Postmodern Society

In postmodern society there is a skepticism towards universal truths, what followers would say would be questioning the validity of what had come forth as a body of knowledge. It means being critical of what many see as historical fact, knowing that much of what was written and passed down to students in history books is often biased with little reference to the vanquished or whole military campaigns being disregarded. It meant that even the way stories were written and told would be revamped because the so-called narrative order was too contradictory.

Critical post-modernists were of the historical narrative that probably influenced writer like T.S. Eliot to write his narrative like Wasteland in the modern period, lamenting on the poor state of society. The post-modernist attempted to say why make any sense of the disillusionment that Eliot wanted to portray. It was then that the idea of the mini-narrative style came up as a way of challenging the attempted order making, covering societal frailties and contradictions that the previous literary period wanted.

Sociologists here are aware of a global cultural view that has shaded historical accounts to favor a universal body of knowledge and that has prohibited people of being aware of individual social issues, or issues which would favor independent studies of social phenomena. The individual social issues were described in the narrative poems of Ginsberg and Ashbery that broke from the complex form of the modern period.Godard typified the movement in his films, that films were about personal visions and not collaborative efforts between colleagues. He broke with prior conventions to make movies where the line between cinematic narrative and essay was less distinct. Burroughs had his own relaxed style of writing, which brought in the element of what was previously kept out of literature; the lovemaking that his couples partook was a statement that blurred the distinctiveness of high culture from popular culture.

A consumer-based society became more evident as people were buying from ads running on TV channels and through mail-order catalogues. There was a sense that man was just a spectator, going through the mechanisms that modernism had laid the basis for; he would be  a victim of his own waste oriented economy as foreign markets were being flooded with cheaper goods and those markets would eventually dry up and others would be generated in their stead.

Postmodernists expressed their own voice through a separate view of society and culture that stemmed from the social sciences. In literary circles it would be known as a period of consumer capitalism, the advent of pulp fiction novels. To Frederic James. A literary critic, it was a period of culture being processed under the pressures of capitalism. The spatialization or arrangement in space of cognitive materials like maps used to describe population shifts was another way of distinguishing postmodernism from the previous modern period.

Whereas modernism was concerned with unity and identity, postmodernism question objectivity and fostered a view towards plurality and skepticism. It lead to a softening of distinctions between the gay and straight, white versus black, overtly academic versus straightforward, as people were less concerned with identities and politically polished constraints than before.

.