Kumar suggests that there is no useful distinction to be made between postmodernity as a socio-political concept and postmodernism as a cultural concept. All the instincts of postmodernists are against such a differentiation of spheres. For postmodernists, it is no longer useful to distinguish subsystems within the social world - culture, society, politics, economy are all collapsed together.
This does not lead, however, to an undifferentiated premodern social situation. The plurality of society is not denied (far from it - cf. Lyotard), but the modern notion that there was some controlling or directing power (economy, tradition, politics) is denied: “There is simply a more or less random, directionless flux across all sectors of society. The boundaries between them are dissolved, leading however not to neo-primitivist wholeness but to a post-modern condition of fragmentation.” The privileged site, if there is one, is cultural, and postmodernism is, by some definitions at least, primarily a reaction to cultural modernism.
Peter Leithart
Peter J. Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute. He is the author of numerous books on theology, literature, and culture, including Theopolitan, Defending Constantine, and Baptized Body.
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