Ponowoczesność jako rzeczywistość społeczna — albo: próba obrony koncepcji końca nowoczesności jako okresu powstania nowych form socjalizacji

Abstrakt

Postmodernity as Social Reality — or: an Attempt at Conceptualizing the End of Modernity as a Period of the Emergence of New Forms of Socialization

The aim of the article is to advocate the conception of postmodernity as the actual expression of authentic and deep social changes. The main feature of these changes is the decentralization of culture. Postmodernity leads to the cultural condition in which metaphysical ideas lose their authority to order human life on the basis of universally binding norms and values. What in modernity could have been perceived as a violation of the basic principles of socialization, nowadays constitutes merely a “game” of signs and meanings. As a result, the principles of socialization and social relations also change their form: new ways of approaching both the individual and the collective have evolved. These structural changes of social relationships will be presented in the last part of the article with reference to Rainer Funk’s conceptualizations of the postmodern “I” and the postmodern “We”.