Postmodernism Essay

4203 Words17 Pages
Basic Premises MODERNITY - Modernity came into being with the Renaissance. Modernity implies “the progressive economic and administrative rationalization and differentiation of the social world” (Sarup 1993). In essence, this term emerged in the context of the development of the capitalist state. Anthropologists have been working towards studying modern times, but have now gone past that. The fundamental act of modernity is to question the foundations of past knowledge. "Modernity" takes its Latin origin from “modo,” which means “just now”. The Postmodern, then literally means “after just now”. POSTMODERNITY - Logically postmodernism literally means “after modernity. It refers to the incipient or actual dissolution of those social forms associated with modernity" (Sarup 1993). MODERNIZATION - “This term is often used to refer to the stages of social development which are based upon industrialization. Modernization is a diverse unity of socio-economic changes generated by scientific and technological discoveries and innovations...” (Sarup 1993). MODERNISM - Modernism is an experiment in finding the inner truths of a situation. It can be characterized by self-consciousness and reflexiveness. This is very closely related to Postmodernism (Sarup 1993). POSTMODERNISM “There is a sense in which if one sees modernism as the culture of modernity, postmodernism is the culture of postmodernity” (Sarup 1993). “Modern, overloaded individuals, desperately trying to maintain rootedness and integrity ... ultimately are pushed to the point where there is little reason not to believe that all value-orientations are equally well-founded. Therefore, increasingly, choice becomes meaningless. According to Baudrillard (1984: 38-9), we must now come to terms with the second revolution, “that of the Twentieth Century, of postmodernity, which is the immense process of
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