"Postmodernism" and "postmodernity," when they are not used simply to designate an architectural style or an artistic impulse, tend to be used to refer to a disillusionment with the optimism of the Enlightenment, with its conception of the liberation of humanity from slavery and ignorance and its unlimited progress toward some final perfection. Something called "modernity" is then identified with those ill-founded hopes and that hopelessly partial Enlightenment view of the world.
The partiality of the Enlightenment view of things comes out as soon as one considers concretely the conditions of the conception, expression, and consumption of that view. When these things are looked at it can be seen that the Enlightenment view expressed little more than the sense of emancipation of one particular class from the constraining bonds of feudalism and a sense of the infinite possibility of the new order of society for that class, which was the motor and representative of that new order. That class has been called "the radical middle class." The term "radical bourgeoisie" would be more accurate, even though the word "bourgeois" has been somewhat damaged by being frequently used to abuse merely. The words "bourgeois" and "bourgeoisie" would be more accurate because the class whose view of the world the Enlightenment formulated and expressed was one that grew up within the towns and was created by, and associated with, the markets that had their home there. It consisted of the merchants, traders, and budding industrialists.
It was this class associated with the towns and created by their markets that was at the center of the historically transforming power of markets, a power that on the one hand called for the transformation of the subsistence economy of feudalism, a largely agricultural economy with little division of labor. On the other hand, the market's for products and commodities set the scene for the industrial revolution as the demands of the market outgrew the production capacity of the cottage industry and the "manufactories" that the market had itself called into existence. It was that infinite expansion of possibility that was reflected in the optimism of the Enlightenment picture.
But if to get clear about this, we ask just who that Enlightenment picture was painted for and whose portrait it was, we see that we have to eliminate large and important segments of eighteenth-century society straight away. It was not for them.
It was not the land-owning class that the Enlightenment was speaking to and whose portrait was being painted in those rosy colors. The importance of that class, its influence on historical developments and the shape of life, was on the wane, even though the land-owning class was able to fight its corner against the "free traders" well into the nineteenth century. But, most strikingly, it was not the peasants that the Enlightenment philosophers, the Philosophes, were speaking to, nor was it to the growing class of agricultural laborers, or the weavers who no longer worked in their cottages but in a "manufactory" on someone else's loom. These were not the classes for whom the books, poems, and pamphlets were written, the music composed, the paintings painted. It was not their liberation that was being referred to or their prospects that were being described, for the simple reason that liberation had not happened for them, nor was it about to.
If, per impossibile, it had been this class of peasants and laborers that was the consumer of literature and sustainer of the intellectuals, providing their living and their position, it would hardly have had that Enlightenment optimism laid out before it. There was nothing in the situation of the members of those classes or their prospects that would have corresponded to that Enlightenment view of the world and of humanity. The members of those classes would have recognized nothing of themselves in such a picture of liberation and unlimited progress. The books would have remained unsold and the intellectuals proclaiming that view would have been dismissed from their posts, their sinecures cancelled, and their support withdrawn for talking such nonsense. The Enlightenment would never have happened. And what then would have become of the "modernity/postmodernity" debate?
This little thought experiment can tell us a good deal about that debate. To begin with, it shows us that the debate has been about a partial view of humanity and history that reflected no more than the hopes and aspirations of one class that was feeling its power and saw its future as unlimited. That class was, to be sure, a dynamic class, and its power was real, and to that extent the Enlightenment view did reflect something real. It had to, or else it would have "fallen stillborn" and never been heard of after.
What was false about it was its claim to speak for humanity as such and for the whole of history where in fact it was the history and situation of just that one class which was at that time a dominant and shaping force in Western Europe. That class was the developing force of what has come to be called "the developed world" and so was clearly important. But though important, it was not the whole of the world or the whole of society.
One should not forget, also, that the Enlightenment view had its own role to play in rallying that class and giving it a sense of coherence and a sense of its own role. The Enlightenment view was itself thus a player, though, one must add quickly, not an independent player that could be detached from the individual human actors who held that view of things and whose actions were influenced by it. It mustn't be thought of as an autonomous force.
But still, we must come back to the fact that the Enlightenment claimed to be speaking for the whole of humanity when it was speaking for only a part of it. Most importantly, the liberation that it proclaimed was the liberation of that one class only. It could not be made to encompass the liberation of the others on pain of contradiction. The coming to dominance of the bourgeoisie, the merchants, traders, the budding industrialists, the hirers of those "hands" who provided the merchants and traders with something to trade, that new dominance itself meant the eclipse of the power of the land-owning class, as laws and institutions came to be shaped to the needs of this new dynamic class and its activities.
Most importantly, the liberation of the hirers of "hands" could not be made to encompass the liberation of the hands themselves. Quite the contrary. The "hands" that the hirers required had to be stripped of their common lands by enclosures, since those common lands had provided a peasant population with a means of independent subsistence. That part of the population had to be made dependent on those "hirers of hands" for the means of their subsistence. The liberation of some was hardly the liberation of all.
Those false claims of the Enlightenment to speak for the whole of humanity were also at the base of just that false optimism that recent history has undermined. It is now no longer so easy to think that humanity as a whole was being liberated, when whatever unevenly distributed prosperity that the developed world enjoys requires the impoverishment of the third-world suppliers of those goods we take for granted, the sugar, the tea, the coffee, the chocolate, the jeans, and the runners that we consume without a thought for the conditions of those who have labored to produce them.
And even within the so-called "developed" world, it now commonly takes the work of two to support a household. That recent development looks rather like a regression to those early nineteenth-century conditions in which a whole family, including small children, worked at the looms of the weaving mills.
The "progress" of the modern world has come increasingly to seem a regress to those willing to think about it, as we read of the small children in the third world whose eyes are destroyed making our carpets, or whose childhood is taken in other ways to provide luxuries for the developed world.
And there are the many threats to humanity itself from that very "progress" of the developed world, from the fearsome and vicious weapons it has generated and disseminated for profit through the world, turning tribal conflicts into genocidal disasters, to the threats from great environmental damage that is the by-product of its byproducts. And we hardly see the liberation from ignorance that the Philosophes hoped to accomplish with the Encycopedie. Certainly not in a time when "store-front" religions and the television healers "daily devour apace," and a struggle is going on to introduce Special Creation as a biological theory into the schools of the World's most advanced capitalist nation.
The question that we have to pose about the "modernity/postmodernity" debate is whether we are talking about an actual historical transition, a break between two identifiable historical periods, each with a different dynamic and direction of development, or about something that is better described as a "disillusionment," a change in our view of the history of our times.
It might seem to be pretty obvious from the above remarks which answer I would give. I have tried to make out the nature of the self-delusion that the Enlightenment view of things involved, the illusion that the one class was speaking for all. But there is a deeply important fact about that illusion, however, and one that it would be entirely false to leave out of account. The fact is that the illusion was an energizing one, one that gave that dynamic class a sense of mission and the coherence and strength to bring about some of the things that the members of it believed.
But not all of those things. And that is an important fact to keep in mind too. The Enlightenment view had some element of the self-fulfilling prophecy about it, but not all its prophecies and aims could be fulfilled equally. Particularly not those of universal liberation.
The relations between the classes in Enlightenment times, and our own, is such that progress for one will generally involve regress for the other, despite all the 'trickle down" theories in the world.
This regress is sometimes obvious, as in the vicious "vagabondage" laws that were enacted through much of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the aim of detaching the peasantry from any independent means of subsistence and driving them into the towns and the arms of employers. Sometimes the regress is masked, as when great changes in production and leaps in productivity allow a greater distribution of goods. I say "masked" because, despite a wider distribution of material goods, a closer look at the changes in the nature of work that the "hands" are required to do shows a progressive draining away of the skills involved and their incorporation into mechanical routines that require little training, call on little intelligence, and are a diminishing of the humanity of the person required to do that work.
That progress for some is regress for others shows itself most clearly in the relations between the developed world and the undeveloped, where any serious economic analysis shows "trickle up" rather than 'trickle down" as each aid dollar finds two others to bring with it back to the developed world. In Latin American Spanish, the transitive verb "to underdevelop" has been introduced into the language to describe the first world's relations with the third and to characterize the changes that have been forced on the third world by the dominant first-world institutions such as the IMF or the World Bank (though you won't find the verb subdesarrollar in many Spanish dictionaries).
So we seem to be led to a position from which we may no longer wish to pose the alternatives so starkly as being between a genuine historical division or a simple change of perspective. A change of perspective is itself a historical fact of which we have to take note and becomes, for example, part of our understanding of the coherence and energy of the new class in its battle with the feudal practices, institutions, and laws that stood in its way. Even though it may not mark a change of the same kind as changes in material conditions, practices and institutions, scientific discoveries, and discoveries of new continents, a change of perspective needs to be ranged alongside those other changes, seen as something connected to them, rather than as something autonomous arriving from outside history and human life. The Enlightenment view had historical antecedents and it had historical consequences too. The philosophers who set it out were not visitors from another planet who came, formed their opinions, and then took them away with them. They were a part of the dynamic of that new social order.
But in seeing a change of perspective, outlook, hope or plan as embedded in and as one amongst other changes to which it is connected, we can see that a change of perspective is not in itself sufficient to mark a division between historical periods. Not, that is, if it is detached from that historical surrounding where it has antecedents which are the source of its sense and its moving power, and consequences that embody and demonstrate them. Abstracted from that context those views are nothing, nothing but wind and air. Much of the discussion of "modernity" and "postmodernity" seems to be caught up in that founding Cartesian assumption that thoughts, beliefs and doubts can be separated from their antecedents and from their consequences for action and still have sense. They cannot, and in asking us to separate our doubts from our life, Descartes is converting his "method of doubt" into a dumb-show.
The real historical force of the Enlightenment philosophy has to be understood by drawing out the conditions, the changes in material life that created possibilities, and energized those to whom the Enlightenment philosophers were speaking, those whose life and possibilities they were describing. Then we can understand how the very description of the new possibilities, and that optimistic picture that was painted, helped to consolidate that optimism and make those possibilities real.
The Enlightenment picture of endless progress and of human perfectibility then ceases to be a mysterious, abstract force arriving out of the air or the imagination. Understanding how that Enlightenment picture could have an actual historical role becomes no more difficult than understanding how drawing a plan helps a carpenter, or encouragement helps a child. We have only to put behind us the divorce between thought and action that Descartes so fatally enjoined and made a condition of the application of his method.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)