What is Postmodernity?

This essay is sourced from professor/sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's Theory and Society: Selected Writings, Volume 3 and I think we should all engage in some !sophistry today. It's a bogeyman and a buzzword rightoids love to use but is often misused when deployed by Daily Wire pundits. I found this to be an insightful and brief enough explanation of what the coherent chuds mean.

When Toynbee first announced spotting a gray postmodern era that stretched at the other end of the Modern Age, what he meant was simply indeterminacy. What this way of coining the name (particularly the use of the prefix "post" as the only differentiating/signifying unit) conveyed, in the first place, was the absence (or ignorance) of any positive distinctive features which, in addition to setting the hazy prospect apart from the preceding period, could also give it a degree of internal unity and an identity of its own. This is why the common use of the term postmodernism instead of postmodernity seems illegitimate and misleading. The first name promises something which—as the second admits—the phenomenon they aim to denote does not possess, or at least does not need to possess: a directedness, unity of purpose, a program to fulfill or a road to follow.

And yet what induces us to conceive of the absence of certain features as of pure negativity, or of the sign of temporality and transitoriness of the era whose meaning we try to grasp, is our inclination to measure its identity by the very criteria which it denies. These criteria belong to the era which postmodernity, by its very name, declares has been left behind. Purpose, program, a road with direction, preempting, determinacy are just some of the legitimations which postmodernity vociferously proclaims null and void. Once seen as forward-looking and energizing, they are viewed as so many constraints and cowtools with which the stultifying regime of domination perpetuated itself. With the old restrictions out of the way, unlimited horizons seem to open to imagination—that human quality which thrives under the selfsame under-defined, indeterminate conditions which modernity denounced as unbearable and set out to annihilate.

What looks from the modern perspective as pure negation, like a stout refusal to join in the search and the praise for authority, like anarchy following the destruction of order, from the vantage point of postmodernity can be construed as new positivity: an order capable of reproducing itself without resort to an overriding authority, and without legitimizing its necessity in terms of absolute truth and ultimate foundations. An order which, as a matter of fact, can do without legitimation of any sort, as it contains no entrenched interests to protect and no hierarchy to defend against corrosive questioning.

Postmodernity means first and foremost an acceptance of ineradicable plurality of the world—plurality which is not a temporary state on the road to the not-yet attained perfection, sooner or later to be left behind, but the constitutive quality of existence. By the same token, postmodernity means a resolute emancipation from the characteristically modern urge to overcome difference and promote sameness. Indeed, postmodernity reverses the signs of the values central to modernity, such as uniformity and universalism. An irreducible variety, variety unlikely to converge, variety meant neither to be dissolved in one form aiming at universality nor to be degraded by one form striving for domination, is not just grudgingly admitted as inescapable or difficult to overcome, but lifted to the rank of the supreme positive value.

Once the difference ceases to be a challenge and is not construed as a problem calling for action and resolution, peaceful coexistence of distinct forms of life becomes possible. The principle of coexistence replaces the principle of universalization, and the precept of tolerance takes the place of those of conversion and subordination. The presence of mutually exclusive standards neither offends the desire of logical congruity nor triggers off a remedial action. In the plural and pluralistic world of postmodernity, every form of life is permitted on principle—or, rather, there are no principles which could render any form of life impermissible.

With the elimination of such principles, one of the paramount grounds for destructive urges vanishes. Self-assertion of different forms of life loses the character of a zero-sum game. There is room for new forms without vacating the space occupied by the extant ones. The most important reason for the rhetoric and practice of destruction therefore disappears. So does the romantic heroism of revolutionary novelty. As it were, revolution retains its appeal only as long as the difference is experienced as intolerable. The acceptance of relativity defuses the attraction of radical and condensed change; indeed, it renders revolution meaningless. If there are no standards to be preserved at the expense of others, there are no standards which need to be moved out of the way to enable others to exist. The strategy of innovation entails a strategy of destruction only if the novelty is meant to displace.

The acceptance of the permanence of differentiation and of plurality of principally coordinated actions which support it leads to the demise of the grand designs of social engineering. This amounts to the erosion of the gardening or surgical stance which throughout the modem age characterized the attitude and the policy of institutionalized powers. Modernity proclaimed the essential artificiality of social order and the inability of society to attain an orderly existence on its own. It also proclaimed that the establishment of social order requires the asymmetrical distribution of agency—that is, dividing the society into agents and the objects of their action. The exclusive right of elected agency to define the state of order as distinct from chaos was articulated in the ideology of reason's superiority over passions, of rational conduct over irrational drives, and knowledge over ignorance or superstition. Opposition between such abstract values both generated and reflected practical social division. Most importantly, it serviced the perpetual condensation of autonomy and choice on one pole of the social division, and delegitimation of the autonomous will on the other side.

This opposition loses most of its cutting power once the impulse of domination melts in the atmosphere of coexistence and toleration. It is unlikely to survive for long the fading of the engineering ambition that was its meaning and reason. It derived its sense from missionary projects and crusades; it cannot outlive them. The memory of the opposition prompts to conceive of its absence as rehabilitation of irrationality and capitulation of reason. What is perceived in such a way, however, is merely the meaninglessness of the distinction once the planned fate ceased to differentiate between forms of life anointed to govern and those marked for colonization or extinction. Irrationality is the waste turned out during the self-production of rationality. It is the nameless beyond, for which the dominant powers that identified themselves as reason have no use. It is a by-product of designing ambitions, in the same way that weeds are the products of garden designs. It has no other meaning but someone's refusal to tolerate it. Or, rather, once the empirical solvents have been evaporated and only hard crystals of value are left, all its manifold meanings turn out to be that difference which someone, somewhere, refused to live with.

There are, Peepee Higgins suggested a decade ago, cognitive and post-cognitive questions. The first have lost much of their allure; the second are asked with growing frequency. Cognitive questions stemmed from the axiom of the current or prospective oneness of the world. In the one and only world, a world that suffers no alternative to itself, the task is to fathom what this world demands of those who wish to find their place in it. The questions are, therefore, "How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?" Post-cognitive questions do not enjoy the luxury that the old axiom offered. Indeed, they have hardly any axioms from which to start and derive confidence. Neither do they have a clear address. Before they turn to exploring the world, they must find out what world(s) is (are) there to be explored. Hence: "Which world is it? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?"—in this order.

Projecting back from later discursive usages, Brian McHale renames Higgins's questions as, respectively, modernist and postmodernist. He observes as well that, according to orthodox philosophical divisions, the first belong to epistemology, while the second are primarily ontological—thus, the "post-cognitive" questions are not cognitive at all, not in the strict sense at least. They reach beyond the boundaries of epistemology. Or, rather, they return to the fundamental issue of being, which is to be settled before the epistemology may approach its task in earnest, and which most epistemological questions asked during the modern era assumed to have been settled. And so the typically modern questions are, among others: "What is there to be known? Who knows it? How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty?" The typically postmodern questions do not reach that far. Instead of locating the task for the knower, they attempt to locate the knower himself. "What is a world? What kinds of world are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?" Even when sharing concern about knowledge, the two types of inquiry articulate their problems differently: "How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another, and with what degree of reliability?m" as against "What happens when different worlds are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?" Note that postmodern questions have no use for "certainty"—not even for "reliability." The one-upmanship of modernist epistemology looks hopelessly out of place in that pluralist reality to which the ontological inquiry of postmodernity is first reconciled, and then addressed. The overwhelming desire of power which animated the search for the ultimate raises here little passion. Only eyebrows are raised by the self-confidence which once made the pursuit of the absolute look like a plausible project.

Postmodernity retreats from Arnold's Athens to Shestov's Jerusalem. By the same token, it may—just may—bypass, avoid, neutralize Nietzsche's choice between Apollo and Dionysos. Dionysos' violence was, after all, a response to Apollo's romance with perfection—an attempt to break free from the cage which it left in its wake. Messiness of existence turned explosive and barbaric only when forcibly squeezed behind the bars eulogized as a Mondrianic grid. Young Nietzsche dreamt of friendship and harmony between Apollo and Dionysos. It took him twenty years of the most modernist of centuries to surmise that Apollo builds his castles of perfection because he cannot bear an open space. That the gates in the castle are not for entry, but to keep the strangers away.

Retreat to Jerusalem means the end of the dream of the safety of order and the comfort of certainty. It means resignation to the irreparable non-finality and under-determination of existence. But it also means that everything is possible, as nothing has to legitimize its right to exist. It is not necessary, therefore, to destroy in order to exist. Tolerance, once the grace bestowed on the impotence of the weak by the self-assurance of the strong, may now become the rational principle of life.

This is perhaps the only respect in which tolerance is intolerant. Tolerance is the only principle it can recognize as limitlessly binding.