Towards a Post-Pandemic Postmodern Society - Is the Pandemic a Deconstruction of the Postmodern Society?

Abstract

Under Fredric Jameson"s "late modern" capitalist system that birthed it, postmodernity has often been thought of (by both partitioners as well as critics) as a playful, not entirely serious thing. In his introductory essay on another key theorist of postmodernity, Jacques Baudrillard, Douglas Kellner states: ""Baudrillard obviously wants to have it both ways with social theorists thinking that he provides salient perspectives on contemporary social realities, that Baudrillard reveals what is really happening, that he tells it like it is. And yet more cynical anti-sociologists are encouraged to enjoy Baudrillard's fictions, his experimental discourse, his games, and his play. Likewise, he sometimes encourages cultural metaphysicians to read his work as serious reflections on the realities of our time, while winking a pataphysical aside to those skeptical of such undertakings. Thus, it is undecidable whether Baudrillard is best read as science fiction and pataphysics or as social theory."But the time for such a playful intellectual consumerism seems now as dated and out of place as a crowded high street or shopping mall.