Theory of Postmodernity

Abstract

This chapter will begin by discussing the main features of postmodern society and the difference between “postmodernity” and “postmodernism.” Immediately after, it introduces De Saussure’s structuralism and Derrida’s poststructuralism.

This chapter will primarily focus on the ideas of six authors: Bell, Baudrillard, Bauman, Maffesoli, Jameson, and Foucault. The text will also include the perspectives of many other theorists, including Ritzer, Giddens, Chomsky, Harvey, Ogburn, Robertson, Albrow, Pieterse, Hannerz, Albrow, Wallerstein, Barber, Toynbee, Hardt and Negri, and Virilio.

Introduction

Postmodern social theory studies the changes in modern society to understand whether it has transformed into a new type of social organization. This chapter will begin by discussing the main features of postmodern society and the difference between “postmodernity” and “postmodernism.” Immediately after, it introduces De Saussure’s Structuralism and Derrida’s Poststructuralism.

This chapter will primarily focus on the ideas of six authors: Bell, Baudrillard, Bauman, Maffesoli, Jameson, and Foucault. However, we will also mention the perspectives of many other theorists. Some of them are postmodern, while others are not. Nevertheless, all of these authors will help us better understand the strengths and limitations of postmodern theory. Additionally, we will examine the views of Ritzer, Giddens, Chomsky, Harvey, Ogburn, Robertson, Albrow, Pieterse, Hannerz, Albrow, Wallerstein, Barber, Toynbee, Hardt and Negri, and Virilio.

Postmodern Society as a Consumer Society

Postmodern society is a consumer society or a social organization in which consumption becomes the main activity of individuals and their greatest concern. The consumer society is an “affluent society” (Galbraith 1958). The fundamental factors that have favored the development of the consumer society are (1) The standardization of production, which increases the quantity of market goods by lowering their unit cost, thanks to Fordist methods; (2) the increase in wages; (3) urbanization; (4) the diffusion of the American culture of consumption against the peasant culture of savings. The growth of the middle class gives the consumer society the geometric shape of a rhombus instead of a pyramid. Scholars are divided on their date of birth (Sassatelli 2007). According to a widespread approach, the consumer society was born in the United States between the two World wars and spread to Europe starting from the second half of the 1950s when the growth of secondary consumption compared to primary food consumption allowed masses to access goods that were once reserved only for the upper classes. In this chapter, I adhere to the thesis according to which the consumer society fully developed in the 1970s (Ritzer and Stepnisky 2017, 308).

The Characteristics of the Postmodern Society

Postmodern society is dominated by ambivalence and uncertainty.

Many other characteristics are attributed to postmodern society, including precariousness, confusion, risk, fragmentation, dispersion, hedonism, fun, self-referentiality, disorder, incoherence, and irrationality.

Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is often cited as an example of postmodernist cinema for its non-linear storytelling and the protagonists’ dialogues disconnected from what is happening around them. Think of the scene in which the two killers, the film’s protagonists, Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega, talk about trivial matters, such as the taste of the hamburger, as they are about to kill their victims. Pulp Fiction subverts the rules of modernist cinema. The events in Pulp Fiction are presented in a non-linear and non-chronological order. The distinction between good and bad guys is fuzzy and ambivalent, as Jules Winnfield explains when pointing a gun at a robber after disarming him in a restaurant (O’Byrne 2011, 215; Rappoport 1998). Winnfield’s speech is full of ethical and epistemological relativism, the same postmodern relativism that has undermined modern society’s objective values ​​and absolute truths.

Thanks to Jean-François Lyotard’s book, The Postmodern Condition, published in 1979, postmodernity has become a topic of specific reflection in social theory. Lyotard, who did not invent the term “postmodern,” identifies several characteristics of the postmodern era.

First, knowledge is the primary productive force of postmodern society. Since knowledge is the most crucial resource, the worldwide competition for it is maximal (Lyotard 1985, 5).

Second, the postmodern age rejects the absolute truths and certainties of the culture of modern society.

Third, postmodern society witnesses a decline in grand narratives that tell the story of humankind as a coherent and rational journey toward a precise goal. Postmodernity has even been associated with “chaos” (Antonelli 2007).

According to Lyotard, modernity has been characterized by three great grand narratives: The Enlightenment, Idealist, and Marxist grand narratives, which lost their credibility, especially after the Second World War, when the development of techniques and technologies shifted the attention of individuals from the ideological ends of action to practical means (Lyotard 1985, 37).

Starting with Lyotard’s work, the word “postmodern” has been used to designate anything (Maffesoli 2021, 19). This polyvalence has created significant confusion, making it unclear what postmodern society is and who postmodernist theorists are.

There are three main ways of conceiving postmodernity.

The first way, mainly attributable to the studies of Jean Baudrillard, conceives postmodern society as a new type of society that has replaced modern society.

The second way, mainly attributable to the studies of Michel Maffesoli, conceives postmodernity as the time of the mortal crisis of modernity. Postmodernity is a transitional phase. It is not possible to establish a clear break between modernity and postmodernity. Great social changes are gradual.

The third way, attributable above all to the studies of Giddens, prefers to speak of “radical modernity” rather than postmodernity. According to Giddens, we live in an age in which the characteristics of modernity have become extreme (Giddens 1990).

To start this chapter, I will define “postmodernity” and “postmodernism.” Throughout the discussion, I will frequently mention the authors we have previously encountered to help the conversation flow smoothly.

Postmodernity and Postmodernism

What is the difference between postmodernity and postmodernism?

I said that the postmodern is the realm of ambivalence and uncertainty. Krishan Kumar has written that there is no consistent criterion for distinguishing these two terms (Kumar 1995, 66–67).

I will use the most helpful teaching terminology to provide clarity by readapting Martin Albrow’s distinction between “modernism” and “modernity.” Modernism is a cultural movement led by intellectuals, artists, and writers. On the other hand, modernity is a historical age with an inner logic (Albrow 1997, 55). Similarly, I hold that postmodernity refers to a historical phase following modernity, while postmodernism pertains to a cultural, artistic, and architectural movement.

Modernity is the phase following the Middle Ages or feudalism characterized by the dynamism of the industrial revolution, the development of civilization, the innovation of capitalism, and the rationality of the Enlightenment. Industrialism, evolution, capitalism, and rationality are the four pillars of the modern era.

Comte exalted the importance of industrialism, Spencer that of evolution, Marx that of capitalism, and Weber that of rationality. Comte, Spencer, Marx, and Weber are great examples of modern theorists. Modern theory is distinguished by its explanations of historical development based on coherence, rationality, causality, and a more or less accentuated linearity. Think of Parsons’ thesis on evolutionary universals. All in all, the journey that has brought man here has been coherent, rational, linear, and can be explained causally. Habermas defends the Enlightenment, a pillar of modernity, and argues that the Enlightenment project should be developed further (Rorty 1984). Habermas’s theory of the colonization of the lifeworld is a more recent example of a grand narrative.

Conversely, postmodernist theorists are attracted by the inconsistency, contradictions, and discontinuity between historical periods. Unlike Durkheim, who sought the causes of the birth of the first form of religion, postmodernist theorists do not seek the “primum movens” of social phenomena and do not promote causal explanations like Weber, who claimed that an explanation is scientific only if it is causal. One might argue that the contradiction dear to postmodernist theorists is central to Marx’s dialectical method. This is true. However, in Marx’s theory, all contradictions lead to a society without contradictions, the communist society.

Postmodernist theorists refuse to believe that society can be described or explained through one grand coherent, linear, and rational narrative, such as Comte’s law of three stages, Spencer’s law of evolution, Marx’s succession of modes of production, or Weber’s rationalization process.

Everything is uncertain in postmodern society. It is still being determined who the postmodernist theorists are. Zygmunt Bauman, Fredric Jameson, and Jean Baudrillard are often cited as postmodern sociologists, but are we sure we can include them under this label?

Jameson is a Marxist who has studied postmodernist culture and ideology. Jean Baudrillard has a Marxist, semiotic, and structuralist background. Is he a postmodern theorist? Baudrillard felt uncomfortable with this label (O’Byrne 2011, 211). Daniel Bell is mentioned in all books on postmodern society, including Lyotard’s. Yet he is a modern critic of the culture of postmodernity.

Daniel Bell

Bell is a seminal author in postmodern society studies. Not surprisingly, Lyotard mentions it on the first page of his The Postmodern Condition, along with Alain Touraine’s book, The Postindustrial Society, published in 1969 (Touraine 1971). In reality, Bell popularized Touraine’s locution.

Bell’s seminal books are The End of Ideology (1960), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, published in 1973 and republished in 1999, accompanied by a new foreword by the author, and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976).

According to Bell, industrial society mainly produces goods and is dominated by manual workers and practical knowledge. Conversely, the post-industrial society mainly produces services and is dominated by professionals and theoretical knowledge that promotes innovation. The bond between science, innovation, and technology is the basis of post-industrial society. Technological development prompts the development of increasingly complex theoretical knowledge to keep the potentially destructive effects of technology under control as traditional ideologies lose their power (Bell 1960). Reconciling technology and security is a permanent problem of post-industrial society, which increases the importance of the university and poses the problem of raising the population’s education level. Bell distinguishes between “knowing how” and “knowing that”. “Knowing how” is a practical matter, an ability to do things which does not involve theory. Nobody needs to know the theory of aerodynamics to ride a bicycle. “Knowing that” is typical of the postindustrial society that exalts theory (Bell 1999, lxiii).

Bell clarified his thesis by comparing the challenges that pre-industrial society, industrial society, and post-industrial society have faced.

The great challenge of pre-industrial society was to extract natural resources using agriculture, fishing, mining, etc. The great challenge of the industrial society is to continue the enterprise of the pre-industrial society by managing increasingly complex machines that require coordination, planning, and organization. The great challenge of the post-industrial society is to offer services based on sophisticated theoretical knowledge, creating a new hierarchy between those who possess the knowledge and those who require it.

Bell is the leading theorist of the information society.

His fundamental premise is that knowledge and information have become the most important strategic resources of post-industrial society. Social change depends, to a large extent, on them. The combination of energy, raw materials, and mechanical technology has been the engine of industrial society. Knowledge and information, on the other hand, are the engines of post-industrial society (Bell 1980, 531).

Bell is a modernist critical of postmodernism and its values.

According to Bell, the social structure and cultural structure of post-industrial society present striking contradictions. While the social structure is dominated by rationality, logical rigor, and efficiency, the cultural structure is dominated by eroticism, amusement, and hedonism, the dominant values of our society (Bell 1976, xi). This contrast creates the necessary, albeit insufficient, conditions for a social revolution. The consumer society induces people to desire everything, making envy an increasingly widespread sentiment: “The revolution of rising expectations is also the revolution in rising ressentiment” (Bell 1999, 451).

De Saussure’s Structuralism

Baudrillard, whom many consider the greatest postmodernist social theorist, had the merit of studying the consumer society when this social model was about to spread. Baudrillard’s first merit is that he was a precursor. Baudrillard is a radical thinker who studied how the mass media dematerialized reality by eliminating any reference to human needs through dissimulation.

I will deal with five Baudrillard concepts: code, sign value, hyperreality, simulacrum, and symbolic exchange.

Baudrillard’s first book is The System of Objects, a highly systematic book published in 1968 (Kellner 1989, 8) influenced by structuralism, a methodology for the human sciences based on the concept of structure which, having originated in France from Ferdinand de Saussure’s works (1857–1913), spread into all human studies (Thibault 2005), including anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), philosophy (Louis Althusser), linguistics (Roman Jakobson), semiology (Roland Barthes).

We studied the concept of structure in the chapter on Spencer. Even for the French structuralism linked to de Saussure’s theory, structure refers to a set of interdependent parts. However, the structure should not be interpreted in the same way as Marx, Spencer, and Parsons did. Structuralists do not focus on economic or political structures, such as the state or the military, but the hidden structure of language and, more generally, the hidden structure of things, including the hidden structure of the mind or the hidden structure of power relations.

De Saussure distinguished “langue” from “parole.” The “langue” indicates the set of formal rules of language governed by certain laws, while the “parole” is how individuals use language in everyday life. According to de Saussure, linguistics must focus on the study of “langue” and not on “parole” since “langue” makes “parole” possible. The “langue” indicates the structure of language, understood as a system of interconnected signs. A sign, separated from the other signs of the system, loses its meaning. In de Saussure’s structuralism, binary oppositions are of crucial importance. For example, the words “hot,” “fast,” and “rich” have their meaning in relation to the words “cold,” “slow,” and “poor.”

Box 14.1: Structuralism and Historicism

Structuralism is opposed to historicism. According to historicists, the diachronic approach, i.e., the study of chronological development, is the most suitable approach for studying social phenomena, including the meaning of words. In contrast, structuralists favor the synchronic approach, according to which understanding the meaning of a word depends on its relationship to other words within a system of common rules or language. According to the structuralists, language, like social reality, is a system of relations. The coordinated study of systems must be preferred to the isolated analysis of the parts. In his posthumously published book, Course in General Linguistics, de Saussure writes: “Language is a system whose parts can and must all be considered in their synchronic solidarity” (de Saussure [1916] 1960, 22).

Unlike humanism, which places man at the center of all reflections in the humanities, structuralism prioritizes structure over man. Man’s ways of thinking, acting, and feeling depend on the structure. Man is only the “place” in which the structure manifests itself. Subjectivism is another polemical target of structuralists who criticize approaches centered on the study of consciousness.

Once transferred from linguistics to sociology, the synchronic approach requires studying the meaning of any cultural object or phenomenon in relation to other cultural objects or phenomena belonging to the same system of objects or cultural systems.

Derrida’s Poststructuralism

Scholars have yet to explain well what poststructuralism is, nor who its real founder was. However, the leading exponents of poststructuralism are the Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. Under the influence of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, poststructuralists use cultural and epistemological relativism to criticize the Western conception of “truth” and “scientific objectivity.”

I will discuss Derrida (1930–2004) as his philosophy is fundamental for postmodern social theory and critical feminist theory.

Of Grammatology is Derrida’s first major book (Derrida [1967] 1997), not surprisingly translated by one of the significant postcolonial feminist theorists, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, which we will study in the last chapter.

In 1968, Derrida published his essay on Plato’s Pharmacy in which he criticized the “logocentrism” rooted in Plato’s Phaedrus, in particular, in the myth of Thamus and Theuth, the inventor of writing (Derrida [1972] 1981, 72). With the term “logocentrism,” Derrida indicates the Western philosophical tradition that favors speech over writing. According to Plato, the written text requires that the “fathers,” i.e., the authors, always have to defend their “sons,” i.e., their written texts, against misunderstandings or distortions by readers. Oral discourse, on the other hand, allows the authors to control their words, protecting their true meaning. Therefore, the truth can only be achieved through dialogue between individuals who interact in their presence. Orality and presence guarantee coherence between the thoughts and words of the speaker since the author’s voice expresses the content of the author’s consciousness: “It is because the voice, producer of the first symbols, has a relationship of essential and immediate proximity with the mind” (Derrida [1967] 1997, 11).

Furthermore, Plato prefers orality to writing because written texts can cause forgetfulness of discourses and make the mind lazy. Paradoxically, writing ends up weakening the memory it would like to preserve. The Western tradition conceived language on the basis of the contrast between presence and absence.

Derrida criticizes logocentrism for having created a philosophical tradition based on the opposition between binary concepts that unjustly favors one of the two poles over the other: Speech over writing, reason over passion, men over women, masculinity over femininity, soul over body, words over pictures, sight over touch, high culture over low culture. According to Derrida, this bifurcation does not allow us to grasp the positive aspects of the counterpart or the less privileged or discredited component of the dyad.

Derrida contrasts Plato’s logocentrism or phonocentrism with his “grammatology,” which we could define as the reflection on the written letters of the alphabet. According to grammatology, language must be understood through the model of writing, which, unlike orality linked to presence, allows the written text to go beyond the context and time in which it was produced.

According to Derrida, philosophy has the task of “deconstructing” written texts in order to criticize them and show their contradictions and logical flaws. Deconstruction allows ideological deceptions to emerge that are passed off as objective truths. Deconstruction also makes it possible to reveal the interweaving between power and the so-called scientific truth that imposes itself in a certain historical time. Individuals reach intellectual maturity when they are confused about the meaning of concepts. This uncertainty means they don’t take the world for granted and do not feel comfortable in a world of bifurcations. Derrida uses a Greek word to express this state of mind, “aporia,” which means “impasse” or “puzzlement.” Aporia is like: “The touch of a sting ray” (Derrida [1972] 1981, 118). A mature mind should not be embarrassed to be confused or doubtful about the meaning of concepts and words.

The psychological process of categorization makes divisions that can result in exclusion, which is often used as a tool to maintain power.

Probably, these reflections of Derrida were influenced by his life. Derrida has come out of the mind/body binary logic. While a philosopher, he was also a soccer and snooker player. Furthermore, Derrida was a victim of anti-Semitism. Born in El Biar, a suburb of Algiers in colonial Algeria, from a Jewish family, he was expelled from his lycée due to the laws introduced in 1942 by the fascist Vichy regime and also suffered from the anti-Semitism of the majority of the Muslim Algerian population. Derrida knows how painful it is to be on the losing or the weak side of the fork. His philosophy, questioning Western certainties about the meaning of objective truth, has been used by oppressed minorities to rebel against discrimination and abuses of power.

Derrida undermines the concept of “center” and “totality,” which are closely linked in the Western tradition. The whole must always have an ordering center. By eliminating the idea of ​​the center, the idea of ​​totality collapses. Derrida points out that deconstructionism is not nihilism. Deconstruction, by decomposing the text, makes possible new interpretations that can lead to the construction of new written texts. In this sense, deconstruction is a “double gesture.” The first gesture consists in questioning the conceptual oppositions true/false, good/evil, body/soul, beautiful/ugly, etc. The second gesture requires to open up new ways of interpreting them.

According to Derrida’s deconstructionism, stable schemes for analyzing texts and interpreting authors cannot exist since a scheme that appears stable and adequate in a certain historical context can appear unstable and inadequate in relation to other schemes. Deconstructive reading does not aim to uncover the meaning of a system of signs. Rather, it questions the notion that there is a literal or “true” meaning of a text. There are no pure and absolute original meanings to be discovered. Interpretations can be good or bad, but they cannot be right and therefore definitive. Even the author’s intentions cannot be definitively known and must be interpreted. Deconstruction argues that the author’s intention and social context are not fixed and require interpretation. In essence, there is no break from interpretation. The Truth is unachievable. This is the famous “hermeneutic circle” (Fuchs and Ward 1994, 483).

With the sentence: “There is nothing outside of the text,” Derrida means that a literary or philosophical text does not refer to an objective world external to it (Derrida [1967] 1997, 158). Meanings and concepts are not found in objects or even in our minds. The meaning of objects is nowhere to be found as each concept assumes its meaning in relation to other objects. No man can reach the full meaning of any concept because the relationships between concepts, objects, and words are potentially infinite. The reader cannot reconstruct the meaning of the text, nor the intentions of its author. It is impossible to interpret a text definitively. The interpretations of a text are potentially infinite. Interpretation is a never-ending work (Margolis 1985, 150).

Even Nietzsche’s fragment: “I have forgotten my umbrella” can have infinite interpretations (Derrida [1978] 1979, 129).

What does Derrida mean by the expression “deconstruction of the subject”?

Deconstruction does not mean “dissolution.” When scholars deconstruct something, they do not destroy, dissolve, or cancel the legitimacy of what they are deconstructing. Deconstructing the subject means, above all, analyzing historically or genealogically the formation of the different ideological layers built around that concept and which compose it. Each concept has its own history.

Derrida clarified his thinking by giving the example of the culture of human rights, which is based on and exalts the concept of “human subject.” But what is the human subject? The “human subject” is a concept with a long and complex history. If human rights are universal, then there should be a universal way of conceiving them and all languages ​​should interpret them in the same way. Deconstruction of the subject is, first of all, the genealogical analysis of the trajectory through which a concept has been constructed, used, and legitimized.

For example, in the Aristotelian tradition, the human subject is something identical to itself, indivisible, which can only be counted as one. Deconstructing the “human subject” means analyzing all the hidden assumptions involved in the ethical, political, and philosophical use of the concept. Human rights are a set of concepts, laws, and requirements that are not found in nature from the beginning. The formulation of the concept of human rights involved a long battle for the affirmation of the concept of “human subject.” Deconstructing the subject means being aware of all the historical components and ideological layers of this concept.

Deconstruction urges individuals not to trust any concept too much. Derrida, like Garfinkel, invites us to question all of social reality. What does it mean to be a “woman,” “man,” or a “colonized subject”? Who has the power to define these terms? These concepts are filled with ideological layers.

As we will see in the next chapters devoted to feminist and postcolonial theories, deconstructing these words is crucial to combating discrimination against homosexuals based on the idea that heterosexuality is rooted in “nature” or neocolonialism. What does it mean to be “terrorists”, “democrats”, and “queers”? What is the role of states and governments in defining these words?

Baudrillard’s The System of Objects

Structuralism and poststructuralism impacted Baudrillard’s intellectual trajectory toward postmodernism.

According to Baudrillard, contemporary society has been overwhelmed by many objects. The ancient man possessed few objects and managed to dominate them all; on the other hand, modern man finds him/herself in the opposite condition. In the consumer society, objects are interdependent and represent a “system.” It is not the usefulness of the single object that is important, but its meaning in relation to other objects. When a family purchases a particular washing machine brand, they usually prefer to buy the same brand for their dishwasher and refrigerator. A certain type of table requires a certain type of lamp, and so on. The market creates matches to get consumers to buy as many items as possible. The objects form an inseparable totality, and the sociologist must understand its global meaning.

Objects clarify individuals’ status and social identity through signs in consumer society. Baudrillard re-proposes Veblen’s leisure-class theory, according to which consumption distinguishes oneself from others in a stratified society. Objects are purchased because they satisfy a symbolic and non-practical need.

According to Baudrillard, society driven by consumption has changed how individuals perceive and interact with reality. When the individual consumes a good, he/she consumes the unreality of the signs. To cite an example not found in Baudrillard’s book, a boy who parks his father’s Ferrari in front of a crowded disco is consuming the signs more than the fuel; he/she consumes the unreality of the signs associated with Ferrari through the consumer code.

In Baudrillard’s semiological approach, consumption is a language in which each consumer object is linked to other objects through a sign. This network of meanings is possible, thanks to a code that transforms the meaning of objects by creating a hierarchy between signs (Baudrillard 1996b, 160).

A sign expresses wealth or poverty according to the code. Whoever controls the code controls the consumers and, therefore, society. Advertising is a key means of disseminating the code. In the consumer society, needs come not from individuals but from the code. The code tells individuals what they need. Although Baudrillard is concerned more with consumption than production, The System of Objects is influenced by Marxism and semiology. The consumer society is driven by the productive forces which have the power to manipulate consumers into arousing their needs and desires through advertising. To clarify his link with Marx, Baudrillard writes that the productive system is based on exploiting the labor force (Baudrillard 1996, 160). In his second book, The Consumer Society, published in 1970, Baudrillard writes: “Advertising is perhaps the most remarkable mass medium of our age” (Baudrillard 1998, 125).

The consumer society presents a paradox. On the one hand, people are in constant communication; on the other, they rely heavily on the objects they consume instead of engaging in face-to-face conversations. This leads to a decrease in direct interactions between individuals.

Baudrillard’s pessimism emerges from his first book.

In a society that produces infinite objects, the ways to distinguish oneself through objects are, in turn, infinite, creating the mechanism of perpetual consumption based on the anxiety attached to periodic payments.

Consumer citizens work every day to pay off their debts every month. When consumers have paid the last installment, they are distressed rather than relieved because they own an old consumer object which triggers the desire to own a new item. And so, consumer citizens resort to the credit system again, which renews the anxiety of paying the installment. Baudrillard speaks of “illusionism”. It is not the consumer society that gives credit to the worker; it is the worker who lends credit to the consumer society to which he/she delivers his/her future wages.

In The System of Objects, Baudrillard compares the consumer-citizen of postmodern society to the worker enslaved to the lord in feudal society.

Thanks to the credit system, the consumer delivers a part of his/her salary to the producer each month before earning it. Many individuals buy their car or household appliance on credit the same day they sign their first employment contract. They run into debt before gaining their first salary. In his first book, Baudrillard states that modern consumers are accomplices of the consumer society as they spontaneously assume the task of consuming to keep the production system alive through the credit system. They work to pay for what they have bought. The credit system has created a new ethic that Baudrillard names “precession of consumption over accumulation.” This expression indicates that the consumption of a good precedes the accumulation of money to buy it: “The whole present system is a “system of buying first and paying off later in labour” (Baudrillard 1996, 160).

The Sign Value

Baudrillard’s second fundamental concept is the “sign value.”

Baudrillard believes that the concepts of exchange value and use value are insufficient to study consumer society. A third metric is needed, the “sign value,” i.e., the value an object assumes for the sign it displays within a hierarchy of signs made possible by the code.

The use value of an object depends on its intrinsic value, tangible utility, and ability to satisfy a concrete human need.

The exchange value of an object depends on the market. A diamond can be worth more than a two-story house.

What is the impact of advertising when it comes to social status and the value assigned to objects within a hierarchical system of signs?

Advertising has tremendous power because it establishes the code that decides which signs are worth the most. In summary, in the consumer society, the value of an object can be of four different types:

• Use value (functional value),

• Exchange value (economic value),

• Symbolic value (the value that one individual assigns to an object in relation to another individual, for example, an engagement ring),

• Sign value (value of an object within a system of objects).

In The Consumer Society, Baudrillard writes:

The washing machine serves as an appliance and acts as an element of prestige, comfort, etc. It is strictly this latter field which is the field of consumption. All kinds of other objects may be substituted here for the washing machine as signifying element. In the logic of signs, as in that of symbols, objects are no longer linked in any sense to a definite function or need. (Baudrillard 1998, 77)

In 1972, Baudrillard published For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (Baudrillard 1981), and in 1973, he published his fourth book, The Mirror of Production, which seeks to broaden the horizon of Marxist theory (Baudrillard 1975).

After Baudrillard’s first four books were published, the major points of break with Marx became clear.

According to Marx, exchange value has surpassed use value in capitalist society. According to Baudrillard, sign value has surpassed exchange value in postmodern society.

According to Marx, commodity fetishism will disappear with the transition to a communist society. According to Baudrillard, however, it will increase with the transition to the consumer society. The sign value increases the fetishism of consumer items. A necklace sported by a movie star increases its “status” value.

According to Baudrillard, Marx failed to grasp the importance of signs and symbols in production. Consequently, he failed to grasp the phenomenon of the virtualization of the economy.

Symbolic Exchange

Symbolic exchange, hyperrealism, and simulacrum are the three fundamental concepts of Baudrillard’s book Symbolic Exchange and Death, published in 1976.

The concepts of hyperreality, simulacrum, and simulation are related.

In Simulacra and Simulation, published in 1981, Baudrillard writes that the contemporary world is a world of simulacra, i.e., of fakes: “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (Baudrillard 1994, 1).

The simulacrum is a particular type of image; it is a copy without an original because the object it speaks of does not exist or the referent has been lost. No one can understand the reality hidden behind the simulacrum because that reality does not exist.

The consumer society is based on simulations rather than genuine reality. Simulations are fakes that create a reality-killing hyperreality. The contemporary world is the realm of simulation, where the false has taken the place of the true and the unreal the place of the real. All this is possible, thanks to electronic media and information technologies that manipulate images and signifiers (Best and Kellner 1991, 52).

In hyperreality, reality is taken to the extreme.

People want to become hyperreal with cosmetic surgery. Examples of hyperreality include pornographic films, “a hypertrophied fiction of sex consumed in its mockery” (Baudrillard 1994, 92). In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard writes that the entirely simulated world is a hyperreal world more real than reality: “Today reality itself is hyperrealist” (Baudrillard 1993, 74).

Disney World is an example of simulation (Baudrillard 1994, 12). Disney World’s streets are super safe, super clean, super orderly, and its staff is super nice. Hyperreality is over-comfortable, over-reassuring, over-rewarding, and dissuades individuals from seeking genuine reality. Individuals prefer to pay a ticket to see a simulated panorama rather than see the real panorama for free within walking distance of them. Hyperreality is often hyper-expensive, such as the gated communities of luxury hotels.

With the expression “ecstasy of communication,” Baudrillard refers to the world of pure simulation, a world of simulacra in which it is not possible to distinguish the sign from its referent and, therefore, the imaginary from the real (Baudrillard 1983, 1988).

The thesis on the disappearance of reality in the age of digital technology helps us understand why the director of the science-fiction action film The Matrix framed the cover of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation in a scene from the film. Baudrillard claimed that The Matrix misinterprets his thinking in a 2003 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur conducted by Aude Lancelin, translated in 2004 by the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies.

I want to dwell on the controversy with the director of The Matrix because it helps make Baudrillard’s thinking more understandable.

Baudrillard reproaches The Matrix for having confused the classic Platonic treatment of illusion with the new postmodern problem of simulation: “This is a serious flaw” (Baudrillard 2004).

To clarify the difference between Plato’s treatment of illusion and Baudrillard’s treatment of simulation, I have to summarize the Platonic myth of the cave.

A slave locked in an underground place is forced to remain still and look in front of him with his legs and neck chained from birth. At his back, the light of a distant fire throws the shadows of real objects on the walls of the cave. Since the slave cannot turn around, his reality is nothing but senseless emptiness. What would happen if just one of these slaves were to be freed and taken to the surface? Arriving in the light of the sun and seeing the real world, he/she would feel pity for his/her companions and would fight desperately to preserve the freedom gained. When he/she returned to the cave, the other slaves would ridicule him/her, not believing a word of his/her story, and would try to kill whoever tried to free them from their chains. The distinction between fiction and reality is clear-cut in Plato’s myth of the cave.

In Baudrillard, the distinction between the real and the illusory implodes because the real has become inaccessible in the postmodern simulated society.

Illusion requires reality to exist. Baudrillard argued that the distinction between illusion and reality is clear in The Matrix. Actors are either in the digitized world or radically outside it. The Matrix preserves the Platonic conception of reality. On the contrary, in Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard wrote: “Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible” (Baudrillard 1994, 19).

Baudrillard reiterates this distinction between illusion and simulation also in his book The Perfect Crime, published in 1994, which contains the most mature part of his reflection: “Now, the image can no longer imagine the real, because it is the real. […]. The reality has been driven out of reality” (Baudrillard 1996, 4).

The Ego’s Inability to Think Independently

Baudrillard ideally refers to the Frankfurt School when he says that the United States is the most unreal and false society. For the first generation of the Frankfurt School, American society is alienated. For Baudrillard, it is simulated. All in all, the simulation concept is similar to that of alienation. Both concepts indicate that the individual has lost touch with genuine reality. The alienated world and the simulated world are inhuman, i.e., not based on the quality of real human relationships due to capitalism. It goes without saying that the internet has multiplied the simulations. In summary, the transition from primitive society to contemporary society implicates the transition from the human world of symbolic exchange to the inhuman world of economic exchange. For the followers of Marcuse and Baudrillard, capitalism is always in the dock.

The fact that many regard Baudrillard as the greatest postmodern social theorist, I believe he is, does not mean he loved postmodern society. His hostility toward the simulated society also emerges from his preferences for the symbolic exchange of primitive societies against the economic exchange of consumer society.

With symbolic exchange, Baudrillard means a reversible process in which the individual gives and receives through a cyclical exchange of gifts and counter-gifts. An example of symbolic exchange is the “kula ring” we encountered while studying Malinowski. According to Baudrillard, the man of primitive societies was mainly engaged in “symbolic exchange.” In primitive societies, the symbolic exchange continued even with the death of loved ones. Friends and relatives brought their gifts to cemeteries integrated into community life. In contemporary societies, however, the dead are kept as far away from the living as possible.

In primitive societies, symbolic exchange involved a very limited number of objects and had a beginning and an end. One individual gave an item to another individual who reciprocated by ending that particular cycle. In the consumer society, on the other hand, economic exchange never ends and must be renewed every day in the interests of the capitalists. Individuals never stop buying things for themselves and for others.

According to Baudrillard, by annulling objective reality, hyperreality annuls the individual as an autonomous and sovereign subject. The transition from modernity to postmodernity tragically ended the ego’s ability to think and act independently.

According to Bell, new information technologies have extended the power of the individual over the world. According to Baudrillard, however, they have transformed the individual into the terminal of a series of processes that escape his control in a world dissolved in information and communication (Kumar 1995, 127). Television is the perfect object of this new era. The postmodern individual ceases to be an actor to resemble an astronaut crossed by computer-controlled electronic messages inside a space capsule (Baudrillard 1983, 127–128).

George Ritzer and the McDonaldization of Society

Ritzer, influenced by Baudrillard, Marx, and Weber, developed the theory of the McDonaldization of society in his homonymous book published in 1993.

Automation in consumer society has accentuated the distance between individuals. Individuals in McDonald’s interact much more with McDonald’s objects than their kind. This phenomenon also occurs at the filling station and in many other places. The automation process requires individuals to do it themselves without the intervention of another person. The consumer does not enter into a relationship with anyone, if not with an electronic machine, becoming the filling station attendant for the time necessary to refuel the car (Ritzer 2004, 58; O’Byrne and Hensby 2011).

In the consumer society, the capitalists’ problem is not the control of the workers but of the consumers. Once upon a time, social unrest was prevented by making the workers work from morning to night. Today social upheavals are avoided by pushing people to shop. In modern society, individuals were locked up in factories and worked as producers on the assembly line. In post-modern society, they are locked up in shopping malls and work as consumers. From work shifts, individuals have moved on to consumption shifts. Members of the same family organize to take turns in the malls or go shopping in the city. Sometimes they don’t buy anything. However, they think about what to consume when they have the money for purchases. Ritzer’s locution of “new means of consumption,” includes shopping malls, megamalls, discount stores, theme parks, cruise ships, superstores, and hotel casinos.

Zygmunt Bauman

Bauman is interested in fostering the development of a sociology of postmodernity and not a postmodern sociology (Bauman 1988, 1997).

What is the difference between the two?

Postmodern sociology is a worldview that proposes severing ties with modern sociology to create a new one.

On the other hand, the sociology of postmodernity is the sociological study of postmodern society. Just as there is a sociology that studies political or economic phenomena, in the same way, there is a sociology that studies postmodernity. Severing ties with modern sociology also means severing ties with Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, as if these authors and the questions they raise had nothing more to say to us. The characteristic phenomena of postmodernity can also be studied with the categories developed by modern sociology.

Bauman can be considered both a modern theorist and a postmodern theorist. It depends on his books: Some of these allow us to give him the first label; others, the second (Smith 2020). Bauman studied the greatest tragedy of the modern world, the Holocaust (Bauman 1989). Still, he also clarified the most tragic aspects of the post-modern society, which he conceives as a consumer society (Bauman 2007a).

Bauman pointed to the fundamental characteristic of postmodern society in its “fluid” nature. Power, economy, identity, sexuality, everything has become fluid. Sexually fluid persons claim their right to migrate from one sexual identity to another and affirm ambivalence as a positive value (Diamond 2008; Katz-Wise 2015; Lynn Barnes 2023).

According to Bauman, the ambivalence of postmodern society offers many opportunities, but only some individuals are equipped to exploit them. Thus, postmodern society is full of winners and losers (Bauman 1999a, 11). Bauman’s description of postmodern society is pessimistic and is similar to Frankfurt school theorists’ descriptions of capitalist society. Postmodern society lives in fear and uncertainty that Bauman considers an intolerable and unbearable “torment” for the human psyche. The postmodern individual must struggle to live with this afflictive existential condition in a society that transforms even psychic suffering into a consumer good from which to gain a profit (Bauman 1999, 82).

According to Bauman, there are four main dimensions of postmodern uncertainty.

• (1) The new world disorder. The world has become a dark place devoid of any logic. The second and third worlds no longer exist. The second world has awakened while the third world has disappeared from the world stage. About twenty rich countries, worried and insecure, are confronted with the rest of the world.

• (2) Universal deregulation. The market, characterized by irrationality and lack of morality, has spread globally. The freedom of finance and capital has developed without limits to the detriment of the freedom of individuals. The market recognizes only the economic reason.

• (3) Rising Inequality. Inequality between states and individuals is ever greater. The welfare state has been curtailed, and trade unions weakened. Labor legislation oppresses workers. The poor and unemployed in rich Europe have become millions. A great mass of individuals lives in suffering and humiliation. Very few individuals are sure of not losing their homes and jobs. All others are at the mercy of forces they do not control. Livelihoods, social standing, recognition of abilities, and the right to personal dignity can vanish abruptly and without warning (Bauman 1999a, 64).

• (4) The dismantling of social networks of trust and solidarity. Neighbor and family relationships have been tragically weakened. Consumerism has transformed the other into a means to achieve personal pleasure by making social relationships unstable and ephemeral. Before bonding, individuals state that their relationship could end at any time. Many individuals try to get the most out of the relationship without making commitments for the present and without making promises for the future. Bauman extends David Bennett’s concept of “radical uncertainty” to all areas of social life (Bennett 1994, 30). In postmodern society, there is no longer anything certain and stable. The difference between normal and abnormal is increasingly blurred.

According to Bauman, postmodern society and postmodernist theorists have had some important merits. For example, they have taught us to live with ambivalence by making society more open to foreigners, tolerant of diversity, and less cruel toward minorities.

On the one hand, the ambivalence of postmodernity increases uncertainty by creating a sense of emptiness and anguish in individuals; on the other, it avoids the massacres of modernity, which suppressed ambivalence with violence in the name of absolute truth. Postmodern plurality and tolerance cause neither cruelty nor massacres. Isn’t it true that the cardinals of the Holy Inquisition and Hitler hated relativism and pluralism? (Bauman 1999b, 13). Postmodern culture does not favor the return of Nazism. However, the development of military technology is a source of existential angst because it could create a tragedy greater than the Holocaust. In postmodern society, humanity has developed nuclear weapons or means of self-destruction (Bauman 2005, 52–67). Here is the postmodern ambivalence. On the one hand, postmodern society is tolerant and disinclined to violence and cruelty; on the other, it could precipitate humankind in the maximum of violence and cruelty or the nuclear nightmare (Marshak 1995; Grausam 2011).

Life in postmodern society is challenging due to ethical relativism that creates a thousand alternatives. Which of these is the right one? Postmodern ethics do not have the certainties of modern ethics.

Individuals are continually called to be in an ambivalent world without universal reference points or absolute truths.

The postmodern individual is neither good nor bad. He is ambivalent and must continually demonstrate that he/she is worthy of social consideration based on the ethical positions he/she assumes in Liquid Times (Bauman 2007). The identity of the postmodern individual is liquid, like contemporary society, and must be continually constructed and reconstructed (Bauman 2000). The postmodern individual is freer to choose than the modern man but also more confused and uncertain because his/her code of ethics is a matter of personal choice. Studying Eric Fromm, we have seen that too much freedom distresses and disorients individuals. Taking an ethical stand every day on sensitive social issues without being able to rely on external regulatory authority is stressful and distressing, especially if the topics under discussion arouse great passion.

The deconstruction of politics has consolidated a society without certain points of reference. What criterion does the individual use to orient him/herself in ethical choices? Bauman replies that this criterion is enjoyment and personal pleasure. Postmodern society continues to confront the ethical dilemmas of modern society. The great themes of modern ethics, such as human rights or social justice, are more alive than ever but are addressed from a different perspective (Bauman 1993). The postmodern individual is self-centered and selfish and does not care about the long-term consequences of his/her ethical choices. All that matters to him/her is to have an immediate, instantaneous pleasant experience, which is born and dies in an instant as established by the rules of the consumer society. Advertising and commercial propaganda produce new desires which allow individuals to be socially controlled without resorting to the police (Bauman 1997, 17–34, 1999, 58–108). Body care is the obsession of the postmodern individual. The postmodern body is the seat of all immediate pleasures. Postmodern society marks the triumph of fitness: “The duty of the postmodern citizen (similar to the duty of the inmates of Rabelais’ Thélème Abbey) is to lead a pleasant life” (Bauman 1999a, 51).

Michel Maffesoli

According to Maffesoli, France has been the laboratory of the values ​​of modernity. As the French are proud of their cultural heritage, they do not accept that modernity is dying and prefer to speak of “second modernity,” “late modernity,” “hypermodernity” rather than postmodernity. Nothing is eternal, everything is transformed. The Middle Ages passed into a transitional phase, the “post-medieval,” which then took on the characteristics of modern society. Likewise, modern society has entered the transition phase of postmodernity (Maffesoli 2005, 49). Postmodernity is an era of crisis characterized by a new “emotional atmosphere” and a new way of living together within the modern civilization now in disarray.

Tribalism, nomadism, and hedonism are the new forms of postmodern coexistence.

The tribes of megalopolises are the new forms of solidarity of postmodern society or small closed groups that love borders. In his 1988 book The Time of the Tribes, Maffesoli explains that mass society, instead of producing a homogeneous individual, has produced a multiplicity of urban tribes distinguished by their internal secrets, uniformity of dress, and styles of life (Maffesoli 1996). Paris, London, and Berlin were the leading cities of modernity. On the other hand, Tokyo, New York, San Paolo, and Mexico City are the leading cities of postmodernity (Maffesoli 2005, 89). Postmodern individuals have fragile and unstructured identities. They move from one tribe to another as nomads but always belong to one place, though never permanently. Theirs is a “dynamic rootedness” (Maffesoli 2005, 83). Although postmodern society exalts ethical and epistemological relativism, the individual cannot help but have a community to anchor him/herself to. Everyone extols hedonism. “Carpe diem” is the motto of postmodernity. What matters is living here and now. In summary, the postmodern individual is tribal, nomadic, and hedonistic and lives on multiple identifications without projecting him/herself into the future.

According to Maffesoli, the three pillars of postmodernity are presentism, tribalism, and emotionalism, while modernity’s three pillars are individualism, progressivism, and rationalism (Maffesoli 2021, 88).

Postmodern presentism is also evident in politics. Postmodern popular rebellions have no plans for the future. They aim to live the present most fully and consciously possible: “Today hysteria returns overwhelmingly to the public square” (2005, 97). Brexit, Trump, Macron, and Beppe Grillo are examples of revolts of the postmodern masses against the ideas of modern times (Maffesoli 2021, 33). This hysteria must not be fought but understood and indulged in order for postmodern society to find a balance with irrational forces. Postmodern society should follow the example of the ancient Greek civilization, which had institutionalized the irrational through the Bacchae and the cult of Dionysus, or the medieval civilization, which had normalized hysteria through the carnival. In postmodern society, reason gives way to emotion and its multiple appetites (Maffesoli 2005, 97).

According to Maffesoli, instead, the characteristic of the postmodern spirit is “juvenoia,” a form of “youthful vitality” that represents the postmodern brand par excellence. Juvenoia is a youthful mental attitude that seeks knowledge through lived experiences in contrast to the dogmatic arrogance of rational knowledge. Juvenoia exalts curiosity and teaches us to consider all human phenomena, including those that scholars consider unworthy.

Maffesoli uses the idea of juvenoia to criticize the modern notion of adulthood that emphasizes seriousness, rationality, productivity, and reproduction. This model is enforced on young individuals, and failure to adhere to it comes with blame and exclusion.

Maffesoli contrasts the modern adult with the postmodern adult, an eternal child embodied in the myth of Dionysus. Dionysian youthfulness pervades postmodern society as demonstrated by the diffusion of rejuvenation techniques. Everyone wants to stay young with cosmetics or cosmetic surgery. Juvenoia conquers all societies and all social spheres, including politics. Maffesoli cites three “new boy” cases: Renzi, Trudeau, and Macron. Youth creativity is also rampant in commercial enterprises, as evidenced by the proliferation of “start-ups.” In postmodern society, politics, conquered by juvenoia, has lost the “project,” i.e., the ability to project itself forward: “The distant project is opposed by the vision of the present and the intensity of the moment, characteristics of the puer aeternus” (Maffesoli 2021, 38). Maffesoli proposes an antithesis between modern and postmodern values but then falls into contradiction when he writes that postmodernity is not anti-modern because it does not challenge modern values ​​(Maffesoli 2021, 61). Yet Maffesoli’s contestation of the values ​​of modern man is very clear and even leads to their rejection.

Maffesoli, like Bauman, supports the sociology of postmodernity rather than postmodern sociology. Maffesoli, a pupil of Julien Freund, did not want to break with modern sociology and, in fact, often cites Pareto, Weber, and Durkheim as fundamental authors for understanding postmodernity. He credits Simmel with exalting the importance of ambivalence in sociological theory (Maffesoli 2005, 78).

Fredric Jameson

Fredric Jameson uses a modern theory, Marxism, to study postmodern society.

According to Jameson, the relativity and uncertainty that dominate postmodern society must be explained by the economic changes in capitalism. Changes in the economic structure have resulted in several changes in culture and ideology. Modern-era capitalism fostered strong and stable identities. A worker was a worker for life and could easily identify with his/her role and social class. But then capitalism needed to decentralize production to increase profits by forcing workers to change jobs continuously, losing those certainties about their future typical of modernity. Postmodernist culture is a form of adaptation to the new type of environment created by late capitalism. No society can function properly if the structure and superstructure are not aligned. The superstructure must be useful and functional to the structure. All of this helps to understand the title of Jameson’s book Postmodernism. Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, published in 1991. Jameson had set out the fundamental thesis of his book in a 1984 article that appeared in the “New Left Review” (Jameson 1984).

In summary, the economic structure of early Fordist capitalism, centralized and based on the nation-state, spreads the modernist culture; the economic structure of late capitalism spreads the postmodernist culture. Not surprisingly, Jameson says that postmodernity and globalization are different names that indicate the same historical phenomenon and economic period. Postmodernity refers to the cultural shift, while globalization pertains to the economic aspect of capitalism that operates on a global scale, as previously predicted by Marx. According to Jameson, the theory of postmodernity must connect to the theory of globalization and vice versa. The new international division of labor, automation, and the transfer of production to the Third World are concepts on which Jameson insists a lot.

To better clarify the characteristics of postmodern society, Jameson introduced the concept of “hyperspace” (Jameson 1991, 38).

Postmodern hyperspace is a new spatial organization characterized by disorganization and dispersion that causes disorientation in individuals. Jameson used the concept of hyperspace to analyze the characteristics of the Westin Bonaventure hotel, a sort of miniature city built in the new downtown of Los Angeles by architect and real estate developer John Portman. The Westin Bonaventure is so large and dispersive to generate a feeling of disorientation in customers. Human beings cannot orient themselves in hyperspace because postmodern architecture has developed faster than the perceptive faculties of individuals.

Jameson’s perspective diverges from that of Marxists due to the enormous significance he places on culture. In postmodern society, culture assumes a centrality that it had never had in the life of individuals in any previous society. Culture has never been more important. Everything is becoming cultural. Cultural consumption has become the essence of capitalism (Jameson 1991, IX). Jameson even goes so far as to state that corporate capitalism and culture are so closely linked that they dissolve into one another, making the distinction between structure and superstructure disappear: “The cultural and the economic, thereby collapse back into one another and say the same thing, in an eclipse of the distinction between base and superstructure” (Jameson 1991, XXI).

Scott Lash has overstated culture’s importance in postmodern society, arriving at a conclusion similar to Jameson’s regarding the relationship between structure and superstructure (Lash 1990, 38–39). According to Lash, the old bourgeoisie of organized capitalism distinguished the upper classes from the lower classes. The new middle classes, on the other hand, use postmodernist culture to flatten everything by blurring the distinction between elite and mass in the new disorganized capitalism. Even the working class has lost its organization. Its identity and its culture are increasingly fragmented. The same fate befell social movements. Postmodern society is of advertisement and disengagement, not of the labor movement and social revolts.

Jameson does not cite William F. Ogburn, yet Westin Bonaventure’s analysis brings to mind Ogburn’s theory of cultural lag based on the distinction between material culture (the set of technological and productive knowledge) and immaterial culture (ideas, values, feelings). Material culture is much more dynamic than immaterial culture, which must continually adapt to the former (for this reason, it is also called “adaptive culture”). According to Ogburn, modifications of material culture involve changes in immaterial culture, such as social organization and customs. However, immaterial culture does not change as quickly as material culture. It falls behind and experiences a period of maladjustment (Ogburn 1922, 196).

Box 14.2 Chomsky and Harvey’s Critique of Postmodernist Theorists

After reading Jameson and Lash, we sense that the culture of postmodernism has ultimately defeated Gramsci’s project to help subaltern groups acquire a political identity to rebel against capitalism. If postmodern culture is fused into capitalism, are postmodernist intellectuals too?

According to Chomsky, French postmodernists induce individuals to be very radical by dissociating them from the world’s real problems. They criticize the world but don’t know how to change it because they are out of touch with ordinary people and their daily problems. This happens for many reasons: “For many reasons. One reason—Chomsky said—is that nobody can understand a word they are saying.” Many postmodernist theorists write so convolutedly that they can’t even understand each other. Their language is sophisticated enough to create a false impression of depth which is useless to subaltern groups. Chomsky praises Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s book, Fashionable Nonsense. Postmodern Intellectuals Abuse of Science, for providing a catalog of nonsense written in the impenetrable lingo of postmodern theorists. Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s book ridiculed the confused and often nonsensical ideas of postmodernist theorists about the meaning of science (Sokal and Bricmont 1999). As a general phenomenon, postmodernist theorists end up consolidating the power and status quo they claim to be enemies of by separating radical intellectuals from popular movements and political activism. Postmodern theorists criticize power. Still, they have become a power group capable of making profits. Chomsky describes the postmodern intellectuals as a lobby. Anyone in this exclusive circle can acquire professorships and give paid lectures worldwide.

Do Chomsky’s criticisms have a foundation?

This passage by Maffesoli makes us think. According to Maffesoli: “True rebellion […] is expressed in sporting effervescence, in emotional environments, in all the excessive gatherings in which the individual gets lost in the tribe” (Maffesoli 2005, 98). According to Chomsky, true rebellion is expressed in the struggle against political and economic power that tramples human rights and democracy (Chomsky 2016).

Baudrillard’s thesis of the “death of reality” is probably one of those abstract postmodern theses that Chomsky doesn’t like. I cannot exclude that Chomsky is also thinking of Baudrillard when he criticizes the incomprehensible writing of postmodernist social theorists and their detachment from the real problems of ordinary people. This is because some of Baudrillard’s writings, especially those of his last period, are apparently incoherent and disconnected aphorisms hostile to any form of systematicity.

In his The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey criticized the excessive nihilism of postmodernism and the prevalence of aesthetics over ethics. Postmodernism does not confront the more dramatic problems of political economy. In this way, it does not represent a tool for improving the world as powerful as Marxism. According to Harvey, postmodern theorists always have trouble in taking themselves seriously. Baudrillard gives the impression to have reduced Nietzsche’s tragic sense to farce. Harvey holds Jameson in high regard, but he believes that Jameson has lost his hold on both the reality he wants to portray and the language that should be used to accurately convey it in his “protean writings” (Harvey 1989, 351).

Michel Foucault

In December 1976, Baudrillard sent Critique a long essay against the work of Foucault, a journal editorial board member. Foucault disdained those criticisms rejected by the journal and then published elsewhere (Halperin 1998; Baudrillard 2007; Lotringer 2008, 3).

Foucault is the social theorist who has been given the most labels and has yet to find the right one. For some, Foucault is a great forerunner of postmodern social theory; to others, he is a well-rounded postmodern theorist. For many others, he is a poststructuralist. The debate about labels is often boring and almost always inconclusive. I will deal with five of Foucault’s concepts: governmentality, the disciplined society, hierarchical observation, the microphysics of power, and biopolitics.

One of the elements that the postmodernists have in common is the study of the power hidden in elementary social relations. Precisely because this power is invisible, it conquers the common man’s mind by favoring the maintenance of the status quo and the oppression of subaltern groups.

According to Foucault, power is everywhere and continually creeps into social relations. Power has no center but infinite centers. This is why Foucault is critical of the Marxist and neo-Marxist approach, which tends to conceive power as a top-down process centered above all on the state (Meadmore 1993, 59).

According to Foucault, political theory lags behind history because it “has not yet cut off the King’s head.”

What does it mean?

Foucault wants to overcome the two dominant conceptions of power, namely the model of the sovereign and the model of property possession. Power is not a top-down command through the law nor a money-like object that can be easily observed and transferred from one person to another as a thing. Power is a network of relationships (August 2022). Cutting off the king’s head in political theory means thinking about power in a new way.

The “microphysics of power” studies hidden power rather than manifest power. Schools, prisons, hospitals, and barracks are the privileged places to observe the microphysics of power.

Foucault coined the term “governmentality” in 1978 by combining the words “government” and “rationality.” Governmentality is the techniques by which governments control the members of a society rationally and with popular consent. Governmentality is exercised by the state, but also by social groups. Even sociological theories and scientific communities can become tools to oppress individuals.

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, published in 1975, is perhaps Foucault’s most important work on governmentality (Foucault 1979). Foucault studies the transformation of the prison system from 1757 to 1830, when torture is progressively replaced by a less bloody system of rational rules in a non-linear process. Although torture has disappeared, prisoners are more oppressed and controlled than before. The book opens with a description of a tortured and dismembered criminal. Every limb of his body is tied to a horse. When the horses gallop in opposite directions, the tortured wriggles in immense pain, but his limbs do not come off. And so the executioner begins to cut off his arms and legs to facilitate the work of the horses amid excruciating screams of pain. Finally, the audience sees a head attached to a torso in a pool of blood.

These gory spectacles often had negative consequences for power.

On the one hand, torture frightened the people and dissuaded them from crime; on the other hand, it increased their hatred of power and educated them to violence by inciting them to rebel. The revolts against the rulers were very violent because the rulers had educated the masses about violence. Punishment in prison offers the advantage of preventing people from observing what happens to the prisoners. Even when detainees are beaten, no one can see it or know it, except in exceptional cases.

An example of governmentality is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, indicating a place where the rulers can observe the governed without being observed. Power consolidates when the governed become aware of this asymmetry in observation or “hierarchical observation.” Those who know they are secretly observed end up controlling themselves, sparing the power the effort of corporal punishment. The panopticon increases the power of those in leadership positions by reducing their fatigue. The panopticon can be represented as a circular prison with a tower in the middle that looks down on everything (Foucault 1975] 1979, 17, 2003, 326). The inmate’s awareness of being watched from the tower allows the guard to be absent or relaxed as the inmate lives in fear that the guard is alert and present. The panopticon makes control less strenuous and more effective than torture, and, what’s more, it has fewer side effects to power. The “disciplined society” of which Foucault speaks is the society of the panopticon.

The panopticon is a very useful concept for understanding today’s online surveillance, a new form of hierarchical observation (Campbell and Carlson 2002; Hope 2005). For example, Facebook users are controlled by individuals who observe without being observed. Which re-proposes the question raised by Plato’s Republic: “Who controls the controllers?”

In addition to hierarchical observation, governmentality has refined two other surveillance techniques: normative judgments and ritual examination. Controllers determine what is normal and what is abnormal through normative judgments. Thus, they can punish people not only for their behavior but also for their ideas. For example, almost all universities have a code of ethics that allows those who control the university to punish professors deemed “not normal.” Punishment is always lurking because it depends on the rules that are changed and interpreted by those in power.

Examinations are also useful for screening individuals by assessing whether subordinates have achieved the goals set by normative judgments. Examinations are not just the exams students have to pass. Exams are a control technique found in many workplaces. Professors are also scrutinized and vetted.

To summarize, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault analyzed three techniques of disciplinary power, namely surveillance, punishment (punishment), and examinations (examination technique) (Macmillan 2009, 157).

Let us now ask ourselves what biopolitics is.

According to Foucault, power refines its control techniques to deal with very practical problems associated with a particular era. The great challenges of modern power have been two. The first was to control small groups in confined spaces, such as prisoners or factory workers. The second was to control large populations in large spaces with the development of mass society. Biopolitics, from the fusion of “biology” and “politics,” concerns the political control of the biological life of individuals (Foucault 2008, 21). Biopolitics deals with populations. Biopower deals with fertility, birth rate, the fight against tumors and the spread of viruses, sanitary regulations, etc. Biopower seems to be a positive practice, but it can turn into the opposite. Biopower can kill to defend life by exterminating a part of the population.

What conclusion can we draw from Foucault’s studies of disciplinary power?

The answer is not exciting.

Torture has disappeared, but techniques to limit individual freedom have become more complex and effective. Torture was cruel and gory, but it only affected the individual at the moment of punishment. On the other hand, today’s individuals are continuously monitored and punished if they do or say something that those in positions of power do not like.

The most disturbing aspect of Foucault’s work is that the techniques for controlling life in prison extended to many social contexts, including school. Is our society full of masked prisons? The microphysics of Foucault’s power induces us to believe it. Foucault developed more than one grand narrative or grand theory: a grand theory of social surveillance, sexuality, and psychiatry. In all cases, society’s control over the individual is increased.

As is evident, Foucault’s research does not allow us to affirm that freedom increased from the Middle Ages to modern society. In common with modernists, Foucault tends to develop grand theories. However, his grand theories do not allow the story of freedom in the West to be told according to a coherent and linear scheme, such as Comte’s law of three stages.

Globalization Theory and Postmodern Society

Globalization theory has made a great contribution to understanding postmodern society. As Jameson explained, globalization is one of the dimensions of postmodernity. This idea has much support. Not surprisingly, the major social theorists of postmodernity have linked the study of postmodern society with that of globalization.

Globalization studies are endless; it is impossible to summarize them all in a few pages. I focus especially on those theories that have used the study of globalization to enrich the debate on postmodern society. Scholars who have kept the theme of postmodernity together with that of globalization have broadened our horizons rather than narrow it.

Bauman linked globalization to the uncertainty that characterizes the postmodern individual. The fourth chapter of his book, Globalization: The Human Consequences, is devoted to being a consumer in a consumer society (Bauman 1988). Ulrich Beck associated his studies on globalization with the diffusion of risk as a constant element of daily life. Beck defines risk as a “systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself” (Beck 1992, 21). Beck distinguishes between “first modernity” and “second modernity,” a concept the Maffesoli does like, as we have seen. Nation-states largely governed early modernity. The second modernity is instead characterized by the decline of the power of nation-states and by deterritorialization.

Ritzer conceives the McDonaldization of society as a process of cultural homogenization that operates within globalization. According to Ritzer, globalization extends the logic of the American consumer society to the whole world.

While globalization theorists highlight globalization’s positive and negative aspects, some are optimistic about its consequences; others, however, are more pessimistic.

Giddens identifies four dimensions of globalization: The world capitalist economy, the nation-state system, the world military order, the industrial development, and the expansion of the global international division of labor (Giddens 1990, 70–78). Giddens is a modernist. Although he attaches great importance to globalization, he believes that we live in the era of radical modernity, a “high modernity,” not the postmodern era. Giddens compares modernity to a juggernaut or a power that no one can stop, which overwhelms everything in its path. Politics seeks to govern modernity, but the risk of the juggernaut of modernity spiraling out of control cannot be eliminated. Globalization increases this risk: “The juggernaut crushes those who resist it, and while it sometimes seems to have a steady path, there are times when it veers away erratically in directions we cannot foresee” (Giddens 1990, 139). Giddens shares the postmodernists’ view that we live in an era of uncertainty, spreading the need to allay existential angst.

Glocalization, Hybridization, and Globalization

Roland Robertson’s concept of “glocalization” indicates the global and local interaction that gives rise to the “glocal.” According to Robertson, globalization does not create a homogeneous and indistinct world without a soul. The relationship of local communities to global society is not one of passive submission but of active interaction. Local communities filter what comes from the outside, creating many particular realities. The concept of glocalization implies creativity, adaptation, innovation, and pluralism. Some social groups react by closing themselves in extreme nationalism; others are open to change and embrace cosmopolitanism. The media are not dark forces manipulating the masses through a secret “code” no individual knows. Instead, individuals evaluate media content by selecting the best fit for their local life (Robertson 1992, 2001).

Robertson’s concept of “glocalization” recalls Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s concept of “hybridization,” which indicates the fusion of two different cultural elements (Pieterse 1994). Instead of viewing globalization as a process of homogenization, Pieterse sees it as a process of structural hybridization, implying the emergence of new, mixed forms of cooperation and cultural hybridization or the development of trans-local mélange cultures (Pieterse 2004). Similarly, Hannerz’s concept of “creolization” refers to combining different languages ​​rather than replacing local languages ​​with a single global language. Nigeria, the country Hannerz was most closely in touch with, offers many examples of such cultural development based on the interplay between imported and indigenous cultures. Hannerz finds those lifestyles fascinating (Hannerz 1987).

Martin Albrow, a Marxist, shares the view that globalization involves the decentralization of the nation-state, leading to the end of the modern era and the beginning of the global age (Albrow 1997). In the global age, citizens create and perform the state themselves. Through performative citizenship, they pressure national governments to advance human rights, environmental concerns, and global economic interests. In the global age, citizens create and perform the state themselves. Performative citizenship can be seen as a creative form of social struggle to pressure national governments to advance human rights, environmental issues, and global economic interests. Citizens have created new forms of political participation to force governments to assume their responsibilities toward the globe. The book by Albrow delivers a positive message: “The future of society will in some part be bound up with the recognition of its self-creative nature in the activities of each and every human being” (Albrow 1997, 154).

The Globalization of Nothing

Ritzer’s thesis, on the other hand, is rather pessimistic. In The Globalization of Nothing, Ritzer criticizes the global diffusion of “empty forms” instead of full forms. In addition to being indigenously conceived and controlled, full forms are relatively rich in distinctive content (Ritzer 2007). According to Ritzer, spreading “something” is much more difficult than spreading “nothing” since local communities much more easily receive trivial and superficial content than deep and complex cultural content. Ritzer also developed the term “grobalization” from the verb “to grow,” to indicate the imperialist ambitions of the power groups that govern the world. Nations, corporations, organizations, and the like want to extend their power and profits throughout the globe (Ritzer 2007, 15). The concept of grobalization is conceived as a counterpart to glocalization.

Ritzer, as we saw, was influenced by Marx and a number of Marxist theorists, including Immanuel Wallerstein, author of the multi-volume opus The Modern World-System, tracing the development of the modern world from the sixteenth to the twentieth century (Wallerstein 1974).

According to Wallerstein, the modern capitalist world-economy is the only world-system known in history along with the world empire, like the ancient Rome one. The capitalist world-economy is characterized by a core geographic area exploiting the rest of the system or the periphery that provides the core with the scarce resources it needs to stay in its dominant position and the semiperiphery. The real engine of exploitation lies in the economic division of labor in the world.

Wallerstein is influential on all authors. In some cases, his theses are taken up, adapted, and further developed; in others, they are criticized and rejected.

The Marxist theme of imperialism returns in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s book, Empire, who see globalization as the culminating phase of the postmodernization of the global economy (Hardt and Negri 2000). Although they have a critical attitude toward postmodern social theory, they use some of its key ideas. According to Hardt and Negri, modernity is characterized by imperialism or the attempt of one or more nation-states to dominate the world by exploiting other nation-states. The imperialism of modernity is “territorial.” The protagonists of exploitation have a name, a face, and a place. On the other hand, the imperialism of postmodernity is deterritorialized and virtual. Postmodern sovereignty has no center. Bauman would say that the empire is “liquid” and, therefore, it is everywhere. The mass media make it omnipresent.

The United States is still important, but it is not the empire that Hardt and Negri discuss. The empire is forming. A new empire will supplant the United States without geographical borders. Despite their Marxist orientation, Hardt and Negri believe that the real power of empire lies in legal power or jurisdiction. Under the guise of peace, the empire wages wars pretending to be liberal and pluralist. When it comes to increasing its power shares, the empire tramples on the moral principles it professes. The rhetoric exalts differences, but the empire’s norms and ethical truths punish differences by incentivizing standardization and homologation. This discourse by Hardt and Negri brings to mind Stiglitz’s criticisms of the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund’s homogenizing “one-size-fits-all” approach which conceives of globalization as the imposition of a single economic model on all countries without respecting their differences (Stiglitz 2002).

Benjamin Barber’s perspective is also rather pessimistic. According to Barber, globalization has created a “McWorld” a single political orientation. Barber describes the struggle between those who pursue corporate control of the political process and those who oppose them by defending traditional values through extreme nationalism or religious orthodoxy and theocracy (Barber 1995).

Time-Space Compression and Toynbee’s Cultural Aggression

In Toynbee’s theory of cultural aggression, we find many ideas of today’s critics of globalization.

According to the theory of cultural aggression, the “meeting” between two civilizations can produce devastating effects if one of the two has a greater radioactive (or “penetrating”) power. By radioactive power, Toynbee means the capacity to overturn the habits, customs, and traditions of the “assaulted” society. When this occurs, the “inferior” civilization is gradually disorganized until it plunges into a crisis that marks the beginning of its decadence. To keep this from happening, an opposition always forms within the “assaulted” society, divided into the party of the “Herodians” and that of the “zealots.” The former are the modernizers. They try to be open to change and plan its development. The latter, instead, are traditionalists and are totally closed to anything that could compromise the spiritual values of the ancestral community.

Toynbee has formulated three laws or empirical generalizations.

The first says that the power of penetration of a cultural element is proportional to its degree of futility. This means that the society with less radioactive power more rapidly receives the superficial cultural elements of the alien culture. Since they are easier for the masses to assimilate, they spread rapidly. The second law asserts that the dissemination of the alien culture starts to break up the traditional values of the “assaulted” society. Finally, the third establishes that the radiation-reception phenomenon creates a “chain reaction.” Since a social system is a set of related parts, changes to one part have repercussions on all the others. These three laws can be summed up as assault, reception, and disintegration: the society with less radioactive power is first assaulted, then transformed, and finally disintegrated—unless the “zealots” manage to get the better of the “Herodians” and block the change before it is too late (Toynbee 1947, vol. III, 239).

When Toynbee says that the civilization with more radioactive power spreads its most trivial and superficial cultural elements in the civilization under attack, I am reminded of Ritzer’s book, The Globalization of Nothing. The empty forms Ritzer talks about are nothing more than the most superficial elements of the American consumeristic culture. Time–space compression makes Toynbee’s cultural aggression faster and more aggressive.

According to Harvey, the time–space compression phenomenon is key to understanding the expansion of capitalism globally. From a Marxist perspective, the development of productive forces is fundamental to understand globalization conceived as the process of expansion of capitalism on a global scale. The development of productive forces also includes the development of technology and transport, which favors the spread of new markets by changing the relationship between space and time. Capitalism needs to overcome spatial barriers. Like any historical materialist, Harvey is particularly attentive to the material conditions that make historical change possible: “The telephone, wireless-telegraph, X-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile, and airplane established the material foundation for new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space” (Harvey 1989, 265).

Paul Virilio is regarded as a pioneer in examining the connection between space and time (Harvey 1989, 293, 299, 351). The year 1977 marked the publication of Virilio’s book Speed and Politics, which introduced the concept of “dromology” as the analysis of time and space and how these dimensions have become less significant in human thought and action (Virilio 2006, 69).

According to Virilio:

THE REDUCTION OF distances has become a strategic reality bearing incalculable economic and political consequences, since it corresponds to the negation of space. […] Territory has lost its significance in favor of the projectile. In fact, the strategic value of the non-place of speed has definitively supplanted that of place, and the question of possession of Time has revived that of territorial appropriation. (Virilio 2006, 149)

The compression of time and space accelerates and intensifies the cultural aggression phenomenon portrayed by Toynbee. The rise of al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism has also been interpreted as a Zealot reaction to the cultural aggression of the West (Pellicani 2004).

Conclusion

This chapter has explored the ideas of many authors who have left us a great heritage of concepts and theories.

Bell’s fundamental concept is the concept of postindustrial society, presenting a contradiction between its dominant social structure of rationality, logical rigor, and efficiency and its dominant cultural structure of eroticism, amusement, and hedonism.

Baudrillard’s key concepts are “consumer society,” “sign value,” “symbolic value,” “symbolic exchange,” “virtualization of the economy,” “simulacra,” “hyperreality,” “ecstasy of communication,” and “death of reality.”

Maffesoli’s conceptual legacy comprises the concepts of presentism, tribalism, emotionalism, and “juvenoia,” a youthful mental attitude characterizing the postmodern individual.

Bauman’s most characteristic concept is “fluidity,” referring to the characteristics of a postmodern society lacking a stable and defined identity and organization.

Five Foucault’s concepts must be remembered: “Governmentality,” “disciplined society,” “hierarchical observation,” “microphysics of power,” and “biopolitics.”

Ritzer’s “McDonaldization of society,” a process of cultural homogenization that operates within globalization, is another essential concept to understand postmodern society. Ritzer’s concept of the “globalization of nothing” is a powerful and thought-provoking idea that challenges our understanding of our world.

Giddens’s contribution to the postmodernism debate is significant, as he introduces the concepts of “high modernity” and “juggernaut.” Giddens challenges the traditional postmodernist view by using these concepts and opens up a space for further discussion and exploration.

Roland Robertson’s concept of “glocalization,” Pieterse’s “hybridization,” and Hannerz’s “creolization” are important tools for understanding the postmodern society.

It is important not to underestimate Harvey’s and Chomsky’s critique of postmodernist theorists. Chomsky identified one of the theory’s weaknesses: It encourages radicalism but is so abstract that it cannot impact the day-to-day lives of ordinary people.

Virilio is regarded as a pioneer in examining the connection between space and time. He proposed the term “dromology” to describe the study of time and space and how they have become less important in human thinking and behavior.

Self-test Path

• (1) What are the main characteristics of postmodern society?

• (2) Can you please talk about De Saussure’s Structuralism?

• (3) Can you please talk about Derrida’s Poststructuralism?

• (4) According to Daniel Bell, what is the contradiction between postmodern society’s social and cultural structures?

• (5) What is the difference between sign value, use value, and exchange value, according to Baudrillard?

• (6) What is “hyperreality,” and why does Baudrillard believe “The Matrix” distorted his thinking?

• (7) What is the McDonaldization of society, according to Ritzer?

• (8) Why is the postmodern individual obsessed with body care, according to Bauman?

• (9) What are the three new forms of postmodern coexistence, according to Maffesoli?

• (10) What is hyperspace, according to Jameson?

• (11) What is the meaning of Ogburn’s theory of cultural lag?

• (12) Why are Chomsky and Harvey so critical of postmodernist theorists?

• (13) What is biopolitics, according to Foucault?

• (14) Can you explain what Giddens means by the Juggernaut metaphor?

• (15) Can you explain Toynbee’s theory of cultural aggression and its value in understanding globalization?