1 :: GENERAL INTRODUCTION
postmodern 1990s. Postmodernist investigations of identity had a tremendous impact
in cultural and media studies as well as having significantly influenced social science
conceptions of identity more generally. Indeed, the term ‘postmodern identity’ was
undoubtedly one of the most widely used in the social sciences during the late
twentieth century and in the early years of the twenty-first century, ranging as it did
across transformations in identity from speed dating to iPads. As regards the analysis
of identity, it is important to distinguish a more structural, sociological use of the
term ‘postmodernity’ from the aesthetic, more cultural term ‘postmodernism’.
Whilst postmodernism denotes an aesthetic style or form of culture which takes off
in the West, roughly speaking, following the decline of modernism (especially in the
fields of popular culture, literature, architecture and the plastic arts), postmodernity
means something more specific about changes in everyday life, social relations and
the lived textures of identity. Postmodernity, at least in terms of identity, involves the
deconstruction and reconstruction of the self as fluid, fragmented, discontinuous,
decentred, dispersed, culturally eclectic, hybrid-like. Postmodern identity means
life lived in the wake of the collapse of modernist grand narratives of reasons, truth,
progress and universal freedom, with a profound recognition that the Enlightenment
search for solid foundations and certitude was, ultimately, self-destructive.
A streetwise, sceptical culture, postmodernity involves a radically ironic turn (see
Rorty 1989). Rejecting the Enlightenment dream of solid, foundational forms of life
and knowledge, individuals in conditions of postmodernity live their lives as a kind
of artful fiction. Identity, in the post-traditional world of the postmodern, becomes
principally performative – depthless, playful, ironic, just a plurality of selves, scripts,
discourses and desires (see Elliott 2004).
For some theorists of the postmodern, these profound social and cultural changes
signal the end of modernity altogether. The postmodern, in this view, is the historical
unfolding of an epoch beyond modernity. However for other theorists of the postmodern
condition, including Zygmunt Bauman, who contributes to this volume, postmodernity
should not be conceptually bracketed off from modernity in this fashion. Postmodernity,
as Bauman’s work makes clear, is not some overarching totality in the same sense as
modernity. Rather, the postmodern is perhaps best conceived as a form of reflection
or state of mind that rounds back upon the modern itself. In Bauman’s influential
formulation, postmodernity is modernity minus illusions (Bauman 1990). What this
means, essentially, is that fabrications of postmodern identity do not mark a point
beyond modernist forms of life and identity, but rather function as reflective
engagements and reworkings of some of the core presuppositions that frame personal
and social life.