ontologicalorder which corresponded to the interests of the masters; it has explained andembellished that which society could not do. Thus all separate power hasbeen spectacular, but the adherence of all to an immobile image only signifiedthe common acceptance of an imaginary prolongation of the poverty of realsocial activity, still largely felt as a unitary condition. The modernspectacle, on the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in thisexpression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible.The spectacle is the preservation of unconsciousness within the practicalchange of the conditions of existence. It is its own product, and it has madeits own rules: it is a pseudo-sacred entity. It shows what it is:separate power developing in itself, in the growth of productivity by means ofthe incessant refinement of the division of labor into a parcellization ofgestures which are then dominated by the independent movement of machines; andworking for an ever-expanding market. All community and all critical sense aredissolved during this movement in which the forces that could grow byseparating are not yet reunited.
With the generalizedseparation of the worker and his products, every unitary view of accomplishedactivity and all direct personal communication among producers are lost.Accompanying the progress of accumulation of separate products and theconcentration of the productive process, unity and communication become theexclusive attribute of the system's management. The success of the economicsystem of separation is the proletarianization of the world.
Due to the success ofseparate production as production of the separate, the fundamental experiencewhich in primitive societies is attached to a central task is in the process ofbeing displaced, at the crest of the system's development. by non-work, byinactivity. But this inactivity is in no way liberated from productiveactivity: it depends on productive activity and is an uneasy and admiringsubmission to the necessities and results of production; it is itself a productof its rationality. There can be no freedom outside of activity, and in thecontext of the spectacle all activity is negated. just as real activity hasbeen captured in its entirety for the global construction of this result. Thusthe present «liberation from labor,» the increase of leisure, is inno way a liberation within labor, nor a liberation from the world shaped bythis labor. None of the activity lost in labor can be regained in the submissionto its result.
The economic systemfounded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. Thetechnology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn.From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by thespectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of theconditions of isolation of «lonely crowds.» The spectacle constantlyrediscovers its own assumptions more concretely.
The spectacle originatesin the loss of the unity of the world, and the gigantic expansion of the modernspectacle expresses the totality of this loss: the abstraction of all specificlabor and the general abstraction of the entirety of production are perfectlyrendered in the spectacle, whose mode of being concrete is precisely abstraction.In the spectacle, one part of the world represents itself to the worldand is superior to it. The spectacle is nothing more than the common languageof this separation. What binds the spectators together is no more than anirreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. Thespectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.
The alienation of thespectator to the profit of the contemplated object (which is the result of hisown unconscious activity) is expressed in the following way: the more hecontemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in thedominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his owndesires. The externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man appearsin the fact that his own gestures are no longer his but those of another whorepresents them to him. This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere,because the spectacle is everywhere.
The worker does notproduce himself; he produces an independent power. The success of thisproduction, its abundance, returns to the producer as an abundance ofdispossession. All the time and space of his world become foreign tohim with the accumulation of his alienated products. The spectacle is the mapof this new world, a map which exactly covers its territory. The very powerswhich escaped us show themselves to us in all their force.
The spectacle withinsociety corresponds to a concrete manufacture of alienation. Economic expansionis mainly the expansion of this specific industrial production. What grows withthe economy in motion for itself can only be the very alienation which was atits origin.
Separated from his product, man himself produces all the details ofhis world with ever increasing power, and thus finds himself ever moreseparated from his world. The more his life is now his product, the more lie isseparated from his life.
The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulationthat it becomes an image.