Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
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Postmodernity
, like its intellectual partner postmodernism, was
defined as a 'postmodern condition' of society that came into being
after 'modernity'. However, inconclusive debates surround when the
transformation might have occurred. Some advocates suggested that
this social transformation was a long-running status quo
of constant
change, rather than a temporal shift and evolution of society into a
new technological phase. Questions concerning whether there was/is
such an 'after-modernity' also further complicated things.
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Post-structuralism
, which emerged in France in the 1960s as the
latest variant of postmodernist anti-modernist thought, was a some-
what disparate philosophical movement of literary criticism. As such,
it has been found to be phenomenological and nihilist in extreme, so
that its value to the development discourse is highly problematic.
These three alternative humanistic interpretations of 'self', 'identity'
and 'plurality of meaning' reject the objectivity and scientific rationality
of modernism and structuralism. As philosophical constructs, they char-
acterize the post-1980s globalization era in sociocultural contextual
terms in which the 'systems of knowledge' that produce human and
societal 'objects' also have to be examined to explain the 'object' under
critical scrutiny more holistically. Specifically, 'agency' is privileged and
postmodernism and post-structuralism, in particular, choose to ignore
'structural' societal complexities such as the political economic relations
that determined the power relationships, production and commercial
structures and class systems of capitalist and non-capitalist societies.
After the inevitable global recession of the early 1980s, modernity
was reconfigured. As Chapter 2.3 explains, all sectors of advanced
capitalism changed their scales of operation to international and
global-to-local relationships. Rapid technological change brought more
global exchanges and system dynamics, and helped global production-
commercial networks, chains and management systems, and financial
'worlds' grow more and more powerful. Neoliberalism and deregulation
became the unchallenged and unfettered practices of the next three
decades until the calamitous recession of 2007-2011.
Secondly, an emerging geo-economic phase of global capitalism has
come to the fore (Sparke, 2007). This era has been associated with
geo-political realignments such as the collapse of the Soviet Union
(leaving the US as the sole military 'superpower') and the rapid growth
of several new 'emerging' economic powers such as the BRICs (Brazil,
Russia, India and China). Fundamentally reconfiguring modernity, the
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