Seeking

I found this:

Postmodernism: The following, Fragmentation, was found here
http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/index.html

Since the grand metanarratives no longer have validity, since there is a plurality of truths, writers on postmodernity frequently emphasize the fragmentation of modern culture. The grand narratives are replaced by local narratives. The distinction between 'high' and 'low' culture also disappears. The postmodern mood tends to value the local over the universal, and popular over élite culture or high art. Popular culture signs and media images are seen as increasingly dominating our sense of reality. There is no distinction between the simulations of the media and reality:

... the cultural dominance of the mass media is emphasized, where reality and identity is constructed for us by fleeting and illusory stories, whether in advertising, popular music or TV soap operas. So although the mass media shrinks our world because of its ability to transcend space, this gives us no more meaningful a purchase on 'reality' - it simply multiples the number, frequency and impermanence of the accounts of reality we consume. What we 'see' via the media inevitably constitutes a major source of our knowledge in a post-modern world - but what we see and know, and therefore are, is only here and now, and only until another story comes along.

Jones (1992)

The individual human subject (or self) is also seen as fragmented. The unified 'Cartesian self' is abandoned in favour of the decentred self. Seen from this perspective, the revivification of the Enlightenment project attempted by Jürgen Habermas is an impossibility. Habermas envisages the achievement of a consensus achieved by a dialogue between free, rational and equal actors. He is quite clear that 'everyday communication' (kommunikative Alltagspraxis) permits a form of mutual understanding based on claims to validity - and this conceived of as the only alternative to exerting influence on one another by more or less coercive means' (1983: 26) From the post-modernist point of view, these 'claims to validity' of the Enlightenment project would depend on some sort of conception of humanity as a universal subject, which is impossible since even the individual subject is irredeemably fragmented, decentred. Further, there can be no rules, not even rules as to what constitutes rational debate, which apply to all players in all games. Rules can only ever be local and temporary, the 'temporary contract' now so prevalent in industrial relations, which Lyotard sees as emblematic of all our other social relations. The dispute between Habermas and Lyotard is not, I think, merely a passing storm in an academic teacup. 'Incredulity towards metanarratives' has the potential to undermine the very basis of cultural studies. For Habermas the unmasking of metanarratives makes sense only if we preserve at least some sort of standard by which we can explain the corruption of all reasonable standards. Without such a standard, we cannot distinguish between theory and ideology, the clear and the masked. If what cultural studies is about is the rational critique of existing institutions, which is of course central to the Enlightenment project, then cultural studies either collapses or has to go off and be about something else, since there is no rational foundation left for the critique. Of course, this may be seen as a problem fundamental to the Enlightenment project. Seen as the relentless pursuit of the critical method, the Enlightenment project eventually runs into the problem that it attacks truth-claims from the standpoint of other truth-claims which (temporarily at least) are accepted as valid. Those truth-claims in their turn will, however, also be subject to criticism. So where do you look for a set of truth-claims which are immune from such attack, where do you find an 'objectively valid' position from which to practise your critique? Habermas places much emphasis on the natural sciences as an example of a coming to a consensus whose validity is not merely context-dependent. Lyotard, by contrast, sees 'modern' science as in fact typically 'postmodern':

Postmodern science by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, 'fracta', catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable and paradoxical.

Lyotard (1984) : 60

For Habermas this is typical of the irrationality which the postmoderns must necessarily give themselves over to. Their unprincipled pragmatism does not permit reasoned critique. Thus, in his view, the critical rationality which permits the cultural theorist to engage with power, ideology, institutions, social reality is simply abandoned in favour of mere passive conformism. Hence his labeling postmoderns 'neo-conservative'.

It's probably worth mentioning in passing, though, that Enlightenment rationalism has always been accompanied by irrationalism. There is a strongly relativist strain in Montesquieu, one of the founding fathers of the Enlightenment; the French Revolution, often seen conveniently as the starting point of the Enlightenment project, soon celebrated the existence of the Supreme Being; the Romantic movement was in many ways deeply anti-rationalist; surrealism, once the high point of modernism, was counter-rational - and so on. So maybe irrationalism is not so obviously scary.

The postmodernists' emphasis on fragmentation leads many to celebrate place and local identities. Diversity and decentralization are applauded as expressions of local autonomy, as are single-issue political movements such as protesters against a the construction of a local by-pass. Whilst there can be no doubt that there is now a wider range of choices, to the extent that it may appear legitimate to question whether we can speak of 'mass culture' or 'popular culture' in the singular at all, the celebration of diversity may simply overlook the underlying capitalist logic behind the fostering of diversity. Where capitalism once benefited from economies of scale, it now also benefits from 'economies of scope'. A wider range of choices means greater market segmentation and greater market segmentation means greater profit. In the same way as capitalism may be seen as having created market through producing fashion and planned obsolescence, so it may now be seen as creating the apparent diversity of post-modern particularism. localism and eclecticism, now that new modes of production make possible the exploitation of such markets.