1. POSTMODERNITY

3. POSTMODERNITY/ISM Postmodernity – a historical period; current economic climate, structural changes – Implications for medicine & health Welfare state (liberalism) to remobilzation of liberal arguments for individual responsibility (neoliberalism) Reflected in epidemiology -ism – a “discourse”

4. Modern/ity/ism/ization Modernity -- historical condition, process, a characteristic period -- a post-traditional order – rupture Modernism -- a practice, usage, expression peculiar to modern times – Modernism as cultural project that renew symbolic practices with an experimental or critical sense Modernization as a socioeconomic process that tries to construct modernity; the act of modernizing; the state of being modernized reflexivity of modernity – the susceptibility of most aspects of social activity, and material relations with nature, to chronic revision in the light of new info or knowledge Implications for health

5. The promise of the enlightenment, the promise of the modern Unending era of material progress & prosperity Abolition of prejudice & superstition Mastery of the forces of nature based on the expansion of human knowledge Laws of development & social sciences The costs of becoming modern -- the discontents – alienation; estrangement; anomie; iron cage; neurotoxic effects of modern, urban life

6. Postmodernism Postmodern as incredulity (challenging) toward meta-narratives contemporary rejection of all overarching or totalizing modes of thought that tell universalist stories (Marxism, Christianity, ‘scientific progress’). Metanarratives operate through strategies of exclusion and inclusion, marshalling and homogenizing heterogeneity into ordered realms – Postmodernists are suspicious of authoritative definitions and singular narratives of any trajectory of events the increasing sound of a plurality of voices from the margins, with an insistence on difference, on cultural diversity and on claims of heterogeneity over homogeneity. – Fragmentation – celebrates the multiple, incompatible, heterogeneous, fragmented, contradictory nature of postmodern society No linguistic normality — we can only produce pastiche (heteroglossia), partial truths

7. Hasan: The Culture of Postmodernism Modernism Postmodernism Purposeplay Designchance Hierarchyanarchy art object, finished workprocess, performance, creation, totalizationdecreation, deconstruction Presenceabsence Centeringdispersal genre, boundarytext, intertext Semanticsrhetoric lisible (readerly)scriptible (writerly) Narrativeanti-narrative grande histoirepetite histoire master codeidiolect origin, causedifference-difference, trace Determinacyindeterminacy Transcendenceimmanence

8. Postmodernity Changes in capitalist society over past 30 years Decline of industrial sector, working class, unionization, & occupation as source of identity Weakening of distinction between public & private sectors – With associated gender division of labor Increased focus on the individual Reflexivity of social identity – construct our own biographies