Postmodernism, Post-Fordism, and Critical Social Theory

Abstract

The relationship between the transformation of advanced capitalist societies from Fordism to post-Fordism and the simultaneous rise within these societies of postmodern culture is investigated. In art and architecture the exhaustion of high-modernist aesthetic progressivism resulted in a postmodern ‘condition’ of ‘free disposability’ of aesthetic materials which was furthered by societal developments such as the dissolution of the Fordist model of standardized consumption into diversified and aesthetizised consumption, the rise of an experimenting culture industry after the youth revolt of the 1960s, the growth of the service class, and the advent of ‘disposability’ in regard to ways and styles of living. In social philosophy a general delegitimation of the grand narratives of progress and emancipation occurred as ‘high-Fordism’ gave way to stagnating ‘late-Fordism’ and fragmented ‘post-Fordism’. In this process the technocratic–statist narrative of Fordism itself and the labor utopia of the industrial working class lost credibility, without any emergence of convincing utopian or grand reformist alternatives. The spatial (global–local) aspects of these transformations are emphasized and the paper concludes with some left-critical considerations which stress the democratic potential of postmodernism and its openness towards local alliances protective against the powers of global capitals and centralized states.