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Contemporary Cultural Theory

society’, a ‘reflexive modernization’, which also represents a
‘radicalization of modernity’ (Beck, 1994, pp. 2–3; cf. Beck, 1992).
For Giddens, it is ‘late modernity’, a similarly reflexive ‘post-
traditional society’, in which globalisation ‘disembeds’ the
‘traditional contexts of action’, so that ‘lifestyle and taste’
become ‘as evident markers of social differentiation as position
in the productive order’ (Giddens, 1994, pp. 95–6; Giddens, 1994a,
p. 143; cf. Giddens, 1991). More interesting than either is Lash’s
notion of aesthetic modernity as a ‘second modernity’, contem-
poraneous with the rationalism of the first, but based on
reflexivity and difference, rather than the rationality of the same
(Lash, 1999, pp. 3–4). The distinctively ‘postmodern’ moment—
though this is not Lash’s preferred term—arrived when both
modernities were superseded, in the ‘multimediatized cultural
space’ of the global information culture, by a new world order,
at once post-national, post-human and even post-western, in
which human subjectivities become equal with ‘animals, things,
machines, nature and other objects’ (pp. 11–14). The result is not
so much difference as indifference.
‘This is the scenario ever repeated in turn-of-the-twenty-first-
century popular culture’, writes Lash: ‘there is no longer a
constitutive outside’, only ‘a swirling vortex of microbes, genes,
desire, death, onco-mice, semiconductors, holograms, semen,
digitized images, electronic money and hyperspaces in a general
economy of indifference’ (p. 344). As impressionistic description,
this is suggestive. As evaluation, however, it is excessively mel-
ancholic; as explanation, near vacuous. As Bauman observed of
a similar blend of melancholia and ‘hyperreal’ excess in
Baudrillard: ‘there is life after and beyond television’, and for
many, ‘reality remains what it always used to be: tough, solid,
resistant and harsh’ (Bauman, 1992, p. 155). Bauman too is a
sociologist, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Universities of
Leeds and Warsaw in fact, but unlike Beck, Giddens and Lash,
he has remained fully committed to the notion of a sociology of
the postmodern. The problem here is with his overly individ-
ualised understanding of what the postmodern might comprise.
As we have seen, Bauman’s early formulations had defined
the opposition between modernity and postmodernity primarily

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