Postmodern Sociology

From grand narratives to fragmented selves

Joachim S. Bauer explores postmodernity as a fragmented, nihilistic paradigm that dismantles truth, identity, and hierarchy through deconstruction, and contrasts it with Alexander Dugin’s call for a sacred, hierarchical, and collectivist order rooted in tradition.

Postmodernity is the mistrust of grand narratives.

— Jean-François Lyotard

The postmodern society is pluralistic and individualized. It knows neither absolute truths nor traditional structures; nation, religion, and family are alien to it. It is a globalized society in which identities are no longer formed by values but by consumption. Work is flexible; society is multicultural and diverse. It is a society in a constantly accelerating process of transformation, based on a culture of spectacle, individuality, and autonomy. However, if there are no longer any collective identities, the world ends in nihilism, concealed in the rhetoric of humanism. Man becomes god, and the individual becomes the state, whose body — like everything else that exists — can be altered at will; the atomized individual becomes the sole aim. It is a chaotic being with no relations to its external world. What exists in terms of truth and order is a product of its consciousness.

Truth and Perception in Postmodernity

Since there is no longer a universal truth, everything is ambiguous and full of socially conditioned hierarchies that have no natural origin (Jacques Derrida). Postmodern society recognizes no original meaning. As described by Jean Baudrillard, it is a world where reality and simulation can no longer be distinguished. Everything that exists is constructed; reality gives way to signs that influence and eventually replace it entirely. In the end, signs only refer to themselves; they become simulacra. Signs are thus no longer representations of reality; they become the new reality, pure staging (Baudrillard calls this hyperreality).

Object-oriented ontology (OOO) holds that objects exist independently of a subject’s perception and interpretation. All entities — everything that exists — are understood as equal objects. The special status of humans, their perception and interpretation, is thus removed. Postmodernity also rejects the special position of the human, instead analyzing and critiquing dominant power structures and concepts of reality and subjectivity. As such, OOO is largely incompatible with classical metaphysics, which presupposes the centrality of the human in ontology.

Nation-State, Gender Roles, and Society

Through its deconstruction and questioning of power relations, postmodernity also challenges the nation-state and traditional gender roles. The nation-state is not seen as a natural and inevitable order but as the result of a historical, discursive process shaped by power dynamics. It forms its identity through exclusion because it can include or exclude identities and determine who belongs and who does not. Globalization processes are seen more positively. For postmodern philosophy, they offer a refreshing change from the rigid (but by no means god-given or natural) structures of the nation-state and allow for the emergence of new configurations.

Rigid gender roles likewise disappear through the analysis of historical power structures. Theorists like Judith Butler emphasize the performativity of gender. As a social construct, gender is constituted through language and practice. Just as gender becomes fluid, society as a whole can be endlessly reinterpreted and reassembled.

Even the relationship between human and animal “society” is contested in postmodern thought. Michel Foucault redefines the boundary between animal and human and points to the power structures that determine life and death. In this understanding, animals are subject to political power relations as well. Derrida questions the dichotomy between human and animal and the historical view of animals as “biological machines” and mere objects.

Postmodernity as an Age of Absolute Nihilism

Postmodern society can only exist as a nihilistic society; it recognizes only liberalism’s values — everything else is alien to it. Against postmodern constructivism, Alexander Dugin posits that liberalism constructs its own set of Western values: diversity, human rights, and liberalism itself are not universal values as liberalism claims (which is paradoxical since liberalism rejects universals); they are instruments of Western liberal oppression.

Deconstructionism, which relativizes everything but offers no alternative order, must therefore be rejected, according to Dugin. The ideals of postmodernity serve only to dismantle traditional values and societies.

The transition from modernity to postmodernity happens through a change in values. Priorities shift from materialistic to post-materialistic values. While economic security remains important, it is no longer equated with happiness. Instead, quality of life gains in importance. Zygmunt Bauman spoke of the “discomfort in postmodernity,” referring to Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. For Freud, this meant the individual’s sacrifice of happiness for the sake of security (even fascism, in part, offered such security).

Bauman, however, means the opposite: the sacrifice of security for happiness. Security and maximum enjoyment are difficult to reconcile, as the pursuit of happiness allows only limited safety. The so-called “moral impulse” is disconnected; it no longer comes from society but from the “life politics” of the individual, which develops its own morality.

The End of Grand Narratives

For the Russian thinker, the only alternative is a return to tradition and identity; only outside of liberalism and the other two political ideologies of fascism and socialism can one restore an order of values free from Western dominance. Unlike modern society, postmodernity recognizes no metanarratives (Jean-François Lyotard). The age of grand narratives ends in postmodernity, and ideologies no longer provide meaning.

From rationality, order, and hierarchy arises chaos; from a linear and goal-oriented history emerge countless subjective histories — always dependent on context, perspective, and construction. Unlike modernity, postmodernity views history as pure chaos. It knows neither order nor purpose. History becomes a chain of fragments, whose meaning emerges from arbitrary interpretations.

Art in postmodern society is abstract and informal; it breaks with conventions. The uniqueness and creativity of modern art become obsolete in postmodernity: postmodern art references styles from earlier epochs. Here, postmodernity, by rejecting liberal historical progress, can freely draw from the past and recombine elements.

The emphasis on subjectivity and rejection of the absolute and universal shifts the focus to the individual’s perspective. Art becomes a collection of signs individually interpreted and recombined at will. Beyond art, postmodernity is also a philosophical break with the tradition of positivism and serves as a diagnosis of the times. Jean-François Lyotard sees postmodernity as the end of “grand narratives.” Science is no longer free of interests. It instead advances postmodernity and the Enlightenment.

What Happens to the Subject in Postmodernity?

The atomized individual, central to postmodernity, also leads to a new understanding of the human body. This too can now be read in various ways — constructed and deconstructed. This is evident today in genetic engineering and the development of artificial organs.

The final aim of postmodernity is referred to as the “Open Society.” For Soros, modern and postmodern elements (human rights, democracy, free markets) are central — also for Popper, for whom rationality remains crucial. In the “Open Society,” the individual must be transcended to become the authentic transhuman or posthuman.

According to Gilles Deleuze, the subject in postmodernity becomes the unity of ambivalence and superdeterminism. The concept of the subject is replaced by that of the “rhizome.” A botanical concept, the rhizome refers to horizontally growing plants. When pulled from the ground, the stem is destroyed, yet the plant lives on.

The human structure, by contrast, is vertical: crown, branches, and trunk represent consciousness and thought. The surface reflects desire — not rational or argued. The problem arises because this vertical hierarchy fails to grasp the complexity of the present. Deleuze and Félix Guattari thus introduce the rhizome principle: non-hierarchical, fully horizontal, based on free association rather than ordered structures.

Postmodernity as a Path to Matriarchy

Postmodernity, in the end, is a sharpening of matriarchal logic. Male logic — hierarchies, identities, dichotomies — stands in contrast to female patterns of thought, associated with fluid concepts of subject, society, and identity. Postmodern and matriarchal theories share deconstruction: questioning, dismantling, and reconstructing. Power, language, and discourse shape identities, societies, and systems of order.

Sex becomes “gender,” and traditional gender roles dissolve. The nation-state ceases to be an absolute truth and is seen as a product of power-laden history. In the matriarchal society — just like in the theories of Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Butler, Lyotard, and Lacan — everything is fluid, never fixed, always dependent on interpretation and language. Language in particular becomes the postmodern tool for shaping reality. It expresses and forms power.

Plurality, diversity, human rights, and democracy are matriarchal values that replace classical patriarchal hierarchies. Networks take the place of hierarchies and structures (as in the diminishing importance of the nation-state, replaced by supranational organizations and globalization). The matriarchal principle manifests in dissolutions: boundaries between animal and human blur; all entities — real or fictional — are equal elements. Everything connects to everything; it is a holistic system. Truth as known in modernity is foreign to postmodernity. Context determines what is true and false; no general truth exists in matriarchal or postmodern logic.

How Can Postmodernity Be Overcome?

In his Noomakhia, Dugin distinguishes between the Apollonian, Dionysian, and Cybelean traditions. Apollonian thought is rational, ordered, hierarchical, and stable. Dionysian thought is chaotic, mystical, and passionate. The Cybelean Logos represents dissolution; everything blends and dissolves. According to Dugin, Cybelean logic dominates the West. Structures familiar from modernity dissolve and blur; identities, hierarchies, and frameworks disintegrate.

So how can postmodernity finally be overcome? The solution lies not in a return to modernity but in a new order beyond the three political ideologies of socialism, liberalism, and fascism. Only by returning to collective identities and traditional (not postmodern) values can distance be gained from the Cybelean Logos of postmodern Western societies, and the Apollonian and Dionysian principles be restored.

Only then does the individual cease to be an isolated subject and become part of a greater whole: a collective. The individual is embedded in a sacredly structured society that rejects post- and transhumanism. This is a hierarchically organized society. Dugin speaks of the Homo hierarchicus, the counterpart to the Homo equalis of egalitarian postmodern society. Homo equalis represents modern notions of equality and individualism; its counterpart, Homo hierarchicus, stands for the individual embedded in a higher structure and grand hierarchy. It is part of a traditional, functionally differentiated hierarchical society, offering an alternative to liberal Western postmodern democracies.

(Translated from the German)

Joachim S. Bauer (b. 1994) is a political scientist and economist, an expert on postmodern theory, and deputy secretary general of the Suworow Institut in Vienna.