Introduction
The urban dictionary, a crowd-sourced online resource for slang terminologies, has this to say about postmodernity:
My professor tried to explain postmodernism but got hung up on what words to use. He kept losing track of the meanings and saying things that nobody could understand. Finally when he was unable to speak any language at all, we all understood and went home but couldnât find it, because home is in the film The Wizard of OZ.
(Bozlog, 2008)
This somewhat abstract initiation to the concept of postmodernity at once encapsulates both its key strength and its central weakness: that it can mean anything to anyone and that it is reassuringly, or prohibitively â depending on the readerâs relationship to it â complex. The term postmodernity is used in a range of contexts with increasing frequency, and in a surprising variety of ways. Its prominent usage is perhaps a reflection of the enduring popularity of debate around the extent to which Western societies have undergone radical cultural transformation in the backdrop of the diminishing credibility of metanarratives and any shared idea of progress. As this chapter will demonstrate, postmodernity is a countermovement against the intellectual values and beliefs that dominated the modern period (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries) in the history of Western intellectual thinking. As a philosophy, its central message is the outright denial of eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the claim that logic and reason are only legitimate within the confines of the established intellectual traditions within which they are applied. It is a slippery concept, and one that consistently evades capture in terms of securing a fixed definition. Postmodernity broadly holds that the descriptive, explanatory ideas that were created and maintained around metanarratives, or âworldviewsâ such as science, history and religion during the Enlightenment era, have not only failed but have floundered spectacularly to the point that postmodernists argue that there is no such thing as âtruthâ at all, outside of context. And in the rarefied field of tourism in particular, postmodernity plays a disruptive, critical role as a way of understanding tourism consumption and behaviour. It is used in this context to describe the point at which the typologically rigid classifications of tourism that emerged in the post-industrial age â such as the categorization of tourists based on simple observations about their motives and consumption â were rejected and replaced with conceptualizations that are more flexible. Postmodern thinking can also be deployed as a research philosophy that offers an alternative to the typical interdisciplinary business approaches often associated with tourism research.
The aim of this chapter, then, is to explain postmodernity, and to do so using the context of tourism so that students and academics interested in postmodern thinking for research or other purposes can take orientation from an oven-ready synthesis of the key themes and debates. As such, it seeks to offer an intellectual framework within which subsequent chapters in this volume might be located. Indeed, the chapter has a grounding in the contemporary market dynamics of tourism, so that what is happening ânowâ, or at least recently, and at the time of writing can be used as a reference point in discussing what postmodernity is and how it relates to tourism.
For example, the rejection of tourist typologies alluded to above, together with a repositioning of the focus in tourism research towards the idea that tourism is a multisensory and physical experience, have brought to bear the notion that the individual plays an increasingly central role in the tourist industry as an empowered consumer who interacts with digital content on a scale never witnessed before. New forms of niche and special interest tourism continue to evolve, challenging the traditional approaches to tourism supply, demand and marketing. These are emerging alongside an intellectual critique of tourism as a behaviour, a language and a pluralistic cultural industry. Postmodernity describes and accounts for these new forms of tourism and tourist experiences, and it seeks to critique tourism as a social and cultural practice using various philosophical approaches that have their roots in late-twentieth-century French philosophy. The chapter begins by introducing and exploring the concept of postmodernity before presenting a discussion of the key issues and debates that have shaped our understanding of it in tourism circles. It concludes by considering the application of postmodern thinking to contemporary tourism settings and to tourism research.
Theory: definitions and key debates in postmodernity
In attempting to answer the question âwhat does postmodernism mean?â It is first necessary to bear in mind that it is only possible to describe the phenomenon, not to define it. Any attempt at coming up with a universal definition might itself be treated as a contravention of the central premise of postmodernism â that that there are no such things as absolute truths or knowledge boundaries. Postmodernity is a rejection of absolutes and is, therefore, an invitation to possibilities. Indeed, one of the central beliefs of postmodernists is relativism; the doctrine that knowledge and truth are culturally conditioned, not absolute. It is not surprising, therefore, that given its apparent vagueness of meaning and application, postmodernism is often received with some scepticism. Approached as theory, it is almost certainly more useful to think about postmodernism as a mind-set rather than a systematic movement. In this context, there is at least some agreement around the idea that postmodernism holds that truth is a relative concept. As Sire (2008: 287) puts it:
âŚno longer is there a single story, a metanarrative that holds Western culture together. The naturalists have their story, the pantheists theirs, the Christians theirs, ad infinitum. With postmodernism, no story can have any more credibility than the other. All are equally valid, being so validated by the community that lives by them.
Postmodernists, therefore, argue that the world that is external to them is in error and that no individual or group can assert dominion over truth or over others on the basis of an authoritative truth. For some postmodernist scholars, and particularly those that apply Foucauldian thinking, truth and knowledge are contingent upon historical forces and not scientifically grounded truths. The trouble with this endless spiral towards a world in which all knowledge is relative and open to dismissal, however, is that postmodern thinkers are increasingly accused of having gone too far with their âweapons of critiqueâ, deconstruction and relativism and⌠rejection of grand narratives, stable definitions and eternal truths (Salmon, 2018). Hence, it is little wonder that postmodernism has been criticized as an entirely nihilistic philosophy (Woodward, 2002) centred around the repudiation of meaning and, therefore, value. Yet to avoid reaching a hasty conclusion that dismisses postmodern thinking as singularly destructive and unproductive, it is necessary to trace its origins to understand the conditions that gave rise to its ascendency within culture and cultural studies. In other words, if we want to understand postmodernity, it is surely useful to understand modernity, which it logically appears to have replaced or at least altered. However, in so doing, it is also important to heed Jennings and Grahamâs (1996: 269) warning that, as signifiers, modernity and postmodernity are unstable terms that have been used in âshifting and conflicting waysâ, and this ambiguity has fuelled debate and created scope for dialogue.
The movement of modernity has been described as the replacement of superstitious worldviews of religion and other forms of irrationality with human reason or narratives, such as Marxism (Grassie, 1997). Kumar (1995) considers that the terms modernity and modernism are used interchangeably: the former as a comprehensive designation of change to intellectual, social and political structures and the latter as a cultural movement at the end of the nineteenth century in the west. The five hallmarks of modern thought can be summarized as:
- Humanism (humans are the source of meaning and value)
- Individualism (individuals are ethically and intellectually prior to society)
- Rationalism (there is a natural human faculty of reason)
- Secular moralism (human reason can allow moral action and moral society)
- Progressive history (human history is progressive and moderns are more humane)
Modernism was, therefore, an intellectual movement that originated in the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century, a period that can be characterized by three major values. These are intellectual power of reason over ignorance, order over disorder and science over superstition. Postmodernism is a continuation of modernism in the sense that it questions and denies prior historical beliefs. Indeed, Diepeveen and Van Laar (2001) suggest that modernists explored the implications of the decline of old systems of explaining and organizing human behaviour and turned to new forms of organization, such as Freudian psychology, anthropology and Marxism. Since the late 1970s, historiography theorists have challenged the assumption that history should be driven by the assembling of large historical truths into grand records of fact and interpretation. The progress of modernism manifested itself in material progress, the production of âthingsâ (i.e. industrialization) and the development of a large amount of objective and value-free scientific knowledge. Postmodern theory, conversely, is based upon a relativist theory of knowledge and the belief that there are no certain single truths about the world, only questions with infinite answers, each as valid as the next.
The term postmodernity came into popular usage after the publication of Francois Lyotardâs The Postmodern Condition in 1979, which began challenging the salience of monolithic systems and meta-narratives that offered overarching explanations of the world. Postmodern thinking asserts, instead, that individuals create their own narrative or reality depending on different communities of knowledge. Authors including Habermas (1987) and Giddens (1990) make the argument that âmodernityâ is still a work in progress, whilst Lyotard (1984) and Foucault (1980) recognize a more definitive move towards postmodernity and the role of context and community in shaping knowledge. Pos...
