Page 140 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Global media/local meaning 131
There is a mode of vital experience—experience of space and time, of self
and others, of life’s possibilities and perils—that is shared by men and
women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience
‘modernity’. To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that
promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves
and the world—and at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything
we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments
and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of
class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity
can be said to unite all mankind [sic]. But [and here comes an important
qualification, I.A.] it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us
all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle
and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of
a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air’.
(Berman 1982:1)

In this sweeping, totalizing generalization, Berman articulates the very central feature of
modernist discourse—seeing modernity as a relentlessly universalizing force, imposing a
singular type of hyper-individualized experience, destroying traditional connections and
meanings on which old certainties were based. But he is only half right. When we look at
what is actually happening in global culture today, we can see that not all that was solid
has melted into air: on the contrary, the globalizing force of capitalist modernity has not
dissolved the categorial solidities of geography, gender, ethnicity, class, nationality,
religion, ideology, and so on, which still have crucial impacts on the ways in which
people experience and interpret the world and create and recreate their cultural
environments, although the way they do so has been reframed by and within the
structuring moulds of the modern itself.
Moreover, at the mundane level of daily life people build new solidities on the ruins of
the old ones. When old ties and bonds and systems of meaning were eroded by the
dissemination of the modern, they were replaced by new ones: people form new senses of
identity and belonging, new symbolic commodities. But these new solidities are of a
different nature than the old, traditional ones: they are less permanent, less total, less
based on fixed territories, more dynamic, more provisional, and above all they are often
based on the resources offered by global modern culture itself. To put it differently, it is
not enough to define the modern as a singular, universal and abstract experience formally
characterized by a constant revolutionizing impulse; instead, we should emphasize that
there are many, historically particular and localized ways of being modern, shaped by and
within particular conditions and power relations.
At issue here, of course, is the question, not of postmodernism, but of postmodernity. I
would like to oppose the tendency of the discourse of postmodernism to speak about
contemporary culture in purely or primarily aesthetic terms, emphasizing elements such
as pastiche, collage, allegory and spectacle. Lash and Urry see this kind of postmodernist
cultural forms as a more or less direct effect of what they call the ‘disorganised
capitalism’ of today (1987:286), while Fredric Jameson (1991) has, in a famous essay,
dubbed postmodernism ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’. The importance here is not
to reduce the postmodern to ‘mere’ style, but to see it much more broadly as describing