Progress and the Post-Modern Society

The progress of technology and social forms have led to deliberations of what it means to live in a modern society. This self-reflection of modernity on its own meaning has resulted in a new epoch. The dissemination of these debates through digital media has permeated society and has had an effect on the application of technology and progress toward furthering the effects of this change of epoch. Thereby, the new age has continually and in full awareness and foresight been transcending its current state.

Keywords Actor-Network Theory; Assemblages; Autopoiesis; Biopower; Biological Citizenship; Consumerism; Cultural Capital; Digital Divide; Digital Inequality; Grand Narratives; Reflexive Modernity; The Social Construction of Reality

Progress & the Post-Modern Society

Overview

Any discussion of a concept such as progress in relation to postmodern society must first ask what postmodernity actually means. Postmodernity as a concept has several divergent and disputed meanings and definitions. The question can even be asked whether there actually is such a thing as postmodernity and whether we do not live in just another mode of modernity; others have even questioned if we have ever been modern at all.

In his landmark study The Postmodern Condition, French scholar Lyotard (1979) analyzes the effect that postmodernity has had on the meaning of human life. The study was originally a report written for a Canadian Council on higher education, yet it became a philosophic bestseller as a monograph. The report was intended to convey an idea of the effects of modern communication technologies in society.

Lyotard argues that society in the postmodern age is showing a trend of losing faith in the grand narratives that had served as modes of orientation for prior generations. This represents a turning point also in the history of the concept of postmodernity, which up to this point was often used in the field of art criticism. In Lyotard's work, it is turned toward a positive identification of the present time in philosophy and sociology. The concept of progress is one of those grand narratives amongst which we can count the claim of science to unveil all knowledge, or religion's promise of ultimate salvation, or the continuous progress of history and civilization, among others. Lyotard discards these in the incredulity that the postmodern society shows as an attitude toward these grand narratives and toward liberalist, Enlightenment, positivist, and Marxist ideologies alike (Lyotard, 1979).

Actual progress, in Lyotard's account, is made in the field of technology but without a "teleological end-in-sight." It is the technologies of communication and information that continue to open up the channels of the discourse of societies and thereby render the grand narratives ineffective and reveal them as a mere "language game," using the terminology of Wittgenstein. Thus, science destroys its own narrative by enabling an ever increasing plurality of such language games.

American literary critics such as Frederic Jameson identify within postmodernity a form of late capitalism, thereby reducing the dynamics of progress to the forces of finance capitalism and the devaluation of labor in that both money and labor are rendered liquid and mobile. The metaphor of liquidity is prominently addressed in the works of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who studied the ambiguity of modernity in the social process of bureaucracy, social exclusion, and their relationships to rationality. The ambivalences and ambiguities of these processes are solid and manifest in modernity, but with the transformation to postmodernity and consumerism are rendered liquid, giving rise to fears and the perception of uncontrollable risks.

The latter topic is the central feature of the work of sociologist Ulrich Beck, who argued that the risk society is a type of society in which the risks that emerge through technological progress, such as nuclear power or CO2-emissions, are no longer contained within national borders and therefore cannot be nationally controlled. The clear perception of these developments by the public, as well as the constant awareness of the interdependencies and the risks and dangers that lie outside of the sphere of their own society's political control, have resulted in a different type of society due to the aggregation into new forms of living, social movements, and political activism. The original publication of Beck's 1986 seminal work, Risk Society, was framed by the Chernobyl catastrophe and the political rise of Europe's environmentalist movement and green parties.

Applications

In the social sciences, progress is often loosely defined by three historic phases:

1. Premodernity
2. Modernity
3. Postmodernity or Reflexive/Second Modernity

However, as is often the case with such concepts, the actual definitions and intervals are highly disputed. This becomes clear when we ask the question whether the time we live in now is just a new phase of modernity, or if it is a postmodern age, or further, if we find ourselves in a second or reflexive modernity. Some have argued that the concept of modernity itself should not be used at all, for we have never been modern. However, a brief presentation follows:

Premodernity

Premodernity can be described as a phase of agrarian society. Production is limited to a base of human and animal power. There is no mass production. Publication and political, religious, and scientific discourse are still intertwined and subject to oral and written correspondence. Political regimes are based on charismatic and traditional authority.

The first epochal change arrived with the establishment of the printing press and large-scale distribution of printed works, enabling a wider political, religious, and scientific discourse, while also making possible a separation of these three spheres, as Elisabeth Eisenstein (1980) has shown.

Modernity

Even though the term modern is generally used to describe the "current and contemporary state of affairs," the intellectual concept of modernity can be described as the emergence of industrialization and the emergence of the public sphere, in accordance with Jurgen Habermas. The economic situation began to change with factories, mass production, and the invention and industrial application of the steam engine as a power source.

The rise of the nation and republicanism as political forms were a result of the discourse in the newly emerging public sphere, and of the decline of the role of religion as a corollary of Enlightenment philosophy and modern science. The theories of evolution and new cosmic models mark the era of modernity, which was solidified with the rise of mass media, such as newspapers, radio, and the emergence of television.

Postmodernity or Reflexive/Second Modernity

At the advent of the digital age, the televised life was perhaps one of the first steps toward a postmodern age. Postmodernity is the least clear-cut of the concepts and continues to be highly disputed. Originally used in art criticism, the term has been used by social scientists to describe a variety of processes, each of which are directly linked to the developments leading to the high phase of modernity.

Postmodern economy is also being increasingly transformed into a knowledge-based economy, wherein knowledge (instead of craftsmanship or human labor) is used as the primary factor for the production of commodities, while knowledge is also becoming a commodity itself. Thereby the importance of other forms of capital, such as cultural or symbolic capital, rise in importance.

Political Authority

Political authority and national sovereignty are broken up and fragmented in the wake of ongoing digitalization and globalization. New political forms are being discussed, such as in Colin Crouch's (2004) diagnosis that we are living in a post-democratic society. Consumerism has become a form of life; even knowledge and information have turned into commodities. The public discourse in modernity, in the hope of realizing the goals of Enlightenment, has prided itself on the public accessibility of knowledge and information to the point where, in the early twenty-first century, the Internet has been hallowed as a tool toward this goal. David Kellog (2006) illustrates that the commodification of scientific knowledge, such as in the decoding and patenting of human DNA, has created a new post-academic culture of science.

Risk, Fear, & Loss of Social Bonds

Other scholars, such as Scott Lash, Anthony Giddens, and Ulrich Beck discuss the "decline" or "transformation" of modernity in a different way. Beck (2006) in particular argues that modernity has not turned into a postmodernity, but instead we find ourselves in a second or reflexive modernity. The results of modernity, specifically the dangers and risks associated with the "progress" of modernity, have entered the public discourse and guided individual decisions. Individuals are increasingly aware that the effects of their individual actions, as well as the effects of aggregated social action of political or economic actors (such as states or industries) are integrated into a structure of interdependencies and therefore rarely calculable. Including and "reflecting on" this dimension in their deliberations therefore does not render the situation into a postmodernity, which some critics and some enthusiasts have simplified to the motto "anything goes." Instead, people begin to deal with risks and fears differently, while deliberating their actions more strategically. Power, Beck argues, actually rests not with multinationals or governments, but with the consumers. All they require is to be organized into consumer movements.

On a social level, this affects the structure of society. Superficially, it could be said that premodern civilizations rested primarily on the unity of small communities, each of which was kept in an integrated state through the bonds of family kin and face-to-face contact. With the rise of modernity, society's integration was upheld through forms or semantics such as national unity, commonwealth, or social welfare, ideas linked to progress within the political sphere. But with urbanization and individualization, the loss of social cohesion accelerated and with it, critics argue, a devaluation of family, community, and friendship, which could result in the dissolution of all social bonds.

In the postmodern or the reflexive modernity, the progress of democratization would have one of two outcomes: it would either end in a cynical reflection of the risks of social progress and the loss of cohesion (as we find addressed by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk) or result in evidence of the system theory of sociologist Niklas Luhmann.

One of the most consequential philosophers of postmodernity, Gilles Deleuze—who wrote about philosophy, psychology, and problems such as the cinema or surveillance society—once compared society to the development of a rhizome, an analogy from botany that describes an underground root-web. The rhizome is supposed to illustrate the aspects of mutuality and multiplicity that Deleuze thought to be inherent in society, which for him (and his colleague Guattari) was the field of research for the representation of multiple and non-hierarchical data exit and entrance points. This is a forerunner to concepts of the information age, network society, or information society, as discussed by Manuell Castells (2001).

The Global City

One major aspect represented in postmodern study is the global city, a field of study for sociologist and political thinker Saskia Sassen (2001). Sassen shows that even in an age of mobile and liquid data streams, there can be a "sense of place" in global economy. Global cities are important nodes in the data streams of the postmodern society, because even in a flexible economy and society, such as the postmodern society, one does have certain needs that must have a location. We then find ourselves aggregated at such nodes, as represented by London, Tokyo, or New York. In other words, even postmodern progress is bound to an idea of space, even if it is a minimal one. However, in her 2006 work, Sassen shows that this does not mean that the global city requires the semantics of the nation or to bind legal sovereignty to territorial administrations such as states. Legal agreements and legal regimes can be hammered out between partners (or competitors) without involving state authority; instead, the interlocutors—the companies themselves—form assemblages that transcend institutionalized guarantees such as state power. This works not only between global companies, but can also involve human rights, consumers, or environmentalist groups.

These assemblages are intertwined in complex global networks that are very hard to describe and rest completely on the use of communication. They are therefore subject to theories that are in themselves products of postmodern scholarship, such as “deconstruction,” Luhmann's system theory of “autopoietical systems,” or “complexity theory.”

Viewpoints

The Progress of Gender

One area of progress within postmodern society can certainly be found in gender discourse. Postmodern scholars have opened up the dichotomy of male-female in a variety of ways. In this effort, progress in the biological sciences has helped distinctively, proving for example that homosexuality is not uncommon among animals, including primates and apes. The deconstructivist reading of psychology, as undertaken by Judith Butler, has revealed to which point the construction of a gender identity relies on performative acts, rather than mere biological sex.

The biological categories have in themselves been a matter of social construction, since nature produces more sexes in humans than just man and woman. Other sexes are not entirely uncommon, but these expressions of genetic predispositions have in historical social debates gone from being considered monstrosities to abnormalities to ultimately being hushed away. In a mutual development of science, psychology, and postmodernity, society has come to embrace the expression of different genetic expressions of sex, as well as different lifestyles that have opened up the previously rigid frame of heterosexual male-female dichotomy. Although, it must be critically stated that some participants in this debate have gone as far as questioning the legitimacy of monogamous heterosexual relationships and have even been openly discriminating and derogatory against traditional family concepts. But suffice it to say, the debate itself has opened up ideas of what is "normal" toward a point that seems more just and approximate to the diversity that both nature and human evolution have to offer.

The Digital Divide

A very critical aspect in light of questions of justice in the development of postmodern society and technological progress is found in the emergence of a so-called digital divide. This concept describes the fact that despite a continuing penetration of our social lives by information and communications technology (ICT/IT), many people—both in poorer countries as well as within wealthy ones—are denied (by effects of social inequality) access to these technologies or to the necessary education required to learn the skills of operating these technologies. Thereby, the inequalities these people often originally suffer are gravely deepened, leading to a spiral of exclusion from which they have an ever slimmer chance of escaping.

Scholars such as Jean Baudrillard (1983) have studied the phenomenon of digitalization very early on and have concluded that reality is eventually becoming less and less real, as it is turning from simulations of reality into simulacra—simulations of simulations. This reaches a point of economic transaction cycles that have no more actual material bases at all. Baudrillard calls this the "impossible exchange," for effectually, nothing is exchanged but simulations in a cascade of simulations.

The Parliament of Things

Against such trends and even against postmodern theory, Bruno Latour set his ideas of the politics of nature and the parliament of things, as well as his approach of actor-network theory (ANT). Reality is shaped by each entity as an actor within its networks. Thereby even the things that surround us are actors, and the network wherein they act is shaped by them and their relations to it. Sociology (and thereby postmodern theory) has claimed that "the social" is the explanation for everything. Thereby, progress is dependent on society, and so is postmodernity as a state of society.

But actually, this does not so much affect the things or their nature. Quite the other way around—nature and things affect through the relations that they form with the world just as much from their perspective as do human individuals or society. Neither entity can claim primacy. In opening our understanding to these relations and by giving them a voice that counts, as a "parliament of things," we gain a much better understanding of the world. Additionally we realize that in our dependence on the world, the concept of modernity itself is only a construct depending on our notions of society or science. But once we realize the dependence, we also face the fact that we have never been modern, because "modernity" is a relation that rests on prerequisites that are, in that regard, unreal.

The ultimate version of the co-development of progress and postmodern society can be found in the ideas of posthumanism or transhumanism. Transhumanists believe that the effects of modern society on the world and nature have rendered and are continually rendering the natural world uninhabitable for human beings. Therefore they argue that only the development of technological augmentation of the body (such as the creation of cyborgs), the invention of artificial intelligence, and the possibility to upload human consciousness into computers will be humanity's eventual salvation.

Terms & Concepts

Actor-Network Theory: ANT has been associated with the work of science historian Bruno Latour. Latour has argued that all entities and things are actors within networks of other things. The "social" as an explanatory category for reality does not suffice, for it is only one among an infinite number of possible relations. It is therefore the relations we should be interested in, as they "really" happen, and not the imputation of a "social" explanation.

Assemblages: Saskia Sassen has used the word assemblages to describe regimes (such as legal or truth regimes) that are agreed upon by parties outside of established institutions or sovereign entities, such as nation states. Assemblages have existed in all eras and often were an engine for structural change and transformation. Contemporary assemblages are described by global actors, such as multinational corporations, international consumer representations, or environmentalist groups, whose actions are not bound by national borders (to one territory) and therefore have no secure legal representation that affects their actions.

Autopoiesis: The idea of autopoiesis in sociology was introduced by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann, in studying the work of the neurologist Humberto Maturana, used it to explain certain features of his systems theory that he could previously not adequately solve. He saw social systems as systems of communication that operate with the distinction system/environment. A system can only observe its environment and render these observations into topics for communication. Systems operate on a basis of continuing their own operation by producing their own basis for continuance. This process of self-reproduction is called autopoiesis.

Biopower: The term biopower was introduced by Michel Foucault to describe a technology of power that states apply to govern a population through subjugation of the body itself via forms of discipline and regulative regimes of biopolitics.

Biological Citizenship: Since we have the possibility to intervene in both our own genetic makeup as well as our neurochemical systems, due to the advances of biomedicine, many choices of lifestyle and freedom have become dependent on the genetic and neurological prerequisites of our body. The legal and ethical regulations and considerations that come with these choices, as well as the sanctions imposed upon us, thereby have rendered citizenship vulnerable to issues of our bodies and our genes, so to speak. Citizenship is therefore no longer just territorial or social, but a biological matter.

Consumerism: A society has turned into a consumerist society when its central features rest on its economy, and when participation in the form of citizenship is realized in the possession and acquisition of material goods and services.

Cultural Capital: The concept of cultural capital as a form of symbolic capital was made popular by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In his work, Bourdieu shows that besides money, other forms of capital exist that regulate access to social classes. Cultural capital is comprised of knowledge, network connections, and experiences.

Digital Divide: The term describes the difference in access to and practical knowledge about the use of information technology, specifically the Internet. The divide exists between different kinds of groups, and internationally between developing and developed nations. In communities, it exists between rural and urban areas, or populated areas that are of more or less economic interest for Internet service providers. Finally, it exists between social classes.

Digital Inequality: The effect of the digital divide is a new form of inequality in which those denied access to the use of or knowledge about the use of Internet technology suffer a disadvantage in political, social, and/or economical disadvantage as a consequence of that exclusion.

Grand Narratives: In the account of Lyotard, postmodernity has freed society from the adherence to "grand narratives," such as the promises of salvation by religion, the promise of universal knowledge, and the universal progress of Enlightenment or of progress as proposed in the philosophy of Hegel. These narratives are mere language games, and once they are elucidated as such, they lose their power over people.

Reflexive Modernity: The term reflexive modernity, coined by Ulrich Beck, refers to a second modernity, a modernity after modernity, which Beck sees as a distinct concept from that of postmodernity. In reflexive modernity, we have become aware that risks cannot be fully controlled, in part because of interdependence. Risks become global, as through global warming, and the actions of one nation (e.g., to increase industrial production) may affect another nation though global warming. Whether politics, science (modern systems), or religion (premodern systems), no system once promising "global solutions" for local problems can offer either; instead, they become local promises that contribute to global problems. The reflexive awareness of this state can be called second modernity, for it transcends the belief in modern systems while keeping them intact to manage the local, modern problems.

“The Social Construction of Reality”: In 1966 Berger and Luckmann published their landmark study of this title. In their view, the reality that exists for members of a society is comprised of phenomena they construct through their social actions, by behaving as if they are following conventional rules, as if the phenomenon does exist. The most famous example is perhaps the assumption of the existence of social status.

Bibliography

Baudrillard, J. (1983). Simulations. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Beck, U. (2006). Power in the global age: A new global political economy. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Beck, U. (1986). Risikogesellschaft. Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp.

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Donati, P. (2011). Modernization and relational reflexivity. International Review of Sociology, 21 , 21–39. Retrieved October 28, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=59702978&site=ehost-live

Eiseinstein, E. (1980). The printing press as an agent of change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Heiskala, R. (2011). From modernity through postmodernity to reflexive modernization. Did we learn anything?. International Review of Sociology, 21 , 3–19. Retrieved October 30, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=59702983&site=ehost-live

Kellog, D. (2006). Toward a post-academic science policy. In: International Journal of Communications Law & Policy: Special Issue Access to Knowledge.

Lyotard, J-F, 1984. (1979). The postmodern condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Sassen, S. (2001). The global city. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sassen, S. (2006). Territory, authority, rights: From medieval to global assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Suggested Reading

Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In, J. C. Richardson, ed. Handbook of Theory and Research in the Sociology of Education. pp. 241–258. New York: Greenwood.

Elias, N. (2000). The civilizing process. Oxford: Blackwell.

Esposito, E. (2003). The arts of contingency. Critical Inquiry. Retrieved on August 23, 2008 from University of Chicago: http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/features/artsstatements/arts.esposito.htm

James, J. (2011). Are changes in the digital divide consistent with global equality or inequality?. Information Society, 27 , 121–128. Retrieved October 30, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=59132056&site=ehost-live

Lash, S. & Urry, J. (1994). Economies of signs and space. London: Sage.

Rifkin, J. (2000). The age of access. New York, NY: Tarcher.

Turner, F. (2006). From counterculture to cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the whole earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Van Dijk, J. A. G. M. (2005). The deepening divide: Inequality in the information society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Villadsen, K. (2011). Ambiguous citizenship: ‘Postmodern’ versus ‘modern’ welfare at the margins. Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 12 , 309–329. Retrieved October 30, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=69892985&site=ehost-live

Warschauer, M. (2003). Technology and social inclusion: Rethinking the digital divide. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.