Postmodernism/ity

Kumar suggests that there is no useful distinction to be made between postmodernity as a socio-political concept and postmodernism as a cultural concept. All the instincts of postmodernists are against such a differentiation of spheres. For postmodernists, it is no longer useful to distinguish subsystems within the social world – culture, society, politics, economy are all collapsed together.

This does not lead, however, to an undifferentiated premodern social situation. The plurality of society is not denied (far from it – cf. Lyotard), but the modern notion that there was some controlling or directing power (economy, tradition, politics) is denied: “There is simply a more or less random, directionless flux across all sectors of society. The boundaries between them are dissolved, leading however not to neo-primitivist wholeness but to a post-modern condition of fragmentation.” The privileged site, if there is one, is cultural, and postmodernism is, by some definitions at least, primarily a reaction to cultural modernism.