Postmodernism and Social Inquiry

POSTMODERNISM AND SOCIAL INQUIRY POSTMODERNISM AND SOCIAL INQUIRY EDITED BY David R.Dickens Andrea Fontana FOREWOR...

Author: David Dickens

160 downloads 2380 Views 1MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

POSTMODERNISM AND SOCIAL INQUIRY

POSTMODERNISM AND SOCIAL INQUIRY

EDITED BY

David R.Dickens Andrea Fontana

FOREWORD BY

Fred Dallmayr

©1994 The Guilford Press A Division of Guilford Publications, Inc. This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. Published in the UK in 1994 by UCL Press. UCL Press Limited University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. The name of University College London (UCL) is a registered trade mark used by UCL Press with the consent of the owner. ISBN 0-203-50034-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-80858-4 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN: 1-85728-365-1 PB British Cataloguing-In-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

For our wives, Tahmineh and Tina, and our children, Neemah, Nicole, and Shayda

Acknowledgments

The production of this manuscript took place over a period of several years. During that time we benefited enormously from the help of many friends and colleagues. In particular, we would like to thank several colleagues at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas: John Unrue, provost and Vice-President for Academic Affairs, Tom Wright, former dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Jim Malek, present dean of the College of Liberal Arts, and Donald Carns, chair of the Department of Sociology, for their invaluable administrative and financial support. The staff of the Acquisitions and Interlibrary Loan Departments at the Dickinson Library went far beyond the call of duty to help us get hold of obscure materials. Bob Antonio, Doug Kellner, Scott McNall, and Larry Olsen each read all or a great deal of the manuscript and provided us with excellent feedback. We owe a special additional debt to Doug Kellner for his role in bringing the project to Guilford whose editor Peter Wissocker has been most supportive. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we would like to thank Veona Hunsinger and Susie Lafrentz for their eternal patience and boundless goodwill in typing the many drafts of the manuscript.

vi

Contributors

Robert J.Antonio, PhD is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas. David Ashley, PhD is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming. Steven Best, PhD is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Texas, El Paso, Texas. Fred Dallmayr, PhD is Packey Dee Professor of Government at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana. Norman K.Denzin, PhD is Professor of Sociology, Communication, Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois. David R.Dickens, PhD is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Graduate Program in Liberal Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada. Sondra Farganis, PhD is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the New School for Social Research, New York, New York. Andrea Fontana, PhD is Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada. Robert Goldman, PhD is Professor of Sociology at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon. M.Gottdiener, PhD is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside, California. Douglas Kellner, PhD is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, Texas. Steven Papson, PhD is Professor of Sociology at St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York.

vii

Foreword

Contemporary intellectual life reflects a sense of ferment if not crisis. “In attempting to uncover the deepest strata of Western culture,” Michel Foucault wrote at one point, “I am restoring to our silent and apparently immobile soil its rifts, its instability, its flows; and it is the same ground that is once more stirring under our feet.” These comments seem to stand in stark contrast with the triumphant sway of Western liberal democracy in our time. In the eyes of many, the dismantling of competing (especially communist) regimes signals the complete vindication of modern Western culture, with its central pillars of individualism, scientific rationality, and technological progress. Yet, despite triumphant rhetoric, a Hegelian dialectic or “cunning of reason” seems to be once again at work. Underneath the shining armor a certain hollowness is spreading: a suspicion that individual identity is slipping, that rationalism ignores and perhaps undermines its premises, and that progress does not necessarily yield happiness or even viable conditions of human life. This suspicion or uneasiness, in my view, is at the heart of contemporary discussions of “postmodernism”—no matter how this term is precisely defined or how its implications are concretely articulated. Up to now, literature dealing with postmodernism—or with the tension between modernity and postmodernity—has tended to be confined to the domains of philosophy, literature, and the arts. Only rarely have attempts been made to explore the relevance of these issues for the social sciences. In this respect, the present volume constitutes a pioneering effort that competently bridges the gap between philosophy and the humanities, on the one hand, and sociological theory and research methods, on the other. David Dickens and Andrea Fontana are to be congratulated for having assembled a group of essays that not only pursue and deepen philosophical or theoretical concerns but document their repercussions— both their fruitfulness and their limitations—in the actual practice of sociological and anthropological inquiry. The book should be welcomed both by devotees and by skeptics or adversaries of postmodernism. To ix

x

Foreword

put it simply: Postmodernism and Social Inquiry is not a “trendy” book, seeking to inaugurate a new fashion in the social sciences. As is well known, the topic of postmodernism has tended to generate intense heat in some quarters, but not always much light. Both in its tone and its substance, the present volume successfully resists and counteracts this tendency. Although the assembled authors are deeply engaged in their subject matter and hence not neutral observers (along positivist lines), they are engaged in a thoughtful and critically reflective manner—thus paying tribute to the best tradition of sociological research. The opening essay by Dickens and Fontana ably sets the stage for the volume, as well as for future discussions following from the volume. Written in lucid style—and free from the turgid jargon often infecting postmodernist writings—their introduction offers an overview of prominent theoretical formulations of postmodernism while simultaneously pinpointing salient issues besetting postmodernist modes of sociological inquiry. Subsequent essays trace the diverse intellectual ancestry of postmodern thought, ranging from the “lapsed Marxism” of Baudrillard and Lyotard over Foucaldian genealogy and Derridian deconstruction to Fredric Jameson’s reintegration of postmodernism with modernist discourse and feminist postmodern theory. Turning to research methodology, a number of further essays discuss “semiotic” analysis (from Saussure to poststructuralism), textual deconstructionism, and postmodern cultural ethnography. Proceeding on the level of case histories and concrete field research, these chapters do much to rescue postmodernism from the reputation of esoteric academic speculation. Faithful to the notion of critical engagement, the essays at the end of each section caution against the equation of postmodernism with a shallow pluralism (oblivious of political power constraints) as well as against the abandonment of critique in the name of a facile “anti-foundationalism.” Being located in a cognate social science (the study of politics), I feel an affinity with both the verve and the tensional agony pervading Dickens and Fontana’s volume. It is my hope that the volume will promote discussion not only between philosophers and sociologists but among social scientists across their narrow disciplinary boundaries. My fondest hope, however, is that the volume may point the way beyond sterile and doctrinaire positions—for or against postmodernism—in the direction of a sustained reflection on and inquiry into the subterranean ferment which (in Foucault’s words) is stirring under our feet. FRED DALLMAYR University of Notre Dame

Contents

CHAPTER

1. Postmodernism in the Social Sciences David R.Dickens and Andrea Fontana

1

PART I POSTMODERN THEORIES OF SOCIETY CHAPTER

2. Foucault, Postmodernism, and Social Theory Steven Best

25

CHAPTER

3. Postmodernism and Antifoundationalism David Ashley

53

CHAPTER

4. North American Theories of Postmodern Culture David R.Dickens

76

CHAPTER

5. Postmodernism and Feminism Sondra Farganis

101

CHAPTER

6. The Future of Social Theory and the Limits of Postmodern Critique Robert J.Antonio and Douglas Kellner

127

PART II POSTMODERN RESEARCH METHODS CHAPTER

7. Semiotics and Postmodernism M.Gottdiener

155

CHAPTER

8. Postmodernism and Deconstructionism Norman K.Denzin

182

CHAPTER

9. Ethnographic Trends in the Postmodern Era Andrea Fontana

203

CHAPTER 10. The Postmodernism That Failed Robert Goldman and Steven Papson Index

224 255

xi

CHAPTER 1

Postmodernism in the Social Sciences David R.Dickens Andrea Fontana

Discourse on postmodernism today occupies a prominent place in a variety of intellectual disciplines within the contemporary arts, humanities, and social sciences. Obtaining a clear-cut, common definition of the term has proven to be extremely difficult, however, not only because of its interdisciplinary applications but also due to its diverse origins. The first instances of the postmodern concept are found in art and literature. In the earliest usage unearthed thus far, around 1870 an English painter, John Watkins Chapman, described as “postmodern” painting that was supposedly more modern than French impressionism (Best and Kellner 1991). The concept was similarly employed in literature in 1934 and again in 1942 to describe a related tendency in Hispanic poetry (Hassan 1987). In a somewhat different context, postmodernism was used as a sociohistorical concept in a number of books and essays published from 1917 to the 1960s to describe a new era of Western civilization (see Huyssen 1984; Best and Kellner 1991). Although the authors differed in terms of their evaluations of the new postmodern epoch, they all agreed that its emergence would have profound consequences for contemporary social life. C.Wright Mills, for example, claimed that “our basic definitions of society and of self are being overtaken by new realities” and that “too many of our explanations are derived from the great historical transition from the Medieval to the Modern Age” (1959, p. 166). 1

2

Postmodernism in the Social Sciences

The third, and most recent, source of origin for current usages of postmodernism is located in a series of exchanges among American literary and cultural critics in the early 1960s concerning the nature of new artistic and literary styles. Some of these critics, most notably Irving Howe and Harry Levin, lamented the passing of modernist art and literature while others, such as Susan Sontag, Leslie Fiedler, and Ihab Hassan, celebrated the new postmodern literature and art as liberation from the stuffy, elitist canons of aesthetic modernism (Huyssen 1984; Hassan 1987). Ironically, American discussions of postmodernism in the social sciences reappear only later, in the 1980s, and then primarily under the influence of French poststructuralist theory. Anthropologists George Marcus and Michael Fischer (1986) provide what is perhaps the best definition of the term as it is used in contemporary social inquiry. They define postmodernism as a “crisis of representation” where traditional standards no longer apply, implying both an epistemological and existential problematic in which present conditions of knowledge and experience are defined not so much in themselves as by what they come after, such as postindustrial, postnarrative, or poststructuralist (also see Dallmayr 1989). The purpose of the present volume is to examine a broad range of theoretical and methodological issues in postmodernist thought as they relate to sociology. Frank (1987) suggests that sociologists have been slow to enter the debates on postmodernism because sociology is itself a product of modernity. Others frame the issue in starker terms. For the French theorist Jean Baudrillard “sociology can only depict the expansion of the social and its vicissitudes. It survives only on the positive and definitive hypothesis of the social. The reabsorption, the implosion of the social, escapes it. The hypothesis of the death of the social is also that of its own death” (Baudrillard 1983a, p. 4). This apocalyptic tone in Baudrillard is echoed in recent sociological commentaries on his work. Denzin claims that “sociology no longer serves society” (1986, p. 203) and cautions that “by shutting the door on postmodern theory sociology effectively seals itself off from the postmodern world” (1987a, p. 211). Bogard similarly maintains that “bringing postmodernism into the mainstream of sociological theory will produce the uncomfortable, and in all likelihood unacceptable, imperative that we as sociologists confront the possibility of an end, and not simply a transformation, of social theory” (1987, p. 208). Increasingly, however, a growing number of sociologists are attempting to incorporate various postmodern themes into their work. As might be expected, much of the sociological literature on postmodernism to date consists of theoretical and methodological critiques of more


3

conventional approaches, and of extended commentaries on the work of the French postmodernists. This trend will no doubt continue as more of the writings of Lyotard, Baudrillard, Foucault, and others are made available in English translation, but it is also being supplemented by efforts to apply postmodern perspectives to a wide range of substantive sociological issues (see Rosenau 1992). The disciplinary cross-fertilization exhibited in the postmodernist writings of philosophers, literary critics, anthropologists, social theorists, and others is undoubtedly a good thing, but it presents a bewildering variety of strategies and positions to the interested sociologist. For discussion purposes these approaches will be grouped under three general headings: historical and theoretical strategies for situating postmodernism; methodological techniques for postmodern analysis; and evaluative positions regarding the social and political implications of postmodernist thought (see Arac 1986; Jameson 1984a).

SITUATING POSTMODERNISM By most accounts “modernity” emerged in Europe over the course of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Its fullest intellectual expression, however, was embodied in the project of the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment philosophers “to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art, according to their inner logic,” with the expectation that “the arts and sciences could promote not only the control of natural forces but also understanding of the world and of the self, moral progress, the justice of institutions and even the happiness of human beings” (Habermas 1981, p. 9). The unifying thread of modernity was a belief in the idea of progress, attained by a radical break with history and tradition, to bring about the liberation of human beings from the bonds of ignorance and superstition (Harvey 1989). Yet as Habermas and others point out, twentieth-century experiences of world wars, death camps, and the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki shattered this optimism (Harvey 1989, p. 13). The advent of postmodern society is thus located by most observers sometime after World War II in the advanced capitalist countries, though they disagree whether this constitutes a decisive break or some sort of continuity with the modernist era. Most dramatically, Jean Baudrillard describes postmodernism as a “second revolution” (1984a) signaling the destruction of meaning and thereby rendering all previous social theories obsolete (1983a). Daniel Bell (1976), on the other hand, sees postmodernism as the continuation of debilitating cultural trends originating in modernism. Fredric Jameson (1984b) takes a more

4


ambivalent stance. He describes postmodernism as a trend beginning in the early 1960s but situates it as the cultural superstructure of a purer, more abstract phase of capitalism. Michel Foucault resists any characterization of his intellectual project as postmodernist, but in his early archaeological studies he describes the modern era as extending from 1800 to 1950 and suggests that, today, “something new is about to begin” (1973, p. 384). Finally, Jean-François Lyotard (1984) rejects the modern-postmodern conceptualization altogether, seeing postmodernism as a potentiality that is realized in modernism, implying that any attempt at periodization is itself a modernist error. The diverse positions represented in attempts to locate postmodernism in time are reproduced in theoretical descriptions of postmodern society and culture. Baudrillard does not use the discourse of the “postmodern” until the 1980s but his previous work dating back to the late 1960s developed the postmodern view of advanced capitalist countries as massmediated consumer societies characterized by a proliferation of signs (Kellner 1988). He describes modernity as an era dominated by production and industrial capitalism based on mechanization, commodification, and universal exchange. In contrast, postmodern society is postindustrial, defined by new technologies that feature the unlimited reproducibility of objects and images. The result is a “hyperreal” society where the distinction between the real and the unreal is obliterated, drowned in a seemingly endless flood of signs and simulations (Baudrillard 1983b). In outlining his theory of postmodern society Lyotard (1984) also borrows liberally from previous theories of postindustrial society, emphasizing the revolutionary role of computers and other forms of information technology in transforming the social order. Yet, unlike Baudrillard, who blends elements of semiotics and French radical theory from the late 1960s (see Debord 1970; Lefebvre 1971), Lyotard focuses on the way in which the new information technology has undermined traditional conceptions of knowledge and legitimacy. All modern forms of knowledge, he claims, whether in positivist, hermeneutic, or Marxist guise, legitimate themselves by making explicit appeals to some type of universal standard. Recent developments, especially in the natural sciences, but also in the social sciences and politics, have undermined these claims, producing what Lyotard calls an “incredulity toward grand narratives.” Postmodern society is thus definded in terms of a radical heterogeneity characterized by a proliferation of creative discoveries in the arts and sciences and a corresponding decline of ideological hegemony in politics and social life. In his early work Foucault also describes contemporary society in terms of new configurations of knowledge, contrasting the rise of


5

philosophy, biology, and political economy as dominant modes of discourse in the modern era with their recent challenge by what he calls the “countersciences” of psychoanalysis, ethnology, and linguistics. Foucault’s discourse-based archeaology of the human sciences is expressed in his controversial thesis of the impending “disappearance of man.” For him, “man” is a relatively recent invention of the modern era whose humanist culture made him, for the first time, both the primary subject and the primary object of intellectual inquiry. The subsequent inability of the modern empirical sciences, including the human sciences of psychology, sociology, and the analysis of literature and myth, to satisfactorily represent the vast range of human experiences reveals for Foucault the profound historical limitations of the modernist project and its pivotal subject, man (Foucault 1973). In his later work the archaeological focus on discourse is supplemented by a genealogical concern with how concrete social practices (political, economic, pedagogical, and interpersonal) ensure what he calls “biopower,” the form of power/knowledge specific to contemporary societies that produces healthy, secure, and productive individuals (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1986). For Jameson (1984b), postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism. He agrees with Lyotard that advanced capitalist societies are today marked by anomic heterogeneity in both culture and society but he rejects the postindustrial label as misleading. In its place he proposes the term “multinational capitalism” to connote the historically novel expansion of capitalism by means of new technologies and media into previously uncommodified areas. Jameson describes this new trend as the colonization of Nature and the Unconscious, involving the more complete penetration of capitalism into the precapitalist third world and the rise of qualitatively new forms of media manipulation. Thus, in contrast to the French theorists, Jameson wants to defend the viability of the Marxian project, albeit in a modified form. Like Jameson, Bell (1976) restricts his usage of the term “postmodernism” to the cultural realm, but he is one of the foremost advocates of the theory of postindustrial society (Bell 1973). For Bell, postmodernism represents an intensification of the adversarial trends in modernist art characterized by a rejection of the norms and standards of the bourgeoisie. It also represents an extension of these trends from a small circle of artists to a much larger number of aesthetic elites who dominate the contemporary cultural scene. Since their views now influence the broader population through the mass media, according to Bell, they threaten to undermine the entire social fabric of advanced societies.

6


ANALYZING POSTMODERNISM Assuming that postmodernism, however theorized, is defined as a crisis of representation or standards in the arts, sciences, and society, the question of method arises. What types of approaches are best suited for analyzing this new situation? Although they too contain a variety of stances, postmodern methods of social inquiry generally may be traced to two common sources. First is the pioneering analysis of signs, symbols, and sign systems by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and, to a lesser extent, that of the American philosopher Charles Peirce (1839–1914). Whether referred to as semiology, following Saussure’s usage, or semiotics, as with Peirce, this approach was originally conceived as a “science of signs” for examining the multiple ways in which meaningful language is produced. For Saussure, the linguistic sign consists of two parts: a sound or acoustic component he called the signifier, and a mental or conceptual component he called the signified, itself representing something in the world. Saussure also distinguished between language (langage), the structure of language consisting of a set of linguistic rules that speakers must obey to communicate, and speech (parole), the everyday use made of the structural system by individual speakers. For him the proper focus of linguistics was on language rather than on speech, for knowledge of the former would reveal the principles by which language functions in everyday practice. In the social sciences, primarily through the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Saussure’s structural approach was seen as providing a model for analyzing various forms of social relations and institutions since any object whatsoever can become a sign, provided it is used to communicate a message, that is, to signify (Sturrock 1979). Postmodern methods of analysis, however, are more properly designated as poststructuralist, as they focus on the process of signification suggested by Saussure and applied to culture by LéviStrauss, but reject the assumption of stable referents upon which the notion of an underlying structure is based. The crisis of representation in postmodernism is reflected here in what might be called a crisis of signification in poststructuralist thought. In this new conceptualization the second important source of postmodernist approaches, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, occupies a central role (Dallmayr 1987). As Habermas points out, “with Nietzsche’s entrance into the discourse of modernity, the argument shifts, from the ground up” (1987, p. 85). Because of his radical, antiEnlightenment critique of reason and knowledge, Nietzsche’s thought has been ignored for the most part in American sociology but his influence on the French postmodernists in particular is enormous (see Merquior


7

1986; Dews 1987). Of particular relevance to poststructuralist methodological approaches is Nietzsche’s radical perspectivism, which informs both his diagnosis of the crisis of modernity as the metaphorical “death of God” and his subsequent endorsement of the primacy of art over science and morality: Against positivism, which halts at phenomena—“There are only facts”—I would say: No, facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact “in itself.” (Nietzsche 1967, p. 267)

Nietzsche thus rejects both the immodesty of positivistic science and the religious notion of a transcendent reality in favor of the interminable proliferation of perspectives (Dews 1987, p. 204). The link between Nietzsche’s radical perspectivism and Saussurean linguistics is contained in the latter’s doctrine of the arbitrary nature of linguistic signs. Saussure argued that the linguistic sign is arbitrary in a double sense. The signifier is arbitrary insofar as there is only a conventional link between it and the thing it signifies, while the signified is arbitrary since each particular language divides the total field of what may be expressed in words in different ways (as one encounters when attempting to translate from one language to another) (Sturrock 1979). Derrida (1972) detects here a poststructuralist tendency already at work in Saussure, but the important substantive point is that in postmodern societies where conventional standards and norms have lost their legitimacy, the arbitrary nature of social relations and institutions is profoundly revealed. The individual nuances distinguishing the various postmodern methodological strategies thus may be seen collectively as variations on the theme of describing social life in terms of a constantly shifting process of signification. Baudrillard employs the notion of continual sign proliferation to analyze what he calls the “hyperreal” nature of contemporary societies. On a different level, Lyotard characterizes social interaction as a process of creative linguistic signification, employing an unorthodox version of Wittgenstein’s concept of language games to describe this process. Other French thinkers have developed similar poststructuralist methods of analysis, though none has advanced a specific theory of postmodern society, including Jacques Lacan’s linguistic model of the unconscious and Roland Barthes’s literary studies revealing the multiple ways texts may be read. The poststructuralist synthesis of Saussure and Nietzsche, however, is most evident in Foucault. In a lucid commentary on Foucault’s writings, Dreyfus and Rabinow succinctly summarize the common Nietzschean claim of all poststructuralist methods: “The more one interprets the

8


more one finds not the fixed meaning of a text, or of the world, but only other interpretations. These interpretations have been created and imposed by other people, not by the nature of things. In this discovery of groundlessness the inherent arbitrariness of interpretation is revealed” (1982, p. 107). As one committed to a revitalization of the Marxian emancipatory project, Jameson rejects the poststructuralists’s radically relativistic stance, but his empirical account of postmodern culture and society exhibits virtually the same form. He describes contemporary advanced societies as being in a state of “stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm” (Jameson 1984b, p. 65). What is presented as new in culture and society today takes the form of pastiche, which is nothing but the random combination of the dead styles of the past, created to satisfy consumer society’s insatiable appetite for novelty. A related technique of postmodern analysis is derived from the deconstructionist approach of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. This poststructuralist strategy further develops another of Saussure’s insights: that language consists of a system of relations among arbitrary signs whose meanings are defined by the differences that set them apart from one another. Since meaning is based on difference, Derrida criticizes all forms of philosophy and, by implication, all social theories that attempt to ground themselves in some fundamental standard or originary starting point that is not itself a product of difference. Deconstructionism is, then, a method for revealing the radical contextuality of all systems of thought. Derrida’s philosophical concern with the way the fundamental ambiguity of meaning has been suppressed in the name of some single interpretation here parallels Foucault’s archeological and genealogical studies of how social institutions and practices within a particular historical period are constituted by a privileged discourse about their objects. The poststructuralist orientation of postmodern methods of analysis is particularly evident in two subfields of contemporary social science inquiry. In the first, a number of anthropologists and sociologists are incorporating poststructuralist conceptions of texts and authorship to reexamine the way in which ethnographic accounts are written (see Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Van Maanen 1988). These researchers challenge the status of traditional ethnographies as definitive texts and of ethnographers as privileged authors. In the second, feminist writers are employing deconstructionist techniques to analyze patriarchal discourse where sexual difference, embodied in the conceptual pair masculine/feminine, is used to establish meanings that are arbitrarily related to gender or the body (see Scott 1988). An especially interesting group combines these two concerns to


9

develop a postmodern feminist ethnography (see Clough 1990, 1992a; Richardson 1991, 1992).

EVALUATING THE POSTMODERN In reviewing the debates concerning the implications of postmodernism for social theory and politics, there is a temptation to describe them in terms of two general alternatives, chaos or liberation. Yet, as is already evident from our overview of postmodern social theories, several of the positions taken by the various theorists may not be so neatly categorized. Lyotard clearly holds the most positive view of postmodern trends. He celebrates the decline of traditional standards in contemporary societies, for this decline releases previously unimaginable possibilities for freedom and creativity in all spheres of life. On the other side, Bell represents the polar opposite view. For him, postmodern culture’s successful assault on bourgeois values threatens to bring about the dissolution of shared moral order in contemporary societies. He thus endorses a return to religion as the only antidote to the fragmented antinomian culture of postmodernism. Jameson’s evaluation of postmodernism is more ambivalent. He accepts the utility of postmodern analysis for describing the disjointed nature of contemporary culture but rejects what he calls the absolute moralizing judgments of celebration or condemnation in favor of a dialectical appreciation of postmodern culture (Jameson 1984a). This entails the recognition that within the commercially manipulative trend of postmodern pastiche there resides a populist impulse that can be developed in the direction of a socialist reconstruction in culture and society. For Baudrillard, any attempt to evaluate postmodernism in traditional political terms, whether liberal, conservative, or radical, is a mistake. Contemporary societies have become so inundated with information and images through the mass media that traditional referents for social or political assessment, such as “class” or “the people,” are meaningless. Even the concept of “the social” is today obsolete (Baudrillard 1983a). The disturbing consequence of Baudrillard’s nihilistic diagnosis is that life in postmodern society is one of survival among the ruins (Baudrillard 1984a). Foucault describes contemporary society as a “disciplinary society” where power over individuals and groups is interwoven with other kinds of relations (in production, family, and sexuality). The historically unique feature of disciplinary power is its heterogeneous nature, its dispersal throughout all levels of society, as opposed to the concentration of what

10


he calls sovereign power in one individual (the king) or institution (the state). Although Foucault refers to the “global functioning” of disciplinary power into a “more-or-less coherent and unitary strategic form” (1980, pp. 107, 142), unlike Baudrillard he does not rule out the possibility of opposition. Instead he claims that resistance, like power, is multiple and effective since it is found wherever power is exercised. He thus recommends a strategy of localized struggles against power in a variety of interpersonal and institutional settings. A final important contributor to the evaluative literature on postmodernism is the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas. His concern is not so much with postmodern culture or society as with the political implications of theories of postmodernism. Habermas interprets the heterogeneous nature of contemporary societies as the product of a long-term process of societal modernization propelled by the dynamics of economic growth and the bureaucratic state (Habermas 1981). He is therefore deeply suspicious of the post-Enlightenment claims of postmodern theories, seeing them instead as ideological allies of earlier anti-Enlightenment, even fascist, approaches (Habermas 1987). Opposing the postmodern stance, Habermas sees modernity as an “incomplete project” he wants to fulfill through a radical reconstruction of Marxian theory.

POSTMODERNISM AND SOCIOLOGY The multiple ways in which the term is employed make it impossible to single out any one essay or book as an exemplar of postmodernism in sociology. Rather, as Gottdiener (1991) suggests, at the present time it is more fruitful to outline a range of issues raised by the postmodern challenge for social inquiry. This is not to say, however, that there exists no common thread that ties together the diverse elements of postmodern analysis with the sociological tradition. In its many guises postmodernism addresses the same sorts of issues that have fired the sociological imagination since the inception of the discipline in the nineteenth century. These issues include those concerning the nature and extent of large-scale structural transformations in Western societies, their corresponding effects on the nature of social interaction and on the construction of social identities, and the need for new theoretical and methodological strategies. Seen in this way, postmodern perspectives exhibit striking parallels with the project of Marx, Weber, Simmel, Durkheim, Mead, and others in the classical sociological tradition as they, too, struggled to find new ways to


11

understand the dramatic changes in social structure and everyday life during their own time. Foremost among the structural changes emphasized in postmodern approaches are a decline in political efficacy of the modern nationstate (both internally and externally), economic transformations in production processes and workplace organization, and a shift in culture toward massmediated consumerism, all of which radically alter the nature of conventional sociological categories such as class, status, gender, and party. At the interactional level, postmodernists focus on what they see as an increasing superficiality in social relationships and its destructive consequences for self formation. Their critical diagnosis is based largely on an extension of Marx’s and Simmel’s analyses of the disintegrating effects of relentless commodification in modern life, accelerated by the pervasive influence of mass media, especially television, in contemporary societies. Mead, the classical theorist who analyzed self construction in the greatest detail, premised his account of the development of organized selves on what he called the “generalized social attitudes” of the community. Although Mead recognized the increasing complexity of the self-development process in rapidly changing modern societies, he felt this complexity nonetheless allowed for the production of more rational, autonomous individuals. For postmodernists, the demise of general community standards, and their replacement with commodified images manufactured by mass media industries, inhibits the construction of stable social identities, as suggested by their proclamations announcing “the end of the social” and “the disappearance of man.” The essays that follow contain a more thorough discussion of the issues we have outlined here by providing detailed expositions and critiques of the major representatives in postmodern social theory and methods. Part One focuses on major theorists of postmodern society and culture. Much of the recent commentary on postmodern theory by more conventional sociological theorists has been highly critical, if not dismissive. Some (see Giddens 1990; Calhoun 1992) deny the substantive validity of postmodernism as a description of contemporary society, while others (see Collins 1990; Alexander 1991) condemn the postmodern critique of theory as self-defeating. A notable exception, however, is Seidman, who calls for a major reorientation of sociological theory based on postmodern narratives that tell “stories about society that carry moral, social, ideological, and perhaps directly political significance (1991, p.142). In Chapter Two Steven Best discusses the relevance of Michel Foucault’s work for contemporary sociology. He provides a detailed

12


account of the main continuities and shifts in Foucault’s thought as it proceeds from the early archaeological studies to the later genealogical focus on the intricate relationship between forms of discourse and power. Honneth (1991, p. 177) argues that in this shift Foucault relinquishes his interest in the abstract genesis of the concept of subjectivity in the modern sciences in favor of a concern with the practical genesis of modern representations of the subject and morality within the context of strategies of social power. Yet, in an interview conducted just five months before his death, Foucault claimed that the question of knowledge/power was never the core issue for him, but was instead an instrument for pursuing the more fundamental problem of the relationship between subject and truth (Foucault 1988). Foucault’s description here of his primary intellectual concern helps clarify what many commentators viewed as a puzzling shift in his last books away from the analysis of power. Best also specifies how Foucault may be understood as a postmodernist, despite his explicit denial of the label, by describing his criticisms of Enlightenment rationality, totalizing approaches to history and society, and humanistic theories of the subject. All of these charges are standard themes in poststructuralist theory, but Best differentiates Foucault’s approach from those of other French thinkers such as Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Deleuze and Guattari, while also criticizing Foucault for his failure to distinguish among different forms of knowledge and power. Finally, noting that Foucault said little about the discipline of sociology but much about the sociology of discipline, Best suggests several ways that Foucault’s writings might be of use to sociologists. In Chapter Three David Ashley examines the theories of Lyotard and Baudrillard. Lyotard’s dramatic claim that the sources of legitimation for philosophy and science in the West since the Enlightenment are no longer viable and Baudrillard’s provocative statement that sociology and its object, “the social,” are obsolete are two of most widely cited claims in the postmodern literature. In his discussion Ashley concentrates on Lyotard’s and Baudrillard’s attempts to provide antifoundationalist approaches that question the relevance of conventional forms of sociological theorizing. He evaluates their efforts in light of Habermas’s charge that their anti-Enlightenment perspectives are premature and politically irresponsible. Ashley also discusses a significant difference in Baudrillard’s and Lyotard’s theoretical trajectories often overlooked in other commentaries on their work: whereas Baudrillard pushes his postmodern analysis to its logical, nihilistic conclusion, Lyotard remains sensitive to the need for standards, characterized in his recent work by the search for a nonrepresentationalist theory of judgment that still finds a place for social and political critique.


13

Here Lyotard exhibits a sensitivity to the complexities of postmodern theorizing and politics in the wake of the decline of metanarratives that seems lacking in the current call for an antifoundationalist approach to theory in contemporary sociology (see Seidman 1991). In Chapter Four David R.Dickens examines the theories of Bell and Jameson, emphasizing their common focus on postmodern culture as well as their divergent views concerning the role of culture in fostering the disintegration of normative consensus in contemporary societies. Bell locates the origins of postmodern culture in the spread of adversial trends in modernist aesthetics that according to him were formerly limited solely to the work and lives of a select group of artists and writers, but with the rise of the 1960s counterculture now define the everyday behavior of the masses. Under the direction of commercially driven cultural elites, most prominently in the mass media, the moral order of bourgeois society has been replaced by an immoral “pornotopia” where virtually anything goes. Dickens points out that Bell’s analysis here is inconsistent insofar as he alternately points to developments solely within the cultural sphere and in other places to capitalism’s interest in broadening consumption since the 1920s, the central element in neo-Marxist accounts, as the primary cause for this change. Jameson also describes postmodern culture in terms of a normative breakdown in advanced capitalist societies, but he theorizes its advent more straightforwardly as the cultural effect of fundamental transformations in the capitalist mode of production. Jameson derives his analysis of these changes from Mandel’s theory of contemporary multinational capitalism as a purer, more abstract phase of capitalism. Seen in this way, the fragmented, superficial character of contemporary postmodern culture is the correlate of a decentralized economic system whose features are increasingly difficult to locate and describe. Dickens then discusses the shared concern of Bell and Jameson with constructing generalized narratives to comprehend and assist in the transformation of postmodern culture and society. He points out that this concern differentiates them from their French counterparts, who imply that any such approach is both historically obsolete and politically dangerous. Bell predicts and endorses a return to religion as the only way to overcome the disruptive tendencies in postmodern culture, though he is unclear concerning both how religion will return and how it own destructive tendencies can be avoided. Jameson’s call for an aesthetics of cognitive mapping is logical given his theoretical framework, but he does not specify sufficiently how it might lead to a resurrection of progressive political action. In Chapter Five Sondra Farganis examines the relationship between postmodernism and feminist theory. Some of the most detailed

14


encounters with postmodernism in contemporary social theory are found in feminist theory (see Nicholson 1990). In her essay Farganis contextualizes these discussions in terms of three historical phases in feminist thought and the women’s movement. In the first phase, justifications for women’s rights were cast in terms of traditional liberal theory, emphasizing equal rights before the law. In the second phase, feminist arguments focused more on the unique biological and/or cultural characteristics women possess that, in some cases, make them superior to men. In the third phase of feminist theory the dialogue with postmodernism begins, and the women’s standpoint approach gives way to a move radical consideration of differences among women in terms of race, religion, and social class. Farganis points out that many feminist theorists are attracted to postmodernism because of its emphasis on heterogeneity and because of the implications of the postmodern critique of scientific objectivity for the analysis of a whole range of institutional practices, from the state and economy to sexuality and the family (see Nicholson 1990, pp. 3–4). Farganis is skeptical, however, of the desirability of adopting a fullblown postmodern feminist perspective, for she fears that it would undermine the goals of feminist theory and the women’s movement. Her concern stems from what she sees as two disturbing consequences of the postmodern critique. First, while the postmodern emphasis on heterogeneity highlights important differences among women, if taken to an extreme it may destabilize altogether the significance of gender as a social category. Second, the political implication of postmodernism’s radical relativism is that it tends to render all forms of activism and critique implausible. Farganis concludes that the social constructionist tradition in conventional sociology provides a more suitable analytical framework for the articulation of feminist concerns. In Chapter Six Robert J.Antonio and Douglas Kellner discuss a range of inconsistencies and aporia in postmodern social theories. They begin by identifying three components of the postmodernist critique of modern social theory: its realist theory of representation, its totalizing approach, and its defective theory of the subject. Collectively, these criticisms undermine the possibility of continuing the project of modern social theory. Antonio and Kellner accept the validity of much of the postmodern critique, but they argue that is presents an overly one-sided portrayal of the theories of thinkers such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, and Mead. These theorists also acknowledged the limitations of representing the social world, viewed societal coherence as the precarious outcome of integrating and fragmenting forces, and recognized subjects as possessing limited rationality and being partially


15

integrated, depending on always changing historical conditions. By failing to recognize these critical aspects of modern social theory, postmodernists confuse the essentialist elements of foundationalist approaches with all forms of social theorizing. Antonio and Kellner also raise the possibility that postmodern theory may itself be seen as a historically specific approach, representing a reaction to the end of the postwar era or a pessimistic response to the conservative regimes that presently run the Western superpowers. In place of the excessively fragmented, ahistorical view of the postmodernists, Antonio and Kellner call for the construction of a comprehensive contemporary social theory that would synchronically describe society’s core institutional structures and diachronically elaborate its central developmental patterns and processes. The kind of critical global theory they envisage would be sensitive to postmodern concerns regarding classical Enlightenment prejudices and take into account new configurations of technology, culture, and social experience, but without giving up the aspiration for progressive social change that gives social theory its vitality. The essays in Part Two contain extended commentaries on postmodern research methods. As previously mentioned, the impact of postmodernism as a methodological strategy is most evident in contemporary ethnographic and feminist approaches. Here again there has been a defensive reaction by some more conventionally oriented researchers (see Lofland 1993; Dawson and Prus in press), with one going so far as to praise as a special strength of two recent books the fact that “neither gives one iota of attention to the currently faddish enamorment with postmodernism and radical deconstructionism” (Lofland 1993, p. 3). Others, however, have been more open to alternative strategies for representing the social world in their work in ways that selectively incorporate postmodern themes (see Richardson 1990; Denzin 1991, 1992; Clough 1992b; Pfohl 1992). In Chapter Seven M.Gottdiener describes the significance of semiotics in postmodern analyses. He begins by discussing the dual origin of semiotics in the writings of Saussure and Peirce, highlighting the differences in their approaches, particularly those concerning the status of the external world. Gottdiener argues that Peirce’s inclusion of the external world of material objects within his theory of signification makes his approach more amenable to a concrete analysis of social and cultural phenomena than Saussure’s. Gottdiener then criticizes the way in which American sociologists have employed semiotics as a postmodern research strategy by linking their appropriation to the idealist, Saussurean view via the French postmodernists, especially Baudrillard. He also points out that while the

16


Saussurean version of semiotics is by far the dominant view among American postmodern sociologists, they often apply his concepts in a superficial and confused manner. Gottdiener illustrates the advantages of a semiotic research strategy based on Pierce’s approach by providing what he calls a sociosemiotic analysis of Disneyland, relating the construction design and themes of Disneyland to Walt Disney’s personal biography and to the dominant consumption codes of American mass culture. Thus he argues for the continued salience of semiotic research strategies in postmodern social inquiry, but provides them with a firmer empirical grounding in sociosemiotics. In Chapter Eight Norman K.Denzin demonstrates how deconstructionism can be employed as an interpretive research strategy. He first outlines the primary features of Derrida’s deconstructionist critique of the Western philosophical tradition and its relation to postmodernism. He then illustrates the utility of the deconstructionist approach as a postmodern method for studying cultural texts by analyzing the popular film The Morning After. Like Derrida and other poststructuralist thinkers, Denzin’s definition of cultural texts is quite broad, encompassing political and scientific treatises as well as literary and artistic productions. What makes them all subjects for deconstruction is the scientistic misrepresentation of their content as containing a single clear-cut message, thereby suppressing other possible interpretations. The application of deconstructionism in academic disciplines outside of philosophy has proceeded roughly along two lines. The first, championed by the Yale literary critics Geoffrey Hartman and J.Hillis Miller, argues for an interminably open-ended approach to reading texts, celebrating the playful, Dionysian impulse in Nietzschean thought. The second appropriation, advocated most forcefully by the British literary theorist Christopher Norris, criticizes the ludic approach for implying that “anything goes” and favors instead a more rigorous way of deconstructing texts that identifies a limited number of alternative interpretations. Denzin’s reading of The Morning After, as well as his recent work linking deconstructive analysis with cultural studies (Denzin 1992), clearly demonstrates the superiority of Norris’s approach for applying deconstruction in social inquiry, as it allows for the association of alternative interpretations of cultural texts with oppositional discourses such as feminism. In Chapter Nine Andrea Fontana describes the impact of postmodernism on ethnographic approaches in anthropology and sociology. Nowhere in the social sciences has the introduction of postmodern concerns had such far-reaching effects than in the


17

reconsideration of how ethnographic accounts are produced. Here the poststructuralist revision of the conventional ways in which authors and texts are conceptualized has led to a variety of new ways of representing the subjects of field research. Fontana identifies three general types of postmodern ethnography: postmodern fieldwork that emphasizes the problematic status of the ethnographer as author; radical ethnography that broadens the focus of ethnographic accounts to include film, television, fiction, dreams, and other unconventional sources of data; and postmodern feminist ethnography that deconstructs the patriarchial bias in ethnographic authority. To contextualize his discussion of the rise of postmodern approaches in ethnography, Fontana outlines the history of ethnography since the early days of Malinowski and the Chicago school interactionists. Despite their internal differences, the classical ethnographers were supremely confident of both the legitimacy and viability of their work. The contemporary crisis in ethnography, however, casts doubt on both the moral and the epistemological nature of the enterprise. In Clifford Geertz’s felicitous phraseology, “Anthropologists have had added to their ‘Is it decent?’ worry an ‘Is it possible?’ one” (1988, p. 135). Fontana agrees with Geertz in regards to the epistemological question: both share the view that the heightened reflexivity emphasized in postmodern approaches does not so much undermine the authorial voice of ethnography as it makes that role a more complicated one. Fontana therefore maintains that postmodern ethnography, in this sense, constitutes an expansion of traditional ethnographic concerns rather that a wholly new, radical departure. The moral issues raised by postmodern ethnographers are equally contentious as they question the ways in which ethnographers have traditionally legitimized their enterprise (see Sangren 1988). If ethnography can no longer justify its claim to enhance understanding and cooperation among different groups and cultures, then why continue doing it? Although, as Fontana points out, this is a nonissue for some postmodernists, it is a crucial one for those who wish to continue doing ethnographies in a postmodern fashion. In Chapter Ten Robert Goldman and Steven Papson analyze the political implications of the emphasis on heterogeneity and difference in postmodern methodologies. A prominent argument in much of the recent postmodern literature suggests that the Marxian concept of hegemony is obsolete since widespread fragmentation in contemporary cultural and social norms precludes the possibility of ideological domination by any single group or class. Goldman and Papson challenge the equation of normative heterogeneity with political pluralism as naive and misleading. They claim instead that the postmodern condition of radical ambiguity

18


is employed hegemonically by corporate advertisers not only to sell their products but, more fundamentally, to reproduce the consumerist ideology of contemporary capitalism. Goldman and Papson demonstrate their argument by providing a detailed analysis of a television advertisement for the Reebok shoe company that appeared in 1988. The advertisement, the centerpiece of Reebok’s “Reeboks Let UBU” campaign, is organized in terms of a postmodern pastiche aesthetic that emphasizes the death of affect, the burnout of desire, linguistic schizophrenia, and the plundering of cultural texts for meaning and value. They describe the commercial as a “metaad” since it turns the skeptical, blasé attitude of the cynical public into a commodity signifier. Although it constitutes an extreme example, Goldman and Papson argue that the Reebok ad represents the way advertisers today appropriate postmodern critiques and convert them into an aesthetic style in their commercials to market products. They situate this new strategy historically as a response to the crisis in contemporary consumer culture where advertisers must continually reestablish a distinct position for their commodities in an increasingly crowded and differentiated field of commercial signs. Goldman and Papson maintain that postmodern semiotic and deconstructionist approaches err because they fail to connect the proliferation of images and simulacra in contemporary mass culture with the political-economic processes of commodity production that underlie them. By focusing their analyses solely on the hyperreal world of signs and signifiers, these approaches mistakenly proclaim the end of production in contemporary societies. In so doing, postmodern research methods unwittingly reproduce the naive empiricism they criticize in positivist approaches to social research and preclude the possibility of social and political critique. A number of important books concerned with selective aspects of postmodernism and social inquiry have appeared recently (see Lash 1990; Turner 1990; Best and Kellner 1991; Featherstone 1991; Bauman 1992; Rosenau 1992; Seidman and Wagner 1992; Smart 1992), but none of them contains the sort of comprehensive, in-depth discussion and critique of postmodern theories and methods that we have attempted to provide in this volume. Also none of them aims, as we do here, to provide a useful guide for those social scientists and others who want to learn more about postmodernism, but are not specialists in continental theory. We share with Mills (1959, p. 166) the conviction that many of our categories of thought and explanations for what is happening around us are derived from the great historical transition from the medieval to the modern age and are no longer generalizable for use today. However, this


19

is not to claim, as some of the recently published texts have argued, that sociologists must choose between a sociology of postmodernism and a postmodern sociology. In our view, any worthwhile account of the nature of contemporary society and culture must be both; it must be a sociology of postmodernism insofar as it should aim to formulate generalized accounts of the sort Best, Dickens, and Antonio and Kellner have endorsed, and, as the essays by Denzin, Gottdiener, and Goldman and Papson demonstrate, it must also encourage the formation of new analytical strategies informed by postmodern approaches such as semiotics and deconstructionism. Simply put, a critical understanding of postmodern perspectives is vitally important for furthering the project of contemporary social inquiry. We offer this volume to the interested reader with the hope that it will be of assistance in the development of this important task.

REFERENCES Alexander, Jeffrey. 1991. “Sociological Theory and the Claim to Reason: Why the End Is Not in Sight.”

Sociological Theory 9:147–153. Arac, Jonathan. 1986. “Introduction.” Pp. ix–xiii in Postmodernism and Politics, edited by Jonathan Arac. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983a. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e). ____. 1983b. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Phillip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e). ____. 1984a. “On Nihilism.” On the Beach 6:38–39. ____. 1984b. “Game with Vestiges.” On the Beach 5:19–25. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1992. Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge. Bell, Daniel. 1973. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Basic Books. ____. 1976. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Best, Steven. 1989. “The Commodification of Reality and the Reality of Commodification: Jean Baudrillard and Postmodernism.” Current Perspectives in Social Theory

9:23–51. Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. 1991. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. New York: Guilford Press. Bogard, William. 1987. “Reply to Denzin: Postmodern Social Theory.” Sociological Theory 5:206–209. Boyne, Roy, and Ali Rattansi, eds. 1990. Postmodernism and Society. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Calhoun, Craig. 1992. “The Infrastructure of Modernity.” Pp. 205–236 in Social Change and Modernity, edited by Hans Haferkamp and Neil Smelser. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

20


Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Clough, Patricia Ticineto. 1990. “The Deconstruction of Ethnographic Subjectivity and the Construction of Deliberate Belief.” Pp. 35–44 in Studies in Symbolic Interaction, vol. 11, edited by Norman Denzin. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. ____. 1992a. “The Rhetoric of Sexual Difference and the Narrative Construction of Ethnographic Authority.” Pp. 3–17 in Studies in Symbolic Interaction, vol. 13, edited by Norman Denzin. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. ____. 1992b. The End(s) of Ethnography. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Collins, Randall. 1990. “Cumulation and Anti-cumulation in Sociology.” American Sociological Review 55:462–463. Connor, Steven. 1989. Postmodernist Culture. Oxford, England: Basel Blackwell. Crook, Stephen, Jan Pakulski, and Malcolm Waters. 1992. Postmodernization: Change in Advanced Society. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Dallmayr, Fred. 1987. Critical Encounters: Between Philosophy and Politics. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. ____. 1989. Margins of Political Discourse. Albany: State University of New York Press. Dawson, Lorne, and Robert Prus. In Press. “Interactionist Ethnography and Postmodern Discourse.” In Studies in Symbolic Interaction, vol. 15, edited by Norman Denzin. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Debord, Guy. 1970. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red. Denzin, Norman K. 1986. “Postmodern Social Theory.” Sociological Theory 4:194–204. ____. 1987a. “Reply to Bogard.” Sociological Theory 5:209–211. ____. 1987b. “On Semiotics and Symbolic Interactionism.” Symbolic Interaction 10:1– 19. ____. 1991. Images of Postmodern Society. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. ____. 1992. Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell. Derrida, Jacques. 1972. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Pp. 247–272 in The Structuralist Controversy, edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dews, Peter. 1987. Logics of Disintegration. New York: Verso. Dreyfus, Hubert, and Paul Rabinow. 1982. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ____. 1986. “What Is Maturity? Habermas and Foucault on ‘What is Enlightment?’” Pp. 109–121 in Foucault: A Critical Reader, edited by David Couzens Hoy. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell. Featherstone, Mike. 1991. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. ____. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon. Translated by Colin Gordon, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. New York: Pantheon Books. ____. 1988. “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom.” Pp. 1–20 in Final Foucault, edited by James Bernauer and David Rasmussen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Frank, Arthur W. 1987. “Review essay on Fragments of Modernity, The Flight from Ambiguity, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.” Symbolic Interaction 10:295–306. Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.


21

Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press Gottdiener, Mark. 1991. “The Post-Modern Project: An Alternative View.” Perspectives 14:7. Habermas, Jürgen. 1981. “Modernity versus Postmodernity.” New German Critique 22:3–14. ____. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Translated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell. Hassan, Ihab. 1987. The Postmodern Turn. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Honneth, Axel. 1991. The Critique of Power. Translated by Kenneth Baynes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Huyssen, Andreas. 1984. “Mapping the Post-modern.” New German Critique 33:5–52. Jameson, Fredric. 1984a. “The Politics of Theory.” New German Critique, 33: 53–65. ____. 1984b. “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146:53–92. Kellner, Douglas. 1987. “Baudrillard, Semiurgy, and Death.” Theory, Culture, and Society 4:125–146. ____. 1988. “Postmodernism as Social Theory: Some Challenges and Problems.” Theory, Culture and Society 5:239–269. ____. 1989. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lash, Scott. 1990. Sociology of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Lefebvre, Henri. 1971. Everyday Life in the Modern World. Translated by Sacha Rabinovitch. New York: Harper & Row. Lofland, Lynn. 1993. “Fighting the Good Fight—Again.” Contemporary Sociology 22:1– 3. Lyotard, Jean-Franc~ois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Manning, Peter. 1987. Semiotics and Fieldwork. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Marcus, George, and Michael Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merquior, J.G. 1986. From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist and Poststructuralist Thought. New York: Verso. Mills, C.W. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Nicholson, Linda. 1990. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–16 in Feminism/Postmodernism, edited by Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J.Hollingdale. New York: Random House. Pfohl, Stephen. 1992. Death at the Parasite Cafe. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Richardson, Laurel. 1990. Writing Strategies: Reaching Diverse Audiences. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. ____. 1991. “Speakers Whose Voices Matter: Towards a Feminist Postmodernist Sociological Praxis.” Pp. 29–38 in Studies in Symbolic Interaction, vol. 12, edited by Norman Denzin. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. ____. 1992. “The Poetic Representation of Lives.” Pp. 19–28 in Studies in Symbolic Interaction, vol. 13, edited by Norman Denzin. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Rosenau, Pauline. 1992. Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

22


Sangren, P.Steven. 1988. “Rhetoric and the Authority of Ethnography.” Current Anthropology 29:405–424. Scott, Joan. 1988. “Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism.” Feminist Studies 14:33–49. Seidman, Steven. 1991. “The End of Sociological Theory: The Postmodern Hope.” Sociological Theory 9:131–146. Seidman, Steven, and David Wagner, eds. 1992. Postmodernism and Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Smart, Barry. 1992. Modern Conditions, Postmodern Controversies. London: Routledge. Sturrock, John, ed. 1979. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–18 in Structuralism and Since: From LéviStrauss to Derrida, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Turner, Bryan, ed. 1990. Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Van Maanen, John. 1988. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

PART I

POSTMODERN THEORIES OF SOCIETY

CHAPTER 2

Foucault, Postmodernism, and Social Theory Steven Best

In sociology, postmodern concepts, methods, and texts have been ignored to a great extent, no doubt because they challenge conventional ways of doing social theory and sociology and even the rationale for sociology in an alleged postmodern world.1 Yet, one also might see sociology—as compared with philosophy, psychology, or economics—as a postmodern discipline, given its fragmentary and pluralistic character. The postmodernist’s celebration of discursive difference and incommensurability is something today’s sociologist confronts on a daily basis at the institutional level. Moreover, the attention sociology has paid to local kinds of knowledge, discourses, rituals, and forms of interaction has undermined the claims of its more scientistic practitioners to universal truth. Still, the methods and assumptions of contemporary sociology, for better or worse, are largely governed by modernist assumptions. Most proponents of postmodernism, however, fail to discern the continuities between postmodern theory and the critical currents in modern social theory. Most obviously, a version of the postmodern critique of modern forms of rationality was anticipated by Weber. Scientistic claims to pure objectivity have been challenged by ethnomethodology and hermeneutic sociology, and structuralist critiques of the subject inform contemporary antihumanist theories. Indeed, before postmodernism emerged as a fashionable discourse, sociologists C. Wright Mills (1959), Peter Berger (Berger, Berger, and Kellner 1973), and Daniel Bell (1976) all claimed that modernity had been exhausted and 25

26


succeeded by a new postmodern period. Nevertheless, postmodern theories constitute a significant enough departure from modern theories to justify the prefix “post-” and to demand serious consideration. What is it, then, to practice postmodern sociology or to practice sociology in a postmodern world, and are they the same thing? Does postmodern theory mean the death of sociology or its transformation? What can American sociologists learn from contemporary European theories? In this chapter I wish to address these questions by focusing on the work of French theorist Michel Foucault. Although Foucault said little about the discipline of sociology and much about the sociology of discipline, his work has important implications for the field, both in terms of what it studies and of how it proceeds. Foucault proposes new ways of theorizing about history, society, power, and the formation of modern subjects. His work is directly relevant for current critiques of positivism, approaches to “conflict theory,” the sociology of deviance, the recent school of “historical sociology,” sociological histories of rationality, and theories of socialization and modernization. Foucault offers a twofold deconstructive critique of sociology that exposes the aporetical logic informing the human sciences and their culpability in spreading modern forms of domination.2 I have three primary tasks: (1) to provide an overview of Foucault’s work that identifies its major shifts in theme and focus, as well as its underlying continuities, (2) to specify the ways in which Foucault can be read as a postmodernist and to distinguish his position from more extreme postmodern theorists such as Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Deleuze and Guattari, and (3) to suggest some ways in which his writings offer useful perspectives for contemporary social theory while identifying some of their problems and limitations.

THE CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY Michel Foucault was born in Poitier, France, in 1926, and he died in Paris in 1984. He began his academic career as a philosopher, studying with Althusser at the Ecole Normale Su?erieure, but grew intolerant of the abstractness of this discipline and its naive truth claims (see Sheridan 1980). He turned to psychology and psychopathology as alternative forms of study and observed psychiatric practice in French mental hospitals during the early 1950s. These studies led to his first two books on the theme of mental illness and began his lifelong interest in the relationship between knowledge and power. He was briefly a member of the French Communist party, but he could not tolerate the straightjacket of orthodoxy and broke with it in 1951, maintaining ambiguous feelings

Foucault, Postmodernism, and Social Theory

27

about Marxism throughout his life. Foucault taught in French departments in Sweden, Poland, and Germany during the 1950s and returned to France in 1960 in order to complete his doctorat d’état in the history of science under Georges Canguilhem. The events of May 1968 had a decisive effect on his thinking and prompted a preoccupation in his work with modern forms of power. After the May protests, Foucault was appointed chairman of the department of philosophy at Vincennes. In 1970 he was appointed to the (self-titled) chair of Professor of History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France, which he held for the rest of his life. Like many contemporary theorists, Foucault’s work is interdisciplinary and enacts what Geertz (1986) terms the “blurring of genres.” Despite the evasive and protean character of Foucault’s work, there are readily identifiable themes that remain constant throughout his career. Foucault’s main project has been to write a “permanent critique of our historical era” (Foucault 1984, p. 42) that “problematizes” modern forms of knowledge, rationality, social institutions, and subjectivity that seem given and natural but in fact are contingent constructs of power and domination. In a series of historical studies he attempted to develop this theme from several standpoints, by analyzing the operations of power in modern psychiatry, medicine, and criminology, and by examining the various ways in which individuals are constituted as subjects and objects of knowledge. Influenced heavily by Georges Canguilhem and Gaston Bachelard, he redirected their research from historical and epistemological accounts of the natural sciences to political critiques of the human sciences. In all of these studies, the themes of power and knowledge—how they interact in practices of domination—form two key axes of his work. In his later work, however, Foucault adopted a third axis, ethics, as he broadened his focus to include not only the ways in which subjects are constituted by others through “technologies of domination” but also the ways in which subjects can transform themselves through “technologies of the self” (see Foucault 1986, 1988a, 1988b, 1988c). Despite these methodological and stylistic shifts, there is an underlying continuity in Foucault’s work insofar as all his books analyzed the relations “between experiences (like madness, illness, transgression of laws, sexuality, selfidentity), knowledge (like psychiatry, medicine, criminology, sexology, psychology) and power (such as the power which is wielded in psychiatric and penal institutions, and in all other institutions which deal with individual control)” (Foucault 1981, p. 239). Although it is misleading to call Foucault a postmodernist tout court, one can identify salient postmodern perspectives or positions in his work. These positions involve a break with (1) versions of Enlightenment

28


rationality that champion modern values as universal, believing that increases in science and reason bring increases in social progress in general, and claiming that theory can provide an objective representation of the world that is grounded in secure foundations; (2) totalizing methodologies that see history and society as unified wholes to be grasped through systematizing schemes that seek the laws governing society and human action; and (3) humanistic theories that anchor knowledge in a rational consciousness and posit an autonomous, unified, and expressive subject as the source of meaning and action. As I will show, these postmodern positions inform all aspects of Foucault’s thought, including his historical methods, his “analytics” of power, and his political strategies. Whereas for many theorists modernity encompasses a large, undifferentiated historical epoch dating from the Renaissance to the present, Foucault distinguishes between two post-Renaissance eras: the “classical” era (1660–1800) and the “modern” era (1800–1950).3 He sees the classical, or Enlightenment era, as inaugurating an intense mode of domination over human beings that culminates in the modern era. He endorses the Nietzschean view that dismisses the Enlightenment ideology of historical progress: “Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination” (Foucault 1977, p. 151). Yet, ironically, Foucault believes that the modern era does exhibit a kind of “progress”—in the dissemination and refinement of techniques of domination. His position here is similar to that of Weber, who analyzed rationalization as a process of refining means of domination, and to that of Adorno and Horkheimer, who saw a continuity of disaster “leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb” (Adorno 1973, p. 320). In his historical studies of the post-Renaissance world, Foucault describes the coercive consequences of modern forms of rationalization. Awakening in the classical world like a sleeping giant, reason finds chaos and disorder everywhere and embarks on a rational ordering of the social, attempting to classify and regulate all forms of experience through a systematic construction of knowledge and “discourse,” which Foucault understands as systems of language imbricated with social practices. Human experiences, such as madness or sexuality, become the object of intense scrutiny, discursively reconstituted within rationalist and scientific frames of reference (the discourses of modern knowledge) and thereby made accessible for administration and control. Since the eighteenth century, there has been a “discursive explosion,” according to Foucault, whereby all human behavior has come under the “imperialism” of


29

discursive intervention, regimes of “power/ knowledge,” and technologies of truth. The task of the Enlightenment, Foucault argues, was to multiply “reason’s political power” (1988d, p. 58) and to disseminate it throughout the social field, eventually saturating the spaces of everyday life. Rationality ultimately leads to “diseases of power” (Foucault 1982a, p. 209), such as fascism and Stalinism. These forms of power are not a horrible aberration of Enlightenment rationality but rather its natural outgrowths. In his genealogical works of the 1970s Foucault analyzed modern rationality, institutions, and forms of subjectivity as sources or constructs of domination. Where modern theories understand knowledge and truth to be neutral, objective vehicles of progress and emancipation, Foucault’s postmodern reversal defines them as integral components of power and domination. In his most gauchiste moments, Foucault approximates the view of the extremist “New Philosophies” in France in rejecting all utopian theories as ruses of power and schemes for constructing new modes of domination, going so far as to argue that “to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system” (1977, p. 230). Here his work represents the postmodern radicalization of the collapse of emancipatory hopes and schemes (most recently, those of the 1960s), surpassing even the pessimism of Adorno and Horkheimer (1972). Where they held out hope for the emergence of some few autonomous individuals within the “totally administrated society,” Foucault systematically dismantles all remaining vestiges of the modern belief in the free or efficacious subject and attempts to articulate a subjectless theory and politics (though he later modified this position). Thus, in direct opposition to modern views, postmodernists valorize incommensurability and fragmentation as liberating. They reject totalizing and monocausal theories to emphasize difference over identity, plurality over uniformity, relativism over foundationalism, nominalism over universality, perspectivism over systematicity, and instability of meaning and signification over semiotic stability. For his part, Foucault underlines “the amazing efficacy of discontinuous, particular and local criticism” as compared with the “inhibiting effect of global, totalitarian theories” (1980a, p. 80) at both the theoretical and political levels. Although he acknowledges that “global theories” such as Marxism and psychoanalysis have provided “useful tools for local research” (1980a, p. 81), he believes they are reductionist (and therefore coercive in their practical implications) and need to be superseded by local forms of knowledge and microanalyses: “We must reject [totalizing] theory and all forms of general discourse” (Foucault 1977, p. 231). Consequently, Foucault attempts to detotalize history and society as unified wholes governed by a center, essence, or telos, and

30


to decenter the subject as a constituted rather than a constituting consciousness. He analyzes history as a nonevolutionary, random, fragmented field of disconnected discourses, society as a dispersed regularity of unevenly developing levels of discourse, and the modern subject as a humanist fiction integral to the operations of a “carceral society.” In so doing, Foucault’s analyses of modernity take the form of specific archaeological and genealogical investigations that problematize the assumptions informing sociology and other human sciences through a history of their discursive practices.

ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE “SCIENCES OF MAN” In his early works Foucault characterized his position as an “archaeology of knowledge.” The metaphor of archaeology suggests that Foucault was attempting an excavation of knowledge, a search for its underlying conditions and determinants. Yet this approach is different from conventional hermeneutical methods and sociologies of knowledge and is strongly influenced by structuralism. Archaeology follows structuralism in the search for underlying rules of human thought and knowledge. Foucault accepted the structuralist critique of the founding subject and transcendental consciousness to focus on the hidden, unconscious determinants of thought. Archaeology attempts to identify the conditions of possibility of knowledge, the determining “rules of formation” of discursive rationality that operate beneath the level of “thematic content” and subjective awareness and intention. These rules form the “positive unconscious” of all knowledge, perception, and truth. They are “the fundamental codes of a culture—those determining its language, its schemes of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices” (Foucault 1973b, p. xx). As such, they constitute a whole epistemological field, or episteme. Foucauldian archaeology differs from the structuralism of LéviStrauss in its rejection of a universal, transhistorical unconscious. Instead, it holds that the rules of discursive formation undergo dramatic changes in different historical periods, creating fundamentally different epistemic conditions. Hence, Foucault calls these rules the “historical a priori” of a given culture; the objects of discourse are not ideal essences but rather historical constructs. Archaeology is also opposed to “commentary,” understood as a hermeneutics that seeks “to uncover the deeper meaning of speech” based on the assumption that there is an implicit meaning not explicitly expressed and rooted in subjective intention. Archaeology eschews hermeneutic analyses of the meaning of texts in favor of a structural analysis of the codes underlying


31

intentionality. It shares with positivism the attempt to merely describe and not explain but undermines the positivist belief in theory-free knowledge by uncovering the unconscious determinants of knowledge and by emphasizing that what counts as discursive “facts” is historically and epistemically relative. Archaeology is the theoretical orientation Foucault pursues in his major works from the 1960s: Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge. The first two works are substantive studies of mental illness and modern medicine. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault pursues metatheoretical reflections on his work and attacks evolutionist and technological approaches to history. Here I shall focus on the analysis of the human science found in the third work of this period, The Order of Things, subtitled “An Archaeology of the Human Sciences,” where Foucault locates the beginnings of the human sciences within the modern episteme and the discourse of “Man.” For Foucault, “Man” is a not a timeless essence but a recent historical invention, emerging with the modern episteme around 1800. As the dominant discursive construct of modern philosophy and the human sciences, Man appears with the “decline of representation,” when representation as a form of knowledge becomes problematic. In the classical era words and things stood in a perfect, God-given correspondence, and language was a translucent mirror of reality. All classical thought attempted to provide an exhaustive systematization of the world, a mathesis universalis, through the construction of ordered tables of identities and differences of things given to representation. The knowing subject grasped the totality of natural relations without itself figuring in the representing process. Where classical thought saw representation as a mere given, modern thought was preoccupied with the question of the origins and legitimacy of representation. The modern era is characterized by a “profound upheaval” in thought, whereby language, objects, and the human subject itself acquire an empirical and historical density. Representation no longer has the immediate and autonomous power to order reality according to analytic grids; the data of representation are now given to thought from sources outside of immediate consciousness, buried within the finite conditions of human existence. With its fall from the natural order of things into history, the representing subject is transformed into Man. Within the new “analytic of finitude,” Man is understood as a finite and historically conditioned being, subject to the laws of biology, production, and language. Man is the being for whom representations exist and who is simultaneously a subject and an object of knowledge. While the empirical sciences (biology,

32


economics, and philology) withdrew from the realm of representation altogether, philosophy (from Kant to Husserl) and the human sciences (psychology, sociology, and literature and myth) took up the issue of representation in a new way, focusing on the conditions of possibility for representation as a form of knowledge. The human sciences thus appeared “when man constituted himself in Western culture as both that which must be conceived of and that which is to be known” (Foucault 1973b, pp. 344–345). Both philosophy and the human sciences acknowledge that the subject is a constituted being, yet each believes it is also a constituting being who can overcome the limitations on its knowledge. Philosophy constituted man within a series of “doublets” that converted empirical constraints on knowledge into transcendental grounds of possibility of knowing rooted in the subject’s very being. The human sciences constructed a transcendental theory of the object by claiming that the object precedes the conditions of knowledge and provides the foundation for the unity of subjective representations. The human sciences thus conceive of Man as empirically determined in accordance with the laws of life, labor, and language, but Man can grasp these laws and “subject them to total clarification” (Foucault 1973b, p. 310) through reflexive analysis. The immediacy and translucency of knowledge in the classical episteme gives way to an opacity and density of thought. Modern thought is preoccupied with the problem of the “unthought,” whereby knowledge is gained only by grasping the conditions of knowledge that elude immediate consciousness. Philosophy seeks this “unthought” in a transcendental consciousness; the human sciences seek it in a more distant region, beyond the subject itself, in the realms of biological function, social conflict, and linguistic signification. Yet this epistemological deficit that threatens the certainty of knowledge and the supremacy of the knowing subject is annulled and transformed into an ontological asset. Man is the being whose limitations on its knowledge provide the very basis for the recuperation of this knowledge. Man is a “paradoxical force in which the empirical contents of knowledge necessarily release, of themselves, the conditions that have made knowledge possible” (Foucault 1973b, p. 322). Since Man is the experience given to himself, the labor whose law constrains him, and the subject of a language that determines him, he is “able to recover his intergity on the basis of what eludes him” (Foucault 1973b, p. 323). Foucault’s archaeology of the human sciences takes the form of a description rather than a critique. His goal is not to denounce them as mere ideology or pseudosciences but rather to underline their aporetic character and their contamination with the philosophy of the subject.


33

He attempts to demonstrate their precarious epistemic arrangement, situated somewhere between the empirical sciences (in their attempt at a formal rigor that employs scientific models) and philosophy (in their preoccupation with representation and man as a constituting/ constituted subject). He thus describes “their uncertainty as science, their dangerous familiarity with philosophy, and their potentially secondary and derived character” (Foucault 1973b, p. 348). Foucault regards the modern attempts to balance the transcendental-empirical polarities of man as a doomed project: “It is probably impossible to give empirical contents transcendental value, or to displace them in the direction of a constitutent subjectivity, without giving rise, at least silently, to an anthropology, that is, to a mode of thought in which the rightful limitations of acquired knowledge (and consequently of all empirical knowledge) are at the same time the concrete forms of existence, precisely as they are given in that same empirical knowledge” (Foucault 1973b, p. 248).4 Having analyzed the birth of Man, The Order of Things concludes by anticipating the “death of Man” in an emerging postmodern epistemic space where the subject is once and for all dethroned and interpreted as an effect of language, desire, and the unconscious. Oscillating between the positive and the fundamental, the empirical and the transcendental, and attempting to construct a solid foundation over a perilous epistemological fault line, modern efforts to construct the figure of Man necessarily failed. The death of Man was perhaps first initiated by the human sciences in their appeal to a region of determination beyond consciousness. New “counter-sciences” (psychoanalysis, ethnology, and linguistics) then emerged that abandoned the standpoint of Man altogether, identifying conditions of knowledge that lay entirely outside of a representing consciousness, thereby inaugurating a new, postmodern episteme. They are counter-sciences, not in the sense that they are less rational or objective than the human sciences, but because they attempt to undo the figure of Man by destroying the ground of his positivity and demonstrating that the conditions of possibility of unconscious representation lie in deeper metapsychological principles of Death, Desire, and Law as the ultimate roots of human finitude. Where the human sciences appeal indirectly to an unconscious to explain the basis of representation and try to preserve a subject-object dialectic, the counter-sciences privilege linguistic over psychological and sociological models and appeal directly to the unconscious, thereby dissolving subjectivity into an alien objectivity. Archaeology itself clearly belongs to this new episteme and its aim is to destroy “anthropologism” and the category of the subject. Archaeology is opposed to all attempts to discuss the subject as a foundation for

34


knowledge and truth and in terms of an alienated yet recuperable essence. By questioning the whole project of modern thought, Foucault attempts “to renew contact in this way with the project for a general critique of reason” (1973b, p. 342). The demolition of Man and the modern episteme and the emergence of a new postmodern form of thought are thus presented in liberatory tones. Like Lyotard (1984), Foucault defines the new postmodern era primarily in terms of new configurations of knowledge rather than of new forms of media and technology (see Baudrillard 1983a, 1983b; Kroker and Cook 1986) or of culture (see Jameson 1984). For Foucault, these postmodern forms of knowledge portend the dawning of a new posthumanist era that begins with “the death of Man.” Although modernity is still with us in numerous ways, Foucault speaks of “the impression of [its] fulfillment and of [its] end, the muffled feeling that carries and animates our thought, and perhaps lulls it to sleep with the facility of its promises, and makes us believe that something new is about to begin” (1973b, p. 384). Yet, while he champions the possibility of a new form of thought, Foucault provides no account of what value a posthumanist form of thought would have. Nor is there yet any clear analysis of the political implications of anthropologism, the human sciences, and the discursive constitution of Man. What happens when human beings become the subjects and objects of scientific study? What if this knowledge is not innocent and is bound up with power and domination? What are the ultimate consequences of the modern will-to-truth? Such issues, although implicit in his earlier works, are not explicitly raised and answered until the genealogical phase of his work, where the archaeological analysis of Man as a historically produced object takes the form of a political reflection on the construction of subjectivity, a critique of the human sciences, and an attempt to articulate a micropolitics of resistance to the plethora of dominating mechanisms that constitute modern “disciplinary society.”

GENEALOGY AND POWER While genealogy signals a shift in focus from the (increasingly rarified) discourse theory of archaeology, it should be seen not as a break in his work but rather as a widening of the scope of analysis. As with archaeology, Foucault characterizes genealogy as a new mode of historical writing, calling the genealogist “the new historian” (1977, p. 160). Both approaches attempt to reexamine the social field from a micrological standpoint that enables one to identify discursive


35

discontinuity and dispersion instead of continuity and identity and to grasp “events” in their real complexity. Both, therefore, attempt to undo the great chains of historical continuity and their teleological destinations by historicizing what was thought to be immutable; to destroy historical identities by tracing the plurality of multiple histories; to purge historical writing of humanist assumptions; and to critically analyze modern reason through a history of the human sciences and a description of its practices. Both approaches, therefore, directly link social theory with historical writing. In the transition to genealogy, however, Foucault places greater emphasis on the material conditions of discourse and hence on analyzing the “relations between discursive formations and non-discursive domains (institutions, political events, economic practices and processes)” (Foucault 1972, p. 49). Consequently, he thematizes the operations of power, particularly as they target the body to produce knowledge and subjectivity. This transition is not, then, a break between an idealist archaeologist and a materialist genealogist since Foucault never totally divorced discourse from social relations and practices; rather, it marks a more adequate thematization of social practices and power relations that were implicit in his work all along.5 Archaeology and genealogy now combine in the form of theory/ practice. As Foucault states, “‘Archaeology’ would be the appropriate methodology of the analysis of local discursivities, and ‘genealogy’ would be the tactics whereby, on the basis of the descriptions of these local discursivities, the subjected knowledges which were thus released would be brought into play” (1980a, p. 85). Where archaeology attempted to show that the subject is a fictitious construct, genealogy attempts to foreground the material context of subject construction, draw out the political consequences of “subjectification,” and help form resistances to subjectifying practices. Where archaeology criticized the human sciences as being grounded in humanist theories, genealogy links these theories to the operations of power and seeks to put historical knowledge to work in local struggles. And where archaeology theorized the birth of the human sciences in the context of the modern episteme and its doublets, genealogy highlights the power relations that they presuppose and enhance. Thus, in Discipline and Punish (1979), Foucault describes the historical formation of the “soul,” body, and subject within various disciplinary matrices of power that operate in prisons, schools, hospitals, workshops, and the like. The individual now is interpreted not only as a discursive construct but as an effect of disciplinary technologies whose very identity and desires are shaped and constituted. This fabrication of the “disciplinary individual” is indissociable from the researches and

36


goals of the human sciences. Similarly, in The History of Sexuality (1980b), he attempts to write the history of the “polymorphous techniques of power” that since the end of the sixteenth century have rigorously inscribed the body within discourses of sexuality governed by a scientific will to knowledge and which have a powerful “normalizing” effect. In order to theorize the birth of modern valuation and subjectification practices, genealogy transgresses the boundaries of legitimation enforced by scientific theory and totalizing narratives such as Marxism to politicize all facets of culture and everyday life and to establish the autonomous reality of local knowledges and struggles. Following Nietzsche’s genealogies of morality, asceticism, justice, and punishment, Foucault tries to write the histories of unknown, forgotten, and marginal discourses. Hence, he sees the discourses of madness, medicine, punishment, and sexuality to have independent histories and institutional bases, irreducible to larger phenomenona such as the modern state and economy. Genealogy “must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality; it must seek them in the most uncompromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history—in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts” (Foucault 1977, pp. 139–140). Against “the tyranny of globalising discourses” (Foucault 1980a, p. 83), Foucault calls for “an insurrection of subjugated knowledges” (1980a, p. 81), of those “disqualified” discourses that both positivistic science and Marxism delegitimate because they are deemed marginal and/or nonformalizable. Genealogies are therefore “anti-sciences,” not because they seek to “vindicate a lyrical right to ignorance or nonknowledge” or attack the concepts and methods of science per se, but rather because they contest “the [coercive] effects of the centralising powers which are linked to the institution and functioning of an organised scientific discourse” (Foucault 1980a, p. 84). Genealogy therefore seeks to vindicate local, disordered, and fragmentary forms of discourse and struggle and to battle the operations of power within modern scientific discourses that attempt to assimilate or disqualify local knowledges. Foucault’s genealogical works attempt to rethink the nature of modern power in a nontotalizing scheme. He rejects all modern theories of power that see it to be anchored in macrostructures or ruling classes and to be primarily repressive in nature. Foucault develops new postmodern perspectives that interpret power as “dispersed,” indeterminate, “heteromorphous,” subjectless, and primarily productive, shaping the subject in toto. He claims that the two dominant models for theorizing about modern power, the “juridical” and the “economistic” models, are flawed by outmoded and erroneous assumptions. The economistic


37

model, espoused by Marxists, is rejected as a reductionistic subordination of power to class domination and economic imperatives. The juridical model, his primary target, analyzes power in terms of legal and moral right and political sovereignty. Although the bourgeois revolution decapitated the king in the sociopolitical realm, many concepts and assumptions of the sovereign-juridical model continue to inform modern thought (e.g., in repression-based theories of power, such as liberal theories). He therefore attempts “to cut off the head of the King” in the realm of theory with a genealogical guillotine. Foucault finds a rupture in history that begins with the classical era and inaugurates a radically different mode of power. Beginning in the seventeenth century, he finds “the emergence, or rather the invention, of a new mechanism of power possessed of highly specific procedural techniques, completely novel instruments, quite different apparatuses…which is absolutely incompatible with the relations of sovereignty” (Foucault 1980a, p. 104). This is a new form of power “bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them” (Foucault 1980b, p. 136). In The History of Sexuality he describes this new mode of power as “bio-power” that has two different but intersecting modalities. The first modality is a “disciplinary power” that involves “an anatomopolitics of the human body” (1980b, p. 130). He defines “disciplines” as “techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities” (1979, p. 218). Initially developed in monasteries and in late seventeenthcentury plague towns that required methods of spatial separation and population surveillance, disciplinary techniques soon extended throughout society, forming a gigantic “carceral archipelago.” As practiced in schools, asylums, hospitals, barracks, and workshops, these techniques included timetables for constant imposition and regulation of activity, surveillance measures to monitor performance, examinations such as written reports and files to reward conformity and penalize resistance, and “normalizing judgment” to impose and enforce moral evaluations such as the work ethic. The ultimate effect of discipline is “normalization,” the elimination of all social and psychological irregularities and the production of useful and docile subjects through a refashioning of minds and bodies. Since the goal of punishment has become not simply to prevent legal infractions but to create an entirely new subject altogether—“the art of correct training”—power takes on an extralegal character and is inscribed in a larger field of authorities, which includes educators, doctors, and psychologists.

38


The second modality of bio-power, emerging subsequent to disciplinary power, focuses on the “species body,” that is, on the social population in general. “Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a ‘people,’ but with a ‘population,’ with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation” (Foucault 1980b, p. 25). The supervision of the population by demography, studies of the use of resources and the circulation of wealth, statistics on birth and death rates, and so on, represent “the entry of life into history,” into a densely constituted political field of knowledge, power, and political techniques. Hence, in the eighteenth century, sexuality became an object of discursive administration and regulation. The ensuing “deployment of sexuality” produced perversions and sexual categorizations of various sorts in accordance with normalizing strategies of power. Against modern theories (positivist and Marxist) that see knowledge as neutral, objective, or emancipatory, Foucault emphasizes that knowledge is indissociable from regimes of power: “There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge. Nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (Foucault 1979. p. 27). Foucault’s concept of “power/ knowledge” is exemplary of the postmodern suspicion of reason and the emancipatory schemes advanced in its name. The circular relationship between power and knowledge is established in Foucault’s genealogical critiques of the human sciences. Having emerged within a preexisting “carceral network” spreading throughout society, disciplines such as clinical medicine, psychiatry, educational psychology, sociology, and criminology in turn contributed to the development, refinement, and proliferation of the new techniques of power. Institutions such as the asylum, the hospital, the prison, and the classroom functioned as laboratories for observation of individuals, experimentation with correctional techniques, and acquisition of knowledge for social control that could be disseminated and applied throughout society. Thus, the human sciences are born within “those ‘ignoble’ archives, where the modern play of coercion over bodies, gestures, and behavior has its beginnings” (Foucault 1979, p. 191). The modern individual became both an object and the subject of knowledge, not simply “repressed” but also positively shaped and formed within the matrices of “scientifico-disciplinary mechanisms,” a moral/ legal/psychological/medical/sexual being “carefully fabricated… according to a whole technique of force and bodies” (Foucault 1979, p. 217), born within “a specific mode of subjection” (Foucault 1979, p. 24). As with traditional sociological theories, the “socialization” of the


39

individual for Foucault involves the inculcation of norms and values, but Foucault theorizes this process in terms of technologies of subjugation; scientific forms of knowledge, truth, and their therapeutic functions; the targeting of the body itself; and the ubiquity of domination that extends throughout all institutional sites in society. As Foucault understands it, the term “subject” has a double meaning: one is both “subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to… [their] own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge” (1982a, p. 212). Hence, as Dews (1987) has noted, Foucault rejects the Enlightenment model that links consciousness, self-reflection, and freedom, and instead follows Nietzsche in tracing the genealogy of self-reflexivity as a strategy of power that operates through mechanisms of internal control. Against some modern theories that posit a pregiven, unified subject or an unchanging human essence that precedes all social operations, Foucault’s postmodern analysis dispenses with the subject as a metaphysical fiction and argues that it is completely determined by power formations, even in its physical and desiring existence. Foucault’s postmodern theory of power emphasizes the highly differentiated nature of modern society and the “heteromorphous” power mechanisms that operate independent of conscious subjects. Demarcating his approach from the Frankfurt school and other modern approaches, Foucault rejects a generalized description of “rationalization.” Instead, he analyzes it as a process that occurs “in several fields, each grounded in a fundamental experience: madness, illness, death, crime, sexuality, etc.” (Foucault 1988d, p. 59). This entails looking at “more remote processes” in which power is multiplied and localized throughout various social institutions, none reducible to a single source. Each field, moreover, is itself highly differentiated and complex: the explosion of sexual discourse beginning at the end of the sixteenth century, for example, emanated simultaneously from the fields of demography, psychiatry, medicine, ethics, and pedagogy. Consequently, Foucault conducts an “ascending” rather than a “descending” analysis; that is, he sees power as circulating throughout a decentered field of institutional networks and is only subsequently taken up by larger structures such as classes or the state. This move explains why Foucault calls his approach an “analytics” rather than a “theory” of power. The latter term implies a systematic, unitary viewpoint, which he seeks to destroy in favor of a plural, fragmentary, differentiated, indeterminate, and historically and spatially specific mode of analysis. What Foucault failed to acknowledge, however, was the totalizing aspects of his own approach, which systematically eliminates agency and the ambiguous character of modernity. In part, however, he overcomes this one-sided focus in his later (1980s) works, where he shifts his focus

40


from modern forms of power to Greco-Roman and early Christian ethics. While still critical of Enlightenment reason, Foucault attempts to positively appropriate key aspects of the Enlightenment heritage, including its acute historical sense of the present, its emphasis on rational autonomy over conformity and dogma, and its critical outlook. He now sees the uncritical acceptance of modern rationality and its complete rejection as equally hazardous: “If it is extremely dangerous to say that Reason is the enemy that should be eliminated, it is just as dangerous to say that any critical questioning risks sending us into irrationality” (Foucault 1984, p. 249). Critical thought must constantly live within a field of tension; its function is to accept and theorize about “this sort of revolving door of rationality that refers us to its necessity, to its indispensibility, and at the same time to its intrinsic dangers” (Foucault 1984, p. 249). Hence, Foucault displays an ambivalent attitude toward Enlightenment rationality. He adopts a different outlook in his later work by discovering a critical impulse in the modern will-to-knowledge that should be preserved. This leads him to modify his position that subjectivity is nothing but a construct of domination and to make positive gestures toward a conception of new, postmodern selves who might become autonomous in their escape from disciplinary systems and ethical self-reinvention within practices seeking an “aesthetics of existence” (Foucault 1982b). He now seeks a connection between reason and autonomy while still concerned with analyzing the potential and actual dangers of rationality.6

TOWARD A POSTMODERN SOCIOLOGY Unlike Baudrillard, Foucault offers not a sociology of postmodernity, but a postmodern sociology, that is, an analysis of modern society that employs postmodern concepts and perspectives. Foucault deconstructs the field of sociology in at least three ways. First, he refuses to see sociology as a privileged disciplinary standpoint for analyzing forms of social interaction, and instead provides a multiperspectival analysis that combines philosophical, historical, and political assumptions and approaches. Sociology is recast as a generalized social theory with political intent. Second, he dismantles the fundamental category of sociology, “society,” through a critique of the holistic assumptions that constitute it as a unity or totality rather than as a complex amalgam of discourses, institutions, practices, and “polymorphous techniques of subjugation.” Society is only an abstraction, to be approached from various


41

perspectives, that can never provide an exhaustive or unified description of social interaction in terms of general laws or structures: “‘The whole of society’ is precisely that which should not be considered except as something to be destroyed” (Foucault 1977, p. 233). Politically, Foucault believes that such a concept entails a totalizing macropolitics that thwarts local initiative. Third, Foucault challenges conventional views about sociology and other human sciences through a two-pronged analysis of their historical conditions of emergence. In his “archaeological demystification” of the human sciences, Foucault attempts to uncover the fundamental discursive conditions of the modern episteme that make the human sciences possible. As we have seen, he locates the birth of the human sciences at the beginning of the modern era with the decline of classical representation and the emergence of the analytics of finitude. He argues that the human sciences developed within an unstable epistemological space tainted by anthropomorphic assumptions. Their status as a rigorous science and their logical coherence is therefore undermined. Moreover, against the conventional historical account, which analyzes the emergence of the human sciences in terms of an increase of rationality achieved through willful theoretical initiative, Foucault understands their development as an effect of a deeper archaeological shift: “The human sciences did not appear when, as a result of some pressing rationalism, some unsolved scientific problem, it was decided to include man…among the objects of science. They appeared when man constituted himself in Western culture as both that which must be conceived of and that which is to be known” (Foucault 1973b, pp. 344– 345). In his “genealogical demystification” of the human sciences, Foucault argued that they are part and parcel of a disciplinary and normalizing power. Through data gathering, surveillance, and therapeutic techniques, disciplines such as sociology, psychiatry, and criminology have appropriated human subjects as objects of study and have developed powerful means of behavioral modification and control. In a non-Marxist materialist analysis, Foucault described how the extraction and application of knowledge developed by the human sciences is bound up with the enforcement of normality. His analyses pose a strong challenge to the standard view that the human sciences are liberal, beneficent, or neutral in character. Thus, while Foucault rejects sociology as a discipline in one sense of the term, he insists that it is a discipline in this second, pejorative sense. Although Foucault did not call himself a sociologist, or privilege sociology for social theory, one can nevertheless identify a properly sociological perspective in his studies of modern European societies in

42


terms of the emergence and development of forms of rationalization, the human sciences and their institutions, techniques of power and domination, and the modes of socialization that “fabricate” individuals as docile bodies and obedient minds. Foucault’s work anticipates contemporary theories of “historical sociology” insofar as he emphasizes the idea that an understanding of present practices, and their transformation, is impossible without a rigorous historical knowledge of the beginnings of conditions that have been long buried and obscured. His analysis of subjectification practices has strong affinities with Thomas Szasz (1961, 1970), Erving Goffman (1961, 1963), and the sociology of deviance that emerged in the 1960s to analyze deviance as a socially constructed category. But unlike Szasz and Goffman, Foucault situated normalizing practices within the broader social framework of the rise and development of modernity and developed a more explicit and penetrating analysis of power. Indeed, one of the most valuable aspects of Foucault’s work is its ability to sensitize the social theorist to the pervasive operations of power and to highlight the problematic or suspicious aspects of rationality, knowledge, social norms, subjectivity, and emancipatory schemes themselves. In richly detailed analyses, Foucault demonstrates how power is woven into all aspects of social and personal life, pervading the schools, hospitals, prisons, and social sciences. Following Nietzsche, Foucault problematizes seemingly innocent or beneficent forms of thought and value (e.g., humanism, self-identity, or utopian schemes) and forces us to rethink them. Nietzsche showed how the highest values have the lowliest “origins,” how morality is rooted in “immorality” and resentment, for example, and how all values, knowledge, and even art are manifestations of the will-to-power. Foucault exposes the links between power, truth, and knowledge and describes how liberal-humanist values are intertwined with and support technologies of domination. Thus, like Nietzsche, Foucault shows that the practices we ordinarily take to be enabling are in fact constraining. Hence, Foucault poses a sharp challenge to sociologists who divorce regimes of knowledge and truth from power and claim that knowledge is neutral, objective, or innocent; to macrotheorists who root power in state or class and ignore the pervasive power systems that circulate throughout a host of institutional sites and in everyday life; and to microtheorists who theorize face-to-face interactions in concrete settings but ignore the realities of power altogether. Extreme postmodern theorists such as Baudrillard and Kroker and Cook vaporize society into a hyperreality of codes, images, and signs; Foucault emphasizes the all-tooreal operations of power. Unlike them, Foucault would not call for the “end of sociology” but rather for a new type of politicized, sociological


43

practice that breaks with the humanist, positivist, and totalizing assumptions of modern theory. Foucault resisted the radical relativism of some postmodernists that rejects all claims to truth and reduces theory to mere narrative or storytelling. Foucault’s work is concerned only with the human sciences, the “dubious disciplines,” and there is no evidence that he wished to impugn the scientific and objective character of the natural sciences (see Gutting 1989). Indeed, he even grants disciplines such as psychiatry a degree of “scientific validity.” This in no way compromises his emphasis on the theme that forms of knowledge are related to forms of power, since he argues that knowledge can be scientific and still objective in character and be part of a disciplinary apparatus. Knowledges, in other words, can achieve a formal autonomy and scientificity despite their political character. In one of his last interviews, for example, Foucault stated that “mathematics is linked in a certain way and without impairing its validity, to games and institutions of power” (cited in Gutting 1989, p. 276). Foucault, therefore, did not ask social scientists to abandon “truth and method”; rather, he asked them only to acknowledge the political character of all their knowledge and to be sensitive to the ways in which knowledge and truth are intertwined with power. Thus, the political thrust of Foucault’s work was to employ knowledge toward the subversion of contemporary forms of domination, and the challenge normalizing processes both within and beyond the academy. It highlights the mechanisms of normalization within academic departments that confine research activities within conservative boundaries that are enforced through disciplinary mechanisms such as examinations and promotional threats or rewards. A Foucauldian approach to sociology would abandon the belief in pure scientific neutrality, insisting on the political character of all theory and knowledge and adopting a frankly partisan stance against social injustice and in support of the disenfranchised and dispossessed. In Foucault’s approach, the role and function of the sociologist is recast as a unique kind of critical theorist, a genealogist whose task is not to produce knowledge for its own sake but rather to contribute to political resistance movements. The genealogist is a “specific intellectual” who abandons any pretension to represent all oppressed groups and assumes the more modest role of an adviser to local forms of struggle, as Foucault himself did in his relation with the Prison Information Group in France. Unlike the “universal intellectual,” the specific intellectual does not attempt to impose closed, totalizing schemes and plans of action to unify local struggles into a revolutionary movement. Rather, the “specific intellectual” helps to ensure the autonomy of local struggles by recovering

44


“subjugated” and “disqualified” knowledges from the hegemony of positivistic science, master narratives, and hierarchical political parties.7 Genealogy therefore allows new perspectives to emerge and vindicates previously marginalized groups as important political actors. The genealogist believes in the cognitive value of the direct experiences of the oppressed and is sharply opposed to the sociological tradition (from Marx, Durkheim, and Weber to the present) that denigrates the lay interpretation of reality to uphold the superiority of professional knowledge, an attitude that legitimates the merger of rationality and force (see Bauman 1990). Instead, the genealogist helps subjugated groups to recover the history of their domination, to understand the mechanisms of their oppresssion, and to work toward changing the power relationships that affect them. For Foucault, politics begins with the “problematization” of present social relations, institutions, and forms of subjectivity by exposing them as historical productions of power relations. By dereifying and unfreezing the historical present, the genealogist disturbs its eternal or self-evident character, an important precondition for changing it. In Foucault’s words, “It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercized itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them” (1974, p. 171). For Foucault, “the critical question today [is] in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints” (Foucault 1984, p. 45). Hence, genealogy helps to expose the constitutive nature of our identities and relations as effects of power and domination and helps to reconstitute them along more liberatory lines. Such a political project may seem incompatible with Foucault’s emphasis on power/knowledge. However, it is a vulgar reading of Foucault to argue that he reduces knowledge to power, transforming the slash mark between power/knowledge into a sign of identity. Foucault has said that “when I read…the thesis, ‘Knowledge is power,’ or ‘Power is knowledge,’ I begin to laugh, since studying their relation is precisely my problem. If they were identical, I would not have to study them and I would be spared a lot of fatigue as a result. The very fact that I pose the question of their relation proves clearly that I do not identify them” (1988d, p. 43). While knowledge and power exist in a circular and mutually reinforcing relation, and while even the most abstract of knowledges are ultimately connected to power formations (as physics and mathematics are indispensable to rocket science and to war), it does not follow that all forms of knowledge are directly reducible to mere power effects or


45

domination mechanisms having no truth status or objectivity whatsoever and that some forms of knowledge cannot be deployed against systems of domination. For Foucault, “knowledge can transform us” (1988d, p. 4) through a contestation of prevailing power relationships. But we cannot change our present relations without knowledge of how they operate and how they have been historically constituted. All forms of knowledge are ultimately connected with forms of power, but not all forms of knowledge reinforce practices of domination. Foucault believed genealogy is a case in point. Genealogy, indeed, is related to a particular regime of power, but it is one that seeks to contest the dominant regime of power and to help install new relations of power that enable individuals to become creative and autonomous rather than blocking and coercing them. Thus, Foucault sought not an end to power relationships per se, which would be impossible since they constitute all social phenomena, but rather an alternative set of power relationships that are more enabling. One problem with Foucault’s work is that he never developed the means to distinguish among different forms of knowledge and power. Like Foucault, Habermas (1971) links knowledge to power (as “human interests”), but Habermas distinguishes between an instrumental rationality that seeks to dominate the social and natural world and a critical or emancipatory reason that seeks to promote human freedom. Habermas also correctly points out that Foucault did not account for the critical transformations in the social sciences in the 1970s, where “objectifying approaches no longer dominated the field [and] were competing instead with hermeneutical and critical approaches that were tailored in their field of knowledge to possibilities of application other than manipulation of self and others” (1987a, pp. 272–273). Habermas does not see, however, that Foucault did look favorably toward the emergence of the counter-sciences, insofar as they abandoned anthropologism and allowed a new conception of the subject to emerge. Yet Foucault did not give any substantive appraisal of them and never fully clarified the political potential of the antihumanist framework he championed. Going beyond Habermas, who rejects postmodernism as a form of neoconservativism (see Habermas 1983, 1987a, 1987b), one might also point to more recent developments within anthropology and sociology that have been influenced by postmodern theory and show promise for advancing radical social theory and politics.8 Foucault’s failure to explictly distinguish between (in Habermas’s terms) instrumental and emancipatory interests is not an oversight but rather a methodological axiom. As argued by numerous theorists (see Fraser 1981; Rajchman 1985; Taylor 1986; and Habermas 1987a, 1987b), Foucault refused to develop the normative framework that is

46


necessary to make such distinctions and to uphold positive values. He clearly opposed the present form of society and intended his ideas to have a political impact, but he simultaneously sought a methodological detachment from normative commitments and questions of validity of his analyses. He therefore could not state why his ideas do not replicate domination in a new form, why they are “true” in any sense, or even why we should prefer freedom to domination. How do we distinguish acceptable from unacceptable forms of power? From what standpoint do we identify “arbitrary” and “contingent” “constraints” on our thought and action, and why should we change them? Unlike Habermas, Foucault was not interested in metatheoretical issues of normative justification. He was concerned, rather, only with the results of his analyses and believed that their practical success was justification enough (see Gandel 1986). The unavoidable result of this atheoretical pragmatism is the contradiction of having strong normative commitments while denying they exist. The normative character of Foucault’s work is not less salient for his refusal to explicitly confront it. The problem is only compounded in his later work, where he actually employs normative terms such as “liberty” and “autonomy” but cannot tell us why we should be free from domination. He is therefore locked into an aporetic bind and committed to a vague rhetoric of liberty. Moreover, how do we know that Foucault’s own analyses and strategies will not promote, like some forms of Marxism did, new and greater forms of domination than the ones we find in capitalist society? The pragmatic reply that we should experiment and “wait and see” begs the question, for we want to know what experimental strategies have the most promise in the first place rather than arbitrarily choosing whatever strategy is at hand. Foucault’s radical social theory, therefore, dispenses with metatheory and metanarrative at great cost. There are other deficiencies in Foucault’s work that relate to his lack of a theory of agency and his prohibition against macrotheory and all forms of “global” thought. If an adequate sociological theory needs a theory of agency, Foucault’s works do not provide this. In his early and middle works he reduced the subject to an effect of discourse and disciplinary mechanisms, rejecting it as nothing more than a humanist fiction or a construct of power. Foucault was not content only to “situate” the subject, as do hermeneutic theorists (see Giddens 1979); rather, he felt compelled to destroy it. Foucault reduced consciousness and identity formation to coercive socialization and failed to grasp the individualizing possibilities created by modernity. In the genealogical stage of his work, this radical antihumanism posed the obvious problem of seeking social change without free and active agents. As we have seen, Foucault realized


47

the one-sidedness of his approach and shifted focus in his later work from a study of technologies of domination to technologies of the self. Yet he never adequately mediated these two approaches, despite his wish “to show the interaction between these two types [constituted and constituting] of self (Foucault 1982c, p. 10). Although his work on technologies of the self is suggestive for relating ethics and selftransformation to a theory of political resistance, Foucault himself never made such connections clear. Moreover, Foucault’s attack on global theory fails to grasp the ways in which a global analysis is necessary and useful to capture the global and totalizing aspects of modernization processes, such as commodification, development, environmental destruction, patriarchy, and racism, and to theorize about their complex and systemic interrelationships. Even in his own descriptions, Foucault implied that modern society has a totalizing and homogenizing character, speaking, for example, of “the global functioning of…a society of normalisation” (1980a, p. 107) and characterizing modern society as a “disciplinary society” where “domination is organized into a more-or-less coherent and unitary strategic form” (1980a, p. 142). Theorizing about such a social formation requires a general systemic form of theory. A Foucauldian analysis of the university, for example, would be seriously deficient if it did not address the intricate connections between the production of knowledge and the disciplining of students, on the one hand, and the corporatization and militarization of the university, on the other. Although Foucault developed such systemic analyses in practice (e.g., drawing connections between political economy and the internment of the mad), he did not adequately discriminate among different types of generalizing analysis, and in theory he tended to denounce all such forms of analysis as “totalitarian” in character. Ironically, Foucault’s own analyses are frequently as totalizing and homogenizing as any modern theory he attacked. Until his 1980s writings (and even here the qualifications are somewhat weak), his critique of modernity turns on a one-dimensional equation of rationality with domination and subjectivity with subjectification that completely obscures the dialectical character of modernity.9 For all the light Foucault’s work sheds on the normalizing character of modern psychiatry, for example, he obscured the ways in which institutions such as those directed by Tuke or Pinel eliminated some of the harshest forms of brutalization of the mad and undertook genuinely progressive changes (see Doerner 1981; Midlefort 1980; Rothman 1978). Foucault therefore transforms the dialectic of Enlightenment into a juggernaut of domination. His approach stands in bold contrast to Marx, who praised capitalism for its development (albeit in a context of alienation and exploitation) of technology,

48


universal human relations, and individuals rich in needs, and Habermas (1987a), who, while criticizing the “colonization of the life world” by power, money, and reified rationality, attempted to redeem the positive aspects of modernity in terms of law, civil rights, and political democracy. Thus, while Foucault’s works have serious limitations, some of which he began to correct himself, they also have a great deal to offer for rethinking social theory in our current historical period. Foucault’s accounts of the ways in which modern individuals are constituted as subjects and objects of knowledge, his reflections on the nature of modern power, and his account of the birth and development of the human sciences shed new light on classical sociological concerns. Like other postmodern theorists, Foucault has attempted to account for the immense changes at the economic, technological, and cultural levels of twentiethcentury capitalist societies and to criticize some of the problematic aspects of Enlightenment values and modern social theory.10 Sociological theory can profit greatly from a critical confrontation with postmodern thought— both its critiques of the epistemological assumptions informing different versions of modern thought and its empirical descriptions of new forms of culture, technology, and politics. Where postmodern methods and insights have been assimilated, however they have tended to be promulgated in extreme ways that uncritically assume the bankruptcy of the modern sociological tradition and glibly reject important issues, such as providing a normative justification of political critique and values or a substantive theory of agency. A key task of contemporary sociological theory, therefore, should be to analyze the contributions and limitations of postmodern theory for the ways it can augment and enrich the best aspects of the classical tradition. 11 Foucault’s works constitute a fascinating and productive point of departure for this project.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Bob (“Ralph”) Antonio and Doug Kellner for extremely helpful conversations and critical remarks.

NOTES 1. In this chapter I attempt to address the implications of Foucault’s work both for social theory in general and for sociology in particular. I shall frequently use the term “social theory” to suggest a broad, interdisciplinary approach to the study of society, of which sociology is a part.


49

2. I use the term “deconstruction” in a general sense to signify an internal critique that exposes the inherent contradictions of a given position or points to the discrepancy between rhetoric and practices. I do not imply that Foucault is a Derridean. 3. There is textual evidence for the claim that Foucault believed the modern era was coming to an end or has already ended. As I stated below, The Order of Things concludes by evoking the dawn of a new postmodern era. In a 1967 interview (Foucault 1989, p. 30), Foucault says: “I can define the modern age in its singularity only by opposing it to the seventeenth century on the one hand and to us on the other; it is necessary, therefore, in order to be able to continuously establish the division, to make the difference that separate us from them surge up under each of our sentences.” He then says that the “modern age…begins around 1790–1810 and goes to around 1950.” 4. In a later reflection (1989, p. 4) on The Order of Things, Foucault describes another tension defining the human sciences, one between hermeneutics and positivism: “The human sciences that have appeared since the end of the nineteenth century are caught as it were in a double oblication, a double and simultaneous postulation: that of hermeneutics, interpretation, or exegesis: one must understand a hidden meaning; and the other: one must formalize, discover the system, the structural invariant, the network of simultaneities.” 5. Both Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic, for example, theorized the emergence of modern “bio-power” based on policing, surveillance, normalization, and discipline. These emphases are altogether lost, however, in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge. 6. For a detailed consideration of the changes in the later Foucault, see Bests and Kellner (1991) and Best (in press). 7. For an excellent example of a sociologist attemptinig such a genealogy, see Gibson (1986), reviewed in Best (1988). 8. For work in anthropology that has been influenced by postmodernism, see Clifford and Marcus (1986). 9. As Grumley observes, Foucault conflates socialization with normalization because “the theory of power on which he depends is unable to articulate the distinction between forms of constraint essential in any process of individual socialisation and the forms of power which mark coercive restraint on already developed needs and abilities which could be satisfied in view of some project for change” (1989, pp. 293–294). Marcuse’s distinction between repression and surplus repression is relevant here. 10. A curious omission in Foucault’s account of contemporary capitalist socieities, as noted by Baudrillard (1987), is the important role of information, mass media, and simulation. 11. For an excellent attempt at such an effort, see Antonio and Kellner in this volume.

REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor. 1973. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B.Ashton. New York: Continuum. Adorno, Theodor, and Horkheimer, Max. 1972. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Gumming. New York: Continuum.

50


Baudrillard, Jean. 1983a. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e). ____. 1983b. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e). ____. 1987. Forget Foucault. New York: Semiotext(e). Bauman, Zygmunt. 1988a. “Is There a Postmodern Sociology?” Theory, Culture, and Society 5:217–238. ____. “Sociology and Postmodernity.” Sociological Review 36:790–813. ____. 1990. “Philosophical Affinities of Postmodern Sociology.” Sociological Review 38:411–444. Bell, Daniel. 1976. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Berger, Peter, Brigette Berger, and Hans Kellner. 1973. The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness. New York: Random House. Best, Steven. 1988. “Casualty Fetishism.” Socialist Review 2:149–154. ____. 1989. “Jameson, Totality, and the Post-Structuralist Critique.” Pp. 333–368 in Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, edited by Douglas Kellner. Washington D.C.: Maissoneuve Press. ____. In press. Politics of Historical Vision. New York: Guilford Press. Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. 1991. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. New York: Guilford Press. Bogard, William. 1986. “Reply to Denzin: Postmodern Social Theory.” Sociological Theory 4:206–211. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Denzin, Norman. 1986. “Postmodern Social Theory.” Sociological Theory 4:194–204. Dews, Peter. 1987. Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory. London: Verso. Doerner, Klaus. 1981. Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: A Social History of Insanity and Psychiatry. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1984. “Beyond Hermeneutics: Interpretation in Late Heidegger and Recent Foucault.” Pp. 66–83in Hermeneutics, edited by Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M.Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. ____. 1973a. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books. ____. 1973b. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. ____. 1974. “Human Nature: Justice versus Power.” Pp. 133–197 in Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind, edited by Fons Elders. London: Souvenir Press. ____. 1975. The Birth of the Clinic: Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by A.M.Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books. ____. 1977. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.


51

____. Discipline and Punish. 1979. Translated by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Sopor. New York: Vintage Books. ____. 1980a. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writtings. Translated by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Sopor. New York: Pantheon Books. ____. 1980b. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. ____. 1981. “Omnes et Singulatim.” Pp. 223–254 in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 2, edited by S.M.McMurrin. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ____. 1982a. “The Subject and Power.” Pp. 208–226 in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert L.Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Berkeley: University of California Press. ____. 1982b. “On the Genealogy of Ethics.” Pp. 229–252 in Hubert L.Drey-fus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Berkeley: University of California Press. ____. 1982c. “Sexuality and Solitude.” Pp. 3–21 in Humanities in Review, vol 1. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ____. 1984. “What Is Enlightenment?” Pp. 31–50 in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books. ____. 1986. The Uses of Pleasure. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. ____. 1988a. The Care of the Self. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. ____. 1988b. The Final Foucault, edited by James Bernauer and David Rasmussen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ____. 1988c. “Technologies of the Self.” Pp. 16–49 in Technologies of the Self, edited by Luther M.Martin, Huck Gitman, and Patrick H.Hutton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. ____. 1988d. Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, edited by Lawrence D.Kritzman. New York: Routledge. ____. 1989. Foucault Live. New York: Semiotext(e). Fraser, Nancy. 1981. “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions” Praxis International 1:272–287. Gandal, Keith. 1986. “Foucault: Intellectual Work and Politics.” Telos 67:111–120. Geertz, Clifford. 1986. Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books. Gibson, William. 1986. The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. Boston: AtlanticMonthly Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory. London: Macmillan. ____. 1987. Social Theory and Modern Sociology. Oxford, England: Polity Press. Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums. New York: Anchor Books. ____. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Gouldner, Alvin. 1970. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books. Grumley, John. 1989. History and Totality. New York: Routledge. Gutting, Gary. 1989. Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. Knowledge and Human Interests. Translated by Jeremy Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press. ____. 1983. “Modernity: An Unfinished Project.” Pp. 3–15 in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essay on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press.

52


____. 1987a. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Translated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ____. 1987b. “Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present.” Pp. 103–108 in Foucault: A Critical Reader, edited by David Couzens Hoy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1984. “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” New Left Review 146:53–93. Kroker, Arthur, and David Cook. 1986. The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture adn Hyper-Aesthetics. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lemert, Charles. 1979. Sociology and the Twilight of Man. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Macdonell, Diane. 1986. Theories of Discourse. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell. Midlefort, H.C.Erik. 1980. “Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe: A Reappraisal of Michel Foucault.” Pp. 247–265 in After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J.H.Hexler, edited by B.C.Malament. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mills, C.Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Rajchman, John. 1985. Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. Rothman, David J. 1978. “Society and its Prison.” The New York Times Book Review, 19 February, pp. 1, 26–27. Sheridan, Alan. 1980 Foucault: The Will to Truth. New York: Tavistock. Smart, Barry. 1990. “On the Disorder of Things: Sociology, Postmodernity, and the ‘End of the Social.’” Sociology 24:397–416. Szasz, Thomas. 1961. The Myth of Mental Illness. New York: Hoeber-Harper. ____. 1970. The Manufacture of Madness. New York: Harper and Row. Taylor, Charles. 1986. “Foucault on Freedom and Truth.” Pp. 69–102 in Foucault: A Critical Reader, edited by David Couzens Hoy. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 3

Postmodernism and Antifoundationalsim David Ashley

POSTMODERNISM: WHAT IS AT STAKE? At the end of the twentieth century, Marxist programs that once promised total political emancipation seemed to have collapsed in on themselves. Perhaps surprisingly, many elite Western intellectuals responded ambivalently to this historic development. Contemplating the ruins of “actually existing socialism” in what had been the first “workers’s state,” Francis Fukuyama, a deputy director of the U.S. State Department, argued that capitalism and the Western liberal democratic form were now impregnable. Nevertheless, he conceded, the “end of history will be a very sad time…[in the future] there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history” (1989, p. 3). Fukuyama’s nostalgic musings resonate sympathetically with some of the writings of the ultraleftist “postmodernist” Jean Baudrillard.1 Long before “the fall of communism” in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Baudrillard had determined that modernity was no longer capable of producing those “finalities” and “referential” (like “Progress” or “Humanity”) that had been such an integral part of European Enlightenment. According to Baudrillard, “When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning” (1983a, p. 12). Baudrillard has claimed that postmodern culture distinguishes neither between reality or unreality, nor between “true” or “false” representation. Rather, it becomes a “weightless” simulation that “envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum” (1983a, p. 11). 53

54


Postmodern culture, in other words, no longer is disciplined, or conditioned, by anything outside itself; as it has broken with representation per se, it is—supposedly—free to construct a purely imaginary universe. For Baudrillard, the “decisive turning point” in cultural development is “the transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing” (1983a, p. 12). To reach this point, the evolution of the sign goes through four discrete stages: (1) it is a reflection of basic reality, (2) it masks and perverts a basic reality, (3) it masks the absence of a basic reality, and (4) it bears no relation to any reality whatever—it is its own pure simulacrum (1983a, p. 11). “To simulate” is to feign what is not, and “to dissimulate” is to conceal or hide what is. As Baudrillard explains, while dissimulation leaves “the reality principle intact” (after all, one is merely concealing the reality of whatever exists), simulation, when taken to its limit, is the “reversion and death sentence of every reference” (1983a, p. 11). To dissimulate that there is nothing, however, is to use simulation to invent simulacra. Hence, dissimulation of nothing is the equivalent of simulation. According to Baudrillard, the absence of reality leads either to nostalgia or to “a panic-stricken production of the real” when, through a “strategy of deterrence,” culture tries to foundationalize itself through the repressive simulation of “hyperreality” (1983a, p. 13). Like the perfect European streets in Walt Disney World, designed to persuade us that we can have a real experience of what Old Europe is like—even though “Old Europe” now is thoroughly Americanized—hyperreality is an imaginary (and, often, a more satisfying) real. As Christopher Norris has pointed out, though, the contemporary need for “hyperreality,” is a kind of perverse compensatory mechanism, a process whereby the perceived loss of truth (or the sheer unreality of present-day experience) goes along with an hysterical desire to prove otherwise. (1990, p. 173)

Thus, notwithstanding Baudrillard’s claims that there is no longer anything to repress, “hyperreality” represents a selective and politically charged mode of forgetting. Baudrillard, in fact, cannot resist pointing out that in contemporary America repressive simulation is everywhere. It explains “Watergate” and “Iran-Contragate,” which, as Baudrillard puckishly points out, are simulated scandals designed to conceal the fact that democratic accountability does not exist. It defines the bizarre “War on Drugs,” which disguises individuals’ total lack of control over the external forces that have invaded, penetrated, and dispersed their bodies. It even accounts for the hysterical campaign against the “sexual

Postmodernism and Antifoundationalsim

55

abuse” of children, which tries to seduce us into believing that the greatest danger to American infants comes not from cultural or economic impoverishment but from oversexed (usually male) guardians. Baudrillard thus poses as a cynical and detached commentator, but, at the same time he cannot resist getting additional licks in by pointing out (contradictorily) that the construction of the purely imaginary domain of the hyperreal is “panic-stricken,” compensatory, and repressive. Yet, if “truth” or “reality” had been erased from the contemporary scene, such hysteria would hardly be necessary. Unlike Fukuyama, who believes that the banalities of contemporary life will continue to be disciplined by the task of endlessly having to satisfy the needs of capitalist accumulation, Baudrillard maintains that postmodern, or post-Enlightenment culture is “weightless.” Both men, though, inexorably return to nostalgia. Fukuyama reflects sadly on a Golden (Bourgeois/Romantic) Age when individuals were willing to risk their lives “for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism” (1989, p. 3). Similarly, Baudrillard describes the current condition of postmodernism as something that tries “to bring back all past cultures, to bring back everything that has been destroyed…in joy and which one is reconstructing in sadness in order to try to live, to survive” (1984, p. 24). Both Fukuyama and Baudrillard see the banalities of Western liberal democracy as irreversible—but neither is capable of theorizing an alternative. While Fukuyama’s analytic serves power, Baudrillard’s is driven by a sophomoric desire to be ultraleftist and posteverything (see Best and Kellner 1991, pp. 122, 140; Norris 1990, pp. 164–193). Unlike Baudrillard, I do not think that we are now irreversibly enmeshed in postmodernity. Rather, as Jean-François Lyotard (1984) has suggested, it seems to me that the current obsession with the postmodern signifies not the birth of something new but a slippage of what under modernity appeared to be familiar and determining modes of signification. In any case, as Lyotard has pointed out, there is something suspect and contradictory in periodizing cultural history in terms of “pre” and “post,” before and after, for the single reason that it leaves unquestioned the position of the “now,” of the present from which one is supposed to be able to achieve a legitimate perspective on a chronological succession (1991, p. 24). The sociological and philosophical debate about “postmodernism,” which has been so dominant during the last decade, is, however, important because it does concern some very real changes that have

56


occurred in Western societies over the last thirty years. Theory, though, should always try to avoid being made part of what it attempts to comprehend, largely because such avoidance is so difficult. Theory should not merely reflect and reproduce existing social relations but should also strive to provide some independent and critical vantage point. According to this criterion, Baudrillard’s work is sorely lacking, although, as I suggest below, he is quite capable of critically evaluating some classical social theorists (most obviously Karl Marx) and of describing certain aspects of contemporary culture. I believe that Lyotard, “celebrated” by some as “the postmodern theorist par excellence” (Best and Kellner 1991, p. 146), has rather more to offer than Baudrillard. As I noted above, he does not regard “postmodernity” as a temporal phase that has broken with modernity in some sense, but as (an admittedly nostalgic) “aesthetics of the sublime” that both precedes and constitutes such modernity (Lyotard 1984, p. 81). Rather than trying to equate “postmodernity” with the end of everything, as Baudrillard tends to do, Lyotard’s theorizing is compatible with some classical accounts of modernity, most obviously Georg Simmel’s. Perhaps of more significance, unlike Baudrillard, Lyotard is concerned with ethical questions. In fact, his more recent writings, most obviously Just Gaming (1985), written with Jean-Loup Thébaud, give highest priority to this issue. As theory, Baudrillard’s writings seem to have deteriorated over the years from the early critique of Marxism to latter-day despair and an obsession with an obscure metaphysics (see Best and Kellner 1991, pp. 122–144). Lyotard’s writings, on the other hand, have become more focused and more critical in recent years. What is most obviously at stake in the current debate about postmodernity is whether or not theory can attain some kind of independent and critical perspective on current events. Of course, a first step here is conceptualizing and generalizing about the present, and Baudrillard certainly has something to contribute in this regard. But social theory also should address the issues of domination and oppression. Of course, not all commentators on the “postmodern scene” would agree with such a claim. Nevertheless, you have to live in a pretty rarified environment to accept what one academic asked his readers to believe in a recent introduction to some of Baudrillard’s work: Critical theory faces the formidable task of unveiling structures of domination when no one is dominating, nothing is being dominated, and no ground exists for a principle of liberation from domination. If Auschwitz is the sign of total tyranny as the production of death, the world of “hyper-reality” bypasses the distinction between death and life. (Poster 1988, p. 6)


57

Taken together, Lyotard and Baudrillard represent a kind of division of labor within French postmodern theory. Lyotard concentrates on the metacritique of modern philosophy and social theory while Baudrillard elaborates (perhaps to an extreme) the consequences of postmodernization. Both tacitly assume the postmodern sociological thesis that advanced capitalist societies lack the kind of normative consensus that legitimated (however ideologically) modern bourgeois societies. In doing so, they share a great deal with Jürgen Habermas, and with prominent U.S. commentators on postmodernism, such as Fredric Jameson and Daniel Bell. But even if postmodernism is the inevitable reflection of a logic of disintegration embedded in the contemporary lifeworld, this does not cancel theory’s responsibility for investigating the reasons why such a disintegration of theory, a disappearance of ego, and a forgetting of history are taking place today. According to Lyotard and Baudrillard, this latter problematic cannot even be addressed, as stated, because it would require the reinstatement of categories that can no longer be thought. Yet, for those who continue to see the above concerns as important issues for contemporary social inquiry, the challenge is to register the concerns of Lyotard and Baudrillard while preserving preserve the emancipatory program of much of classical social theory, though not necessarily in its classical form.

BAUDRILLARD AND POLITICAL ECONOMY At the center of Baudrillard’s theory of postmodernity is an attempt to historicize and relativize what Baudrillard concedes was Marx’s cogent nineteenth-century critique of bourgeois political economy. Baudrillard (1975, 1987a) points out that both bourgeois ideology and Marx’s description of the overcoming of capitalism through communism employed a naturalistic conception of the necessity of production to explain how humankind could become a self-knowing and self-directing subject of history. This argument is, I believe, persuasive. It is true that Marx (1978, p. 226) insisted that “all production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society” (emphasis added), and thus it would be incorrect to allege that Marx presumed that production would be determining in the same way in all social formations. However, although Marx believed that production could be seen, in part, as a “moment” of consumption (1978, p. 228), he was emphatic in arguing that

58


production predominates not only over itself, in the antithetical definition of production, but over the other moments as well. The process always returns to production to begin anew. That exchange and consumption cannot be predominant is self-evident. (1978, p. 236)

In Marx’s version of capitalism, commodities are mass-produced as exchange-values. Yet, according to Marx, commodities also have the double character of possessing both exchange- and use-value. In their early stages at least, capitalist societies rationalize production in terms of a cycle of value, wherein use-value is converted into exchange-value (as labor is purchased) and then converted back into use-value (as laborers purchase those commodities necessary to reproduce their labor power). Marx observed that bourgeois ideology reduces human subjectivity to its location within a system of commodity production and resultant exchange. Yet, as Baudrillard points out, according to Marxist economics, exchange-value (which is the logic of equivalence, and the master code under capitalism) “originates and logically terminates in use-value” (1975, p. 25). Marx tried to make “use-value” the ultimate referent, or foundation for thought, something that was outside a particular social formation. It is “a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society…it is an external nature-imposed necessity” (Marx 1970, pp. 42–43). Marx, then, could not avoid defining “species-being” in terms of productive labor, or labor that was defined, in the final analysis, in terms of its relation to use-value. Marx believed that commodity fetishism concealed the hidden real: expropriated, productive, useful labor (Ashley 1991, p. 76). But he was not alone in believing that usevalue was the ultimate referent; his opponents, the “bourgeois” political economists of his day, also believed this. Consequently, as Baudrillard asserts, neither Marxists nor bourgeois political economists were able to step outside their productivist version of history in order to justify what they had made internal to it (1975, pp. 21–33). Retroactively, it seems that the Marxist critique was not immune from the fate that tends to befall “all critical concepts as soon as they claim any kind of explanatory power beyond the historical context that produced them” (Norris 1990, p. 170). Baudrillard (1981) acknowledges that Marx’s analysis of the logic of commodity production and exchange accurately described the organization and rationalization of the sign under early capitalism. But, according to Baudrillard (1975), Marx’s critique of political economy was incisive precisely because it mirrored a historically constituted reality. (Thus, for Baudrillard, Marxism was never the


59

transcendental critique it claimed to be.) Baudrillard (1975) argues that Marx recognized that nineteenth-century capitalism had effected a totalistic organization of the sign in terms of commodity production and exchange. He argues, though, that consumer (or late) capitalism cannot be understood merely as a economic system that sacrifices the bodies of the proletariat in the interest of accumulation. According to Baudrillard, what Marx failed to anticipate was the dark side of the dialectic: that the rationalistic fetishism of commodity production contained a nihilistic telos that would lead not to the self-understanding of the proletariat as a universal class but to the progressive detachment of the sign from production and from use-value (see Kroker and Cook 1988, pp. 170– 171). Thus, the possibility of a progressive evolution of the sign would be undermined from within, not opposed from without. Marx’s mistake was concealed within the early stages of capitalism because, during this historical and progressive epoch, material production was ultimately determining. Baudrillard seems to believe that the origin of the lost referent in signs can be found in the “strong symbolic order” of feudal or archaic caste societies (1983a, pp. 84ff). In such societies, the relationship between signifier and signified is not arbitrary. In traditional societies signs refer to the social relationships of “reciprocal obligation between castes, clans or persons.” Here, Baudrillard reveals the residual influence of structuralism in his work, especially as conceived by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of “savage thought” does not distinguish the moment of observation from that of interpretation: “The signs expressed carry with them their meaning” (1966, p. 223), that is, they contain their own referent, this because it is conceptually impossible to separate signifier from referent. There can, for instance, be no “fashion” in such societies because class mobility is nonexistent. Therefore, vestments are immediately understood to signify and cement reciprocal social obligations. According to Baudrillard, “The arbitrary sign begins when, instead of linking two persons in an unbreakable reciprocity, the signifier starts referring back to the disenchanted universe of the signified, [the] common denominator of the real world toward which no one has any obligation” (1983a, pp. 84–85). The emergence of this “counterfeit” world began in Europe during the Renaissance “with the destructuring of the feudal order by the bourgeois order and the emergence of open competition on the level of distinctive signs” (1983a, p. 92). Both Baudrillard (1983a) and Lyotard (1973a) suggest that during the classical, “counterfeit” era that existed between the feudal and industrial orders, the order of signification increasingly was organized in terms of theatrical imagery. The industrial

60


age does not have to rely on counterfeiting signs because they can now be mass-produced. Under industrial capitalism the relation among signs is no longer concerned with the relation of an original to its counterfeit; rather, it is one of “equivalence, indifference” (Baudrillard 1983a, p. 97). Thus exchange-value is universalized and preeminent. Baudrillard suggests that the major problem now facing those who wish to skate across the surface of an absent political domain is that of persuading some political constituency that power still exists. According to Baudrillard, “Individuals exist only as undifferentiated particles within the mass,” which, itself, “only exists as the point of convergence of all the media waves that depict it.” Political engagement, then, can mean only disengagement: “Withdrawing into the private world could well be a direct defiance of the political [that is, the power of the state], a form of actively resisting political manipulation” (Baudrillard 1983b, p. 39). If postmodern administrative power no longer is faced with legitimation problems, it still can be faced with defiance, through “hyperconformity.” For Baudrillard, the masses now are “asocial,” “resistant to all pedagogies, to all socialist education”: They know there is no liberation, and that a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization. “You want us to consume—OK, let’s consume always more, and anything whatever; for any useless and absurd purpose.” (1983b, p. 46)

The problems facing advanced capitalist societies, then, are those of desire and meaning, not of production. More specifically, the major catastrophe facing these societies is the shriveling of desire, not the diminution of productive capacity. Contemporary individuals do not reproduce themselves as they count pennies; seduction is what moves us onto the glassy surface of hyperreality, and consumption is how we move about on this surface. To some extent, profit still determines whether or not corporations can be said to be acting rationally; for multinational conglomerates, however, profit maintenance requires little more than the reproduction of present social relations, a simulation of what already exists. In America, political representation is increasingly difficult to detect. Political “debate” in the “participatory,” “democratic,” “nontotalitarian” U.S. system now involves alternation between two parties whose only democratic goal is to simulate choice by engineering an increasingly diminishing aleatory vote “around equal quotients (50/50).” Voting “comes to resemble a Brownian movement of particles or the calculation of probabilities. It is as if everyone voted by chance, or monkeys voted” (Baudrillard 1983a, p. 132).


61

Baudrillard’s rejection of the reason immanent in modernism has more in common with Hindu or Tao mysticism than with Western philosophical traditions. Perhaps this is not surprising, for, to avoid obvious inconsistency, Baudrillard hardly could permit his analysis to be swept into a domain of cognition that takes as apriorities those features of reality that he wants to claim can no longer meaningfully be thought. Baudrillard insists that the mischief in Western rationalism is not so much its invention of “interconnections, relations, meanings…. It is, on the contrary, to fabricate the neutral, the indifferent, to demagnetize clusters,” to dissect and divide that which, in itself, or for itself, is indivisible (1982, pp. 279–280). According to Baudrillard, Western rationalism has always assumed that everything in the world is scattered and that it is only due to “chance” that from time to time things interconnect or meet. As he notes, however, the opposing hypothesis that “everything is destined to encounter everything, only chance has it that they do not meet” (1982, p. 272) is on the face of it at least equally as plausible.2 According to this latter notion, the work of intellect and of reason in the arbitrary coupling of signifier with signified restricts the magical order of a world of objects and delimits the orientation of subjects. The enchanted world of objects, which exercises a seductive hold on conscious subjects, has thereby been replaced by a strict, modernist, subject/object differentiation. Baudrillard’s analysis of postmodernism thus represents a catastrophic reversal of Weber’s well-known thesis of rationalization. Weber’s (1968) description of ninth-century Chinese geomantic development perfectly illustrates the pre-Westernized, prerationalized worldview that Baudrillard uses to counter the assumptions of a disenchanted modernity. In describing the competition among different groups of Chinese geomancers, Weber notes that, after the victory of “the school of ‘forms’” over their “more substantively animist opponent[s]” (1968, pp. 198–199), it became possible to see everything as connected and as geomantically significant. In a world of magical interconnectedness where all objects exercise a seductive hold over their percipients, nothing at all could be [seen as] irrelevant. Baudrillard’s anti-Western metaphysic recapitulates Weber’s ideal-typical reconstruction of the magical worldview. In Baudrillard’s terms, “Everything breaks out in connections, in seduction; nothing is isolated, nothing is by chance—correlation is total” (1982, p. 278).

LYOTARD AND THE END OF TOTAL NARRATIVES Both Lyotard and Baudrillard entered the debate about the significance, relevance, and truth of Marxism by relating it to those existential

62


conditions that would continue to make of it a radical idiom. Neither of them finds fault with Marx’s attempt to develop, in Lyotard’s terms, a localized language that would help the proletariat understand the terms of its own exploitation and alienation. Lyotard, however, opposes all the totalizing tendencies of modernist theories (1984, pp. xxiv, 79ff). His attack on Marxism thus centers on its more grandiose claims to universal significance. Lyotard points out that, in terms of representation, it is not coincidental that the proletariat is logically equivalent to the other universal subjects of modernity, including, for instance, the idea of the nation in the French Declaration of Independence. Yet, according to Lyotard, if what is characteristic of modernity is the attempt to totalize, what is peculiar about capitalism is its one-sided emphasis on production. Thus he agrees with Baudrillard that the truth of historical materialism is embedded in the very conditions of modernity that made bourgeois Homo economicus a subject. But this means that the Marxist conception of revolution is crippled by an inadequate historicist conception of revolution “which has become, and perhaps always was, empty: the idea that one could actually overturn relations merely within the sphere of political economy and therefore the [tacit] idea that this sphere must be maintained” (Lyotard 1974, p. 145). Lyotard believes that the dualistic and totalistic epistemologies of civilization have been taken to an extreme by modernity (though they were not invented by it). His more recent philosophy of representation (Lyotard and Thébaud 1985; Lyotard 1988a) is consistent with the larger poststructuralist rejection of those epistemologies that demarcate a space between knower and known. Following Ferdinand de Saussure’s famous dictum that language is a self-contained system of differences without positive terms, Lyotard argues that the structure of language cannot be shaped by a domain of objects whose ontology somehow determines the structure of representation. A subject can move only on the inside of the discourses that constitute it: the familiar distinction between the “inside” of a language (its signifier) and its “outside” (what it depicts) reflects only the aporias of a traditional metaphysics. As Jacques Derrida puts it, “Speech [or language] represents itself; it is its representation. Even better, speech is the representation of itself” (1973, p. 57). In one of his earliest exercises in deconstruction, Lyotard distinguished between two incommensurable domains, that of writing and discourse on the one hand and that of the “figural” on the other (1971, pp. 1–18). The figural is hard to define; as one commentator has pointed out, “Lyotard does everything he can to keep the term as elusive as possible and even drastically changes the terms used to describe it” (Carroll 1987, p. 32).


63

“The figural” refers to the visual, to art, or to design. It is always opposed to a closed system of representation or discourse, and tries to break apart the rigid demarcations of such closed systems. Lyotard argues that “the political” invariably tries to ban, or exclude, all aesthetic considerations from discussion and seeks to portray its discourse as closed, final, or determinate in some sense. While there can be no politics of the sublime, there can be a sublime aesthetic in politics: a willingness to defer finalities in communicative interaction and to permit desire and feeling to drift away from reason and truth. The sublime is “the feeling of something monstrous,” “formless,” or “negative,” and contains an awareness of terror and “the idea of death” (Lyotard 1982; 1986, p. 24). Within the aesthetic domain “the idea of the sublime…is no longer the feeling of pleasure, or not simply one of pleasure.” Rather, it “is a contradictory feeling, because it is a feeling of both pleasure and displeasure together” (Lyotard 1986, p. 22). For Lyotard, the sublime thus represents (in Kant’s terms) the attempt to present the unpresentable. Kant’s hope was that the idea of the sublime could lead to closure and to the idea of universal community. Yet, while Lyotard accepts the idea that Kant’s aesthetic of the beautiful does steer humanity toward a nonintuitive conception of totality, harmony, and finality, Lyotard rejects the possibility that the conception of the sublime could, in any sense, be rule-derived or could lead to a universal sense of humanity. Tracing the oppressive conception of justice back to its origins in Plato, Lyotard and Thébaud argue that the Platonic tradition searches for “an essence of justice” that is “stated by either a theoretician, or a philosopher” (1985, pp. 19–20). They describe such an orientation as “pietistic”: opposing truth to illusion by means of representing something that is “absent, a lost origin, something that must be restored to a society in which it is lacking.” “Politics,” then, for Lyotard and Thébaud does indeed rest on what Baudrillard would recognize as a “strategy of deterrence”: It implies the idea, the representation, that…[justice] is absent, that it is to be effected in the society, that it is lacking in the society, and that it can be accomplished only if it is first correctly thought out or described. (Lyotard and Thébaud 1985, p. 20) On the other hand, “paganism,” which Lyotard favors, recognizes that domains of power and domination are indeterminate. Lyotard and Thébaud trace paganism back to Greek and Roman mythology, which did not provide actors with a “stable system to guide judgments” (1985, p. 16). Paganism “consists in the fact that each game is played as such, which implies that it does not give itself as the game of all the other games or as the true one” (Lyotard and Thébaud 1985, p. 60). According to

64


Lyotard and Thébaud, this does not lead to amorality but to a heightened concern with ethics. In pursuit of a sublime aesthetics in politics, Lyotard and Thébaud declare themselves to be followers of the Kant of the Third Critique,3 the Kant “who recovered from the sickness of knowledge and rules,” not “the Kant of the concepts and the moral law” (Benjamin 1989, p. 133). According to Lyotard and Thébaud before his “conversion to Paganism,” in The Critique of Practical Reason Kant attempted to produce “a language game that would be completely independent of that of knowledge” (1985, p. 73). Because “the will…is an unfathomable principle…there is nothing to say about it” (Lyotard and Thébaud 1985, p. 17); nevertheless, “without it, there would be no experience of obligation” (Lyotard and Thébaud 1985, p. 17). In The Critique of Practical Reason Kant develops a philosophy of will that seeks to attain (an unknowable) finality, but, in The Critique of Judgment he advocates a philosophy of judgment that operates on “a case by case” basis, without relying on preexisting concepts or “a type of discourse that somehow dominates the social practice of justice and that subordinates it to itself” (Lyotard and Thébaud 1985, p. 20). Lyotard and Thébaud conclude that ethical practice can only come into effect once it is acknowledged that the domain of the political is indeterminate: “The ability to judge does not hang on the observance of criteria.” Ethical practice is based on a “constitutive” imagination, “a power to invent criteria” (1985, p. 17). This is the essence of paganism, the realization that there can be no overlap between the true and the just. Truth refers to a determinate object of cognition; when truth and justice are combined, a totalitarian, terroristic politics ensues that demands consensus: “The manufacture of a subject that is authorized to say ‘we’” (Lyotard and Thébaud 1985, p. 81). Injustice (whether Platonic, Marxist, liberal, or whatever) results from the conflation of imaginative judgment with a descriptive phrase that purports to represent the “true being of society” and asserts “that society will be just if it is brought into conformity with this true being” (Lyotard and Thébaud 1985, p. 23). “Pagans” have known all along that “a rational politics is no longer admissable…a science of politics must be abandoned. Politics is not a matter of science” (Lyotard and Thébaud 1985, p. 23). Lyotard’s skepticism about science’s more grandiose claims can be grouped with those of theorists such as Thomas Kuhn (1970), Michel Foucault (1973, 1980), Richard Rorty (1989), and Paul Feyerabend (1975, 1987), all of whom have attacked philosophy’s tendency to erect mythical reconstructions of scientific achievement. The issue here is whether or not scientific knowledge is uniquely privileged. Like any discourse that posits


65

a referent and which claims finality and closure, science must deal with the question of how the relationship between its discourse and the truth of its referent is to be grounded or established. One solution to this problem would be to have recourse to another discourse that would itself establish the veracity of the problematic relationship in the first discourse. Yet this procedure would deny the original discourse closure or finality. A second solution would be to permit this original discourse to presume the validity of its own access to truth (the referent). This latter stratagem begs the question, however, for it abolishes the referent by subsuming it within the discursive rules of the discourse in question. As Lyotard points out, whichever of the two solutions is adopted, we must recognize that idiom becomes more important than referent (1988a, pp. 12ff). Either a discourse refers us to another discourse, or it dogmatically insists that its internal and idiomatic rules of validity are absolute and complete in themselves. But, in either case, the referent of a discourse is a discourse. According to Lyotard, authoritative discourse—whether it defines itself as “science” or not—cannot ground itself without referring to those narratives that are part of, and emerge from, the lifeworld. The scientist tends to resist such narratives, declaring that they belong “to a different mentality: savage, primitive, underdeveloped, backward, alienated, composed of opinions, customs, authority, prejudice, ignorance, ideology” (Lyotard 1984, p. 27). Yet all narrative knowledge (the life sciences, physical sciences, or human sciences included) “certifies itself in the pragmatic of its own transmission,” and does not make the mistake of trying to “give priority to the question of its own legitimation” (Lyotard 1984, p. 27). Lyotard looks forward to the emergence of (postmodern) scientific practices that are heterogenous and varied. Postmodern science “plays its own game,” and “is incapable of legitimating [grounding] itself, as speculation assumed it could” (Lyotard 1984, pp. 40–41). “Speculative” philosophy can now “relinquish its [failed] legitimation duties” with a sigh of relief. We do not have to be nostalgic for lost certainties.4 Instead, we should learn from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s travails, and have the courage to make the same paradigmatic shift that he made: We can say today that the mourning process has been completed. There is no need to start all over again. Wittgenstein’s strength is that he did not opt for the positivism that was being developed by the Vienna Circle, but outlined in his investigation of language games a kind of legitimation that is based on performativity. That is what the postmodern world is all about. (Lyotard 1984, p. 41)

In The Differend, Lyotard (1988a) builds on his analysis of the heterogeneity and incommensurability of prescriptive language games

66


to show how an unjust politics could be overcome. Lyotard discusses the controversy surrounding the historian Faurisson, who has argued that no evidence exists that millions of people were killed at Auschwitz. Faurisson bases his argument on the fact that he has been unable to find a single witness who can “prove” that he or she saw a gas chamber in operation. Lyotard responds that what Auschwitz most obviously represents is a silence. Perhaps this is because the survivors do not accept the right of those who did not experience it to tell what Auschwitz meant. Perhaps the survivors of the death camps are unwilling to talk about what happened to them, or perhaps they are simply unable to do so. Lyotard argues that, to establish the reality of the referent “Auschwitz,” it must be established that (1) “there is someone to signify the referent,” (2) “there is someone to understand the phrase that signifies it,” (3) “the referent can be signified,” and (4) “it exists” (1988a, p. 16). An agreement that something exists (4) is predicated upon the pragmatic completion of steps (1), (2), and (3). Faurisson’s rules for establishing the reality of Auschwitz as a death camp are so narrow that he can, quite readily, convince himself that it never existed. What is of most interest to Lyotard here, however, is the problem of representing the unrepresentable. Auschwitz represents a “differend”: the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be. This state includes silence, which is a negative phrase, but it also calls upon phrases which are in principle possible. This state is signaled by what one ordinarily calls a feeling…. What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them. (Lyotard 1988a, p. 13)

Revisionist historians such as Faurisson, for whom the silence of victims is not a problem, do not recognize the problem of the differend: “They will say that history is not made up of feelings, and that it is necessary to establish the facts” (Lyotard 1988a, p. 57). Lyotard argues, however, that the historian must break with the “monopoly over history granted to the cognitive regimen of phrases.” He insists that the issue of justice cannot be dissociated from the problem of representation because both justice and adequate representation necessitate the alterity of the other. As David Carroll suggests: Auschwitz is the irrefutable sign, for Lyotard, that no matter how limited the rules and logic of historical validification might be, what cannot be determined by the rules or logic of knowledge or reason, per se, can in no way be considered to be outside the realm of critical judgment and the problem of justice. (1987, p. 173)


67

The alterity of the other is infinitely variable and always curves beyond the horizon of our understanding. Nevertheless, according to Lyotard, it is dynamic modes of alterity, not appeals to static, transcendental, or totalistic rules of discourse, that help establish shifting modes of representation. Rather than relying on transcendental principles of communicative rationality, as does Habermas, for instance, Lyotard prefers to define this privileged vantage point in terms of respect for the differend and for the alterity of the other. For him, Habermas’s communicative rationality moves toward closure. Lyotard’s philosophy of critical judgment, on the other hand, encourages pragmatic and communicative modes of intersubjectivity that are open-ended and that cannot attain any kind of finality and closure. While Habermas and Lyotard both reject the philosophy of the subject, reason for Habermas must be unitary and hegemonic, at least within the supposedly discrete life spheres of science, morality, and art. Habermas (1984, 19 87) believes that “the pathologies of modernism” are caused by the “colonization” of the life spheres of morality, art, and language. He argues that what Weber failed to grasp (but what Marx comprehended) was that this one-sided colonization of the lifeworld by cognitive instrumentalism would lead to the deformation and underdevelopment of those areas of life thus penetrated (1984, pp. 345–399). In other words, the institutionalization of purposiverational action in all life spheres would lead to irrationality and retardation of those spheres (such as morality, art, and language) for which instrumental rationalization is inappropriate. According to Habermas, the crisis that the lifeworld is now experiencing results from instrumentalism’s Anschluss of neighboring life spheres. Unfortunately, under the conditions of a capitalist world order, the only kind of progress permitted is cognitive-instrumentalist rationalization, and thus this “colonization” is inevitable. In short, developing a theoretical project that was initiated by the earlier theorists of the Frankfurt school, Habermas claims that there are identifiable structural determinants of modernity’s chaos and that these take the familiar forms of capitalist rationalization and human alienation. From Habermas’s perspective, poststructuralism and postmodernism do little besides pick through the wreckage resulting from the forced acknowledgment of the dissolution of structured life spheres. Habermas is not particularly attuned to the possibility that there might be a critical thrust to the dismantlement of the reifications of modernity. What is of greatest concern to him is that postmodernists such as Lyotard and Baudrillard positively flaunt their rejection of the dialectic of Enlightenment, that is, they dispense with the possibility that individuals

68


might rationally and comprehensively grasp those mechanisms that could, reflectively, be shown to have produced them in the first place (Habermas 1981). It is precisely this tendency Habermas, one of the last great rationalists, abhors so strongly. Habermas’s attempt to show how modernity must stabilize itself on the basis of the very divisions it has wrought is itself as much enmeshed in modernity as is the philosophy of the subject. As Peter Dews (1987) has pointed out, Habermas’s model of communicative rationality could come about only at the cost of eliminating the textuality, the fluidity, and the lack of closure that must be a feature of any life form. Furthermore, as Lyotard notes, the highly differentiated life spheres that Habermas recognizes entail quite different, “heteromorphous” language games, “subject to heterogenous sets of pragmatic rules,” for which there are no “universally valid “metaprescriptions” (1984, pp. 72–73). How, then, could these life spheres be reconciled or balanced? Habermas does not seem to recognize any possible solution to this fundamental problem. In any case, as Lyotard would ask, why should we assume that diversity and unmediated pluralism are problematic in the first place? Even with regard to the rationalization (or perfection) of the aesthetic domain, Habermas argues that the authenticity, unity, and harmony of art are understandable only with regard to the application of “culturally established standards of value” and “exemplary forms of criticism” (1984, pp. 20ff ). According to Habermas, art should contribute to the illumination of universal life situations. Rather than treating the aesthetic as a sublime destruction of ordered categories of thought and feeling, Habermas is still wedded to an early modern conception of aesthetic rationality that presupposes the possibilities of unified subjectivity and assumes that art expresses the search for transcendent beauty. For Lyotard, however, as we have seen, art should be sublime, not transcendent. Aesthetic experience is more likely to be a neurotic, restless search for the new rather than a nostalgic attempt to retain lost totalities. Even in the moral domain there cannot be a transcendent or unitary reason, only a sensitivity toward the differend and the infinite variety of human experience and feeling. Indeed, Lyotard believes that the smothering of a differend in “litigation,” that is, the subsumption of difference in a form of mediation that smooths over what the differend represents, cannot be regarded as just. For instance, labor disputes often are mediated in terms of the logic of commodity relations. According to Lyotard, such a litigation simply denies the worker his status as victim. What should be at stake in a literature, a history, or a politics is the institution of “new addressees, new


69

addressers, new significations, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and for the plaintiff to cease being a victim” (Lyotard 1988a, p. 13). Lyotard thus demolishes traditional boundaries between the aesthetic and the political. The political becomes “the threat of the differend…. Everything is political if politics is the possibility of the differend on the occasion of the slightest linkage. Politics is not everything, though, if by that one believes it to be the genre that contains all the genres. It is not [itself] a genre” (Lyotard 1988a, pp. 138–39).

SOCIAL THEORY NOW Baudrillard believes that hyperreality frees us from the discipline of the referent. Postmodernity has pushed simulation to its limit and generated hyperreality, or the dissimulation of nothing. But, as Habermas and others who have yet to jettison the Marxist paradigm have acknowledged, those who have been proletarianized by the world system of capitalism and who live outside the Postmodern Zone cannot yet participate in such ironic freedom. There is a strategy of resistance implicit within Baudrillard’s analysis: it is one of withdrawal and “hyperconformity.” But, not surprisingly if quite logically, Baudrillard’s strategy of resistance is, itself, imploded. It is a strategy that cannot, in any sense, get beyond the domination it is unable to comprehend. According to Baudrillard, power today can no longer exist because it cannot do without production: “To produce is to force what belongs to another order (that of secrecy and seduction) to materialize” (1987a, p. 21). Power must “produce something real” or “produce the real.” It is only in the postmodern era that we can conceive of a new peripetia of power—a catastrophic one this time— where power no longer succeeds in producing the real, in reproducing itself as real, or in opening new spaces to the reality principle, and where it falls into the hyperreal and vanishes: this is the end of power, the end of the strategy of the real. (1987a, p. 33)

Baudrillard wants us to believe that “seduction is stronger than power” because it is reversible, while “power wants to be irreversible,” “cumulative,” and “immortal” (1987a, p. 45). Consequently, his strategy of resistance attempts to give power every opportunity to erase itself in an exuberant explosion of the hyperreal. A program of ironic compliance, hyperconformity, and nonseriousness becomes, for Baudrillard, the most effective weapon of resistance in a postmodern universe.

70


The problem here is that, at least on the face of it, this strategy of “resistance” looks a lot like surrender. What presumably prevents it from being mere capitulation is the inability of the strategy to be represented in any other than an ironic, nonserious way. Insofar as the reporting of political events, by television, for instance, increasingly has to be cast in an ironic mode (because of the nature of the medium itself), Baudrillard might have a point. Undoubtedly, in contemporary mass societies, to some extent power is being seduced and eliminated by the mass media. However, a strategy of resistance attuned to Baudrillard’s version of America hardly has much relevance in the rest of the world. Nor, with the exception of some privileged groups who can manipulate media happenings, does it make much sense even for groups in America. Baudrillard is on firm ground, though, when he suggests that there are tendencies within advanced capitalist societies that make it increasingly difficult for a “social signified to give force to a political signifier” (1983b, p. 5). Obviously, he is right in suggesting that ruling-class hegemony is jeopardized by the ability of the unsignifiable masses to resist meaning and that this could be a catastrophe of a sort for dominant elites. However, class hegemony also hinges on the ability of such elites to play their part in mystifying, depoliticizing, and persuading the unnamed masses to adopt fatalistic strategies of self-delusion. Baudrillard’s “political” strategy of hyperconformity, while appearing to be ultraradical, effectively serves as a material defense of civil society, while it conveniently erases the subject that might be expected to have become a player. Postmodern criticism foreswears allegiance to any unitary or universalistic political dialectic. Unlike Marxism, it does not, a priori, privilege any particular social position or identify any primary mode of oppression. Postmodern ideas and practices become increasingly valid to the extent that all “the various narratives, language games, or fictive devices” in use are understood to “refer to nothing other beyond their own transient power to make sense of an otherwise unknowable reality” (Norris and Benjamin 1988, p. 29). Nevertheless, we do not yet live in a postmodern universe. And, as long as the productive variables of modernity still maintain their grip on the world system, Marxism will continue to be an influential critical theory of the present. For a modernist and neo-Marxist such as Habermas (1987), the metanarrative of emancipation immanent in modernism must be fulfilled before any other possible critiques of life can be contemplated. For Habermas, the appeal of Marxism is its seductive rationality—its promise to smooth out all of the aporias and contradictions of modernity. But, for postmodernists, power and domination are not the obfuscation of the real or a denial of some social essence. As Lyotard argues, the politics of the differend cannot be smoothed over.


71

Lyotard acknowledges that the greatest threat to the existence of ongoing political struggle is the presence of power that does not dialectically produce its negation, but instead manages and contains all possible forms of opposition. While he also acknowledges that Marxism has been the critical self-understanding of modernity, Lyotard is fully aware of its limitations. As a revolutionary creed, Marxism ceases to permit victims to struggle and to represent their oppression precisely at that point where it portrays itself as metanarrative—as the total philosophy of modernity’s self-realization. Postmodern resistance tries to establish those forms of alterity and resistance in terms of which a play of power can be renewed. Such struggle is the end, rather than the means, of existence; it has to do with the self-constitution, not the realization, of subjects. Postmodern critique engages in a Nietszchean valorization of conflict (see Thiele 1990), but it also acknowledges that neither essence nor subject can be thought of as preceding struggle. What must be achieved under the conditions of postmodernity are the means of representing subjects capable of maintaining resistance in the face of a collapse of those modern signifiers that anchored individuality in a past that is rapidly receding. Dews has suggested that “post-structuralism can be understood as the point at which the ‘logic of disintegration’ penetrates into the thought which attempts to comprehend it” (1987, pp. 231–232). Both Lyotard and Baudrillard are part of this “logic of disintegration”; both understand that conventional conceptions of reason, based on a secure subject/object dualism and on absolute vantage points, have become increasingly precarious and unbelievable. While Lyotard appears willing to try to relocate a critical judgment within this dispersal of familiar parameters of reason, Baudrillard has little to offer in this regard except a rather clever, if somewhat fanciful, description of our current malaise. Habermas’s theory of critical judgment is far more ambitious than Lyotard’s, but it is, perhaps, less likely to have much application today. Habermas cannot really respond to postmodernism because he is incapable of taking it seriously. What ultimately dooms his theory of communicative rationality is its roots in the modern assumption that critical self-reflection necessitates the reconciliation of fragmentation and differentiation. However, Lyotard does not even grant Habermas his problematic. Instead, as we have seen, he welcomes the contemporary dislocation, variability, and incommensurability of authoritative experience. The major weakness of Lyotard’s writings, however, as Best and Kellner (1991, pp. 177–178) note, is that they focus too much on problems of knowledge and lack an adequate macrotheory of society

72


and social formation. While Baudrillard at least offers an account of what is going on in politics and culture today, Lyotard’s writings are too abstract to be of much substantive help in explaining current social conditions. The kind of social theory that is likely to be most valuable in the future will combine Lyotard’s interest in maintaining a critical theory of judgment with a concrete and historical concern with extant modes of domination and oppression. Without necessarily endorsing his work as a whole, I would suggest that the kind of research conducted by Harvey (1989, pp. 121–200) would be a good starting point for this kind of theorizing. Harvey acknowledges that the mode of domination institutionalized under late capitalism is historically situated, but, unlike Baudrillard, he does not believe that politics or oppression have become invisible. The task facing social theorists now is to synthesize some of the insights of theories of postmodernity with a critical theory of the present.

NOTES 1. There has been significant disagreement among commentators on Baudrillard about whether or not Baudrillard is a postmodernist or a merely a theorist of postmodernism. According to Doug Kellner, Baudrillard adopted the term “postmodernism” in the 1980s “when it became the fashion in some circles” and was “perhaps the first to organize…a postmodern social theory” (1988, p. 242) Criticizing Kellner, Mike Gane claims that “[F]ar from embracing postmodernism, Baudrillard’s whole effort is to combat it” (1991, p. 51). Kellner might sometimes have overlooked the intended irony of Baudrillard’s commentaries on contemporary culture, but Baudrillard certainly has not always objected to the label “postmodernist.” 2. Baudrillard’s conception of order and chaos here is strongly influenced by his early reading of Monod (1972). 3. The Critique of Judgment, written by Kant when he was in his sixties. 4. Although critical of Lyotard in many respects, Richard Rorty (1985) is generally supportive of the policy implications that he believes stem from Lyotard’s critique of science’s “cultural imperialism.” Rorty points out, correctly, I think, that Lyotard’s critique of scientism is not nearly as original or as novel as its author claims. Nevertheless, Rorty wants to argue that Lyotard has accurately identified a crisis of legitimacy for the more absolutist kinds of scientific language games. As Rorty notes, Lyotard is asserting that “there are no interesting epistemological differences between the aims and procedures of scientists and those of politicians” (1985, p. 170). This position is shared by Foucault (1980, 1989), Feyerabend (1987), and Hesse (1980), among others. According to this view, the history of science cannot be explained in terms of a disinterested search for the truth, nor can scientific knowledge be regarded as specially privileged.


73

REFERENCES Ashley, David. 1990a. “Postmodernism and the End of the Individual: From Repressive Self-Mastery to Ecstatic Communication.” Pp. 195–221 in Current Perspectives in Social Theory, vol. 10, edited by John Wilson. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. ____. 1990b. “Marx and the Excess of the Signifier: Domination as Production and as Simulation.” Sociological Perspectives, 33:129–146. ____. 1991. “Playing with the Pieces: The Fragmentation of Social Theory.” Pp. 70– 97 in Critical Theory Now, edited by Philip Wexler. London: Falmer Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1975. The Mirror of Production. Translated by Mark Poster. St. Louis: Telos Press. ____. 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Translated by Charles Levin. St. Louis: Telos Press. ____. 1982. “Fatality or Reversible Imminence: Beyond the Uncertainty Principle.” Social Research 49:273–293. ____. 1983a. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Phillip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e). ____. 1983b. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e). ____. 1984. “Game with Vestiges.” On the Beach 5:19–25. ____. 1987a. Forget Foucault. New York: Semiotext(e). ____. 1987b. The Evil Demon of Images. Translated by Paul Patton and Paul Foss. Sydney, Australia: Power Institute Publications. ____. 1988a. The Ecstasy of Communication, edited by Sylvére Lotringer. Translated by Bernard and Caroline Schutze. New York: Semiotext(e). ____. 1988b. America. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso. ____. 1989a. “The End of Production.” Translated by Anthony Julian Pefanis. Polygraph 2–3:5–29. ____. 1989b. “Modern Communication and the Disappearance of Art and Politics.” A letter delivered at the University of Montana, Missoula, 12 May. ____. 1990. Fatal Strategies. Translated by Phililp Beitchman and W.G.J.Niesluchowski. New York: Semiotext(e). Bell, Daniel. 1973. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Basic Books. ____. 1976. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Benjamin, Andrew (ed.). 1989. The Lyotard Reader. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell. Bennington, Geoffrey. 1988. Lyotard: Writing the Event. New York: Columbia University Press. Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. 1991. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. New York: Guilford Press. Blistene, Bernard. 1985. “A Conversation with Jean-François Lyotard.” Flash Art 121:32–35. Carroll, David. 1987. Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida. London: Methuen. Crook, Stephen. 1991. Modernist Radicalism and Its Aftermath: Foundationalism and AntiFoundationalism in Radical Social Theory. London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Dews, Peter. 1987. Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory. London: Verso. Feyerabend, Paul. 1975. Against Method. London: Verso. ____. 1987. Farewell to Reason. London: Verso.

74


Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage Books. ____. 1980. Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon. Translated by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. New York: Pantheon Books. Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. “The End of History?” National Interest 16:3–18. Gane, Mike. 1991. Baudrillard: Critical and Fatal Theory. London: Routledge. Habermas, Jürgen. 1975. Legitimation Crisis. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press. ____. 1981. “Modernity versus Postmodernity.” New German Critique 22:3–14. ____. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action, vol 1, Reason and Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press. ____. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Translated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hesse, Mary. 1980. Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ____. 1988. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Pp. 13–29 in Postmodernism and its Discontents, edited by E.Ann Kaplan. London: Verso. Kant, Immanuel. 1978. Critique of Judgment. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. ____. 1976. Critique of Practical Reason. Translated by Lewis White Beck. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Kellner, Douglas. 1988. “Postmodernism as Social Theory: Some Challenges and Problems.” Theory, Culture, and Society 5:239–270. ____. 1989. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kroker, Arthur, and David Cook. 1988. The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics. London: Macmillan. Kroker, Arthur, Marilouise Kroker, and David Cook. 1989. Panic Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Postmodern Scene. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2d. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1971. Discours, figure. Paris: Klincksieck. ____. 1973a. Des dispositifs pulsionnels. Paris: Union generale d’editions. ____. 1973b. Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud. Paris: Union générale d’éditions. ____. 1974. Economic libidinale. Paris: Minuit. ____. 1982. “Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime.” Artforum, 20:64–69. ____. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ____. 1986. “Complexity and the Sublime.” Pp. 19–26. Postmodernism ICA Documents, nos.4–5, edited by Lisa Appignanesi. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts. ____. 1988a. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Translated by George Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ____. 1988b. Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event. New York: Columbia University Press. ____. 1991. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.


75

Lyotard, Jean-François, and Jean Loup Thébaud. 1985. Just Gaming. Translated by Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marx, Karl. 1970. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Translated by Stanley Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: International Publishers. ____. 1977. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by S.W.Ryazanskaya. Moscow: Progress Publishers. ____. 1978. “The Grundrisse.” Pp. 221–293 in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed., edited by Robert C.Tucker. New York: W.W.Norton. Monod, Jacques. 1972. Chance and Necessity. New York: Random House. Norris, Christopher, and Andrew Benjamin. 1988. What Is Deconstruction? London: St. Martin’s Press. Norris, Christopher. 1990. What’s Wrong with Postmodernism? Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Poster, Mark (ed.). 1988. Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Rorty, Richard. 1985. “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity.” Pp. 161–175in Habermas and Modernity, edited by Richard J.Bernstein. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ____. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1983. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Roy Harris. London: Duckworth. Scherpe, Klaus R. 1987. “Dramatization and De-dramatization of the ‘End’: The Apocalyptic Consciousness of Modernity and Post-Modernity.” Cultural Critique 5:95–129. Thiele, Leslie Paul. 1990. “The Agony of Politics: The Nietzschean Roots of Foucault’s Thought.” American Political Science Review 84:907–925. Weber, Max. 1968. The Religion of China. Translated by Hans H.Gerth. New York: Free Press.

CHAPTER 4

North American Theories of Postmodern Culture David R.Dickens

Until very recently social and cultural analyses of postmodernism have been dominated for the most part by European—especially French— philosophers, critics, and social theorists, although the substantive parameters of the current debates were largely defined by American literary and cultural critics in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In this chapter I will examine the theories of postmodern culture contained in the writings of two of the more prominent contemporary American contributors to the debates on postmodernism, Daniel Bell and Fredric Jameson. Bell is a sociologist with an extensive background in journalism and socialist politics. In order to fully comprehend Bell’s critical perspective on postmodern culture, I situate his analysis in terms of his larger theoretical and normative concerns with the nature and direction of contemporary advanced societies. Jameson is a literary critic whose interest in postmodernism has led him to a broader involvement in the rapidly growing field of cultural studies (Kellner 1989a). Jameson’s perspective on postmodern culture is less hostile than Bell’s, but he too refuses the celebratory tone of Lyotard and other French thinkers in favor of a more activist stance toward current societal and cultural trends. At the most general level, what ties together Bell’s and Jameson’s writings on postmodernism is their shared concern with the disentegrating tendencies of contemporary postmodern culture and their attempts to outline strategies for overcoming them. 76

North American Theories of Postmodern Culture

77

DANIEL BELL’S DISJUNCTIVE THEORY OF SOCIETY Introduction

At a time when the so-called big names in contemporary sociological theory are focusing almost exclusively on what are more accurately described as abstract methodological issues (see Alexander 1982; Giddens 1984; Habermas 1984), or reacting to this trend by nostalgically calling for a return to an unreconstructed version of positivism long ago rejected by their role models in the natural sciences (see Turner 1985; Gibbs 1990), Bell is almost alone among sociological theorists today in striving to articulate a substantive vision of contemporary societal transformations in the tradition of the classics. Also, like Spencer, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim before him, normative considerations are an integral part of Bell’s theoretical concerns. As two recent book-length studies of his work (Liebowitz 1985; Brick 1986) convincingly argue, these concerns are most evident in his continuing preoccupation with the dual crises of liberalism and socialism, central themes for leftist American intellectuals since the 1930s. Bell describes himself as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture” (1978, p. xi). Socialism, for him, “is not statism, or the collective ownership of the means of production. It is a judgment on the priorities of economic policy [where] the community takes precedence over the individual in the values that legitimate economic policy. The first lien on the resources of a society therefore should be to establish that ‘social minimum’ which would allow individuals to lead a life of self-respect, to be members of the community” (1978, p. xii). As a liberal in politics, Bell believes that “the individual should be the primary actor, not the group (be it family or corporation or church or ethnic or minority group),” and that the polity “has to maintain the distinction between the public and the private, so that not all behavior is politicized, as in communist states, or left without restraint, as in the justification of laissez-faire in traditional capitalist societies” (1978, p. xiv). Most significantly for his views on postmodernism, Bell states: “I am a conservative in culture because I respect tradition; I believe in reasoned judgments of good and bad about the qualities of a work of art; and I regard as necessary the principle of authority in the judging of the value of experience and art and education” (1978, p. xv). Recognizing the unusual nature of this standpoint, Bell argues that “the triune positions I hold do have a consistency in that they unite a belief in the inclusion of all people into citizenship through that economic minimum which allows for self-respect, the principle of individual achievement of social

78


position on the basis of merit, and the continuity of the past and present, in order to shape the future, as the necessary conditions of a civilized order” (1978, p. xv). Bell’s unorthodox self-description is reflected in what may be called his disjunctive theory of society. He rejects the holistic view of society found both in Marxist and structural-functionalist theorizing in favor of an approach that conceives of society in terms of three distinct realms: the technoeconomic (or social structure), the polity, and the culture. These realms have distinct rhythms of change, and follow different norms that legitimate different, even contrasting, types of behavior. The technoeconomic realm is concerned with the organization of production and the distribution of goods and services. It also shapes the occupational and stratification system of society. The organizational or axial principle, as Bell calls it, of the technoeconomic order is functional rationality and its regulative mode is economizing, which refers to technical efficiency defined as the least cost for the greatest returns. The axial structure of this realm of society is bureaucratic and hierarchical, derived from the specialization and segmentation of functions and the need to coordinate activities. Social structure is thus a reified world of structured roles, not individual persons, represented in organizational charts that specify relationships in terms of hierarchy and function (Bell 1978, p. 11). Bell defines the political realm as the arena of social justice and power, entailing the legitimate use of force and the regulation of conflict. The axial principle of the polity is legitimacy, which in democratic societies consists of the principle that power is held and governance exercised only through the consent of the governed. Implicit in this conception is the idea of equality which, according to Bell, has been expanded in the past one hundred years to include not only equality in the public sphere but in all other dimensions of life as well to enable the individual to fully participate in society. The axial structure of the polity is representation or participation, with political parties and/or social groups expressing the interests of particular segments in society. Since political action is oriented toward reconciling conflicting and often incompatible interests, decision making in the political realm is made by bargaining or by law, not by technocratic rationality (Bell 1978, p. 12). For Bell, the cultural realm is defined not in the broad anthropological sense but as the arena of expressive symbolism, including aesthetic and religious efforts to explore and express the meaning of human existence in some imaginative form. The varied expressions of culture are derived from existential situations that confront human beings in all times, such as how one faces death, the definition of loyalty and obligation, the meaning of love and sacrifice,


79

and the claims of instinct and restraint. Thus, culture historically has been fused with religion. The axial principle of contemporary culture, however, is the expression and remaking of the self in order to attain self-realization and self-fulfillment, which implies the denial of all limits or boundaries to experience (Bell 1978, pp. 12–14). Bell’s three major books to date, The End of Ideology (1960), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1978),1 all collections of essays actually, each addresses changes and conflicts within and among the three realms, with The Coming of PostIndustrial Society and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism focusing especially on the technoeconomic social structure and the cultural sphere, respectively.2 The End of Ideology is without a doubt one of the more controversial works in contemporary social thought. It produced a firestorm of criticism immediately after its publication, which continued unabated for more than a decade. 3 Subtitled “On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties,” its most prominent claim is that the universalist, humanistic ideologies of the nineteenth century, especially Marxian socialism, are exhausted, a theme that anticipates a common claim in postmodern critiques of politics. The problem with these approaches, according to Bell, is that, as “easy left formulae,” they are “terrible simplifiers” which make it unnecessary for their proponents to confront individual issues on their particular merits (Bell 1960, p. 405). Criticisms of the end-of-ideology thesis cluster around two related claims: that it generates a complacency that legitimates the political status quo and that it endorses a technocratic approach to politics that is itself ideological. The charge of political complacency derives much of its force from the assimilation of Bell’s argument with those of other end-of-ideology theorists like Raymond Aron, Edward Shils, and especially Seymour Martin Lipset, for whom American democracy is the good society in operation (Liebowitz 1985). The technocratic ideology reproach derives from Bell’s appeal to the need for concrete planning as the alternative to what he sees as simplistic leftist formulas. Both criticisms, however, are misleading, for Bell’s endorsement of the American way of life has never been as unqualified as Lipset’s or Shils’s, and he himself states categorically that “few serious minds believe any longer than one can set down ‘blueprints’ and through ‘social engineering’ bring about a new utopia of social harmony” (1960, p. 402). Bell’s subsequent claim that there is a “rough consensus” among intellectuals in the Western world “for the acceptance of a Welfare State, the desirability of decentralized power, a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism” (1960, pp. 402–403) is obviously dated, but it does

80


give substance to the closing passages in The End of Ideology, where he states that “the end of ideology is not—should not be—the end of utopia as well” (1960, p. 405). Employing both terms in a manner derived from Mannheim, Bell pleads that “there is now, more than ever, some need for utopia, in the sense that men need—as they have always needed—some vision of their potential, some manner of fusing passion with intelligence” (1960, p. 405). Yet, “the ladder to the City of Heaven can no longer be a ‘faith ladder,’ but an empirical one” (1960, p. 405). These enigmatic lines lead to his later attempts to identify the empirical ladder in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society and, ironically, the need for a few rungs of faith in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism and subsequent essays (Bell 1980a, 1980b). Bell foresaw the beginning of a previously unheralded phase of societal development as early as 1952 (Brick 1986), and first employed the concept of “postindustrial society” to describe it in a long, unpublished essay in 1962 (Bell 1973). With the publication of The Coming of PostIndustrial Society in 1973 the concept achieves its prominence as a “speculative construct” in the manner of Weber’s ideal type to describe the outlines of what Bell claims to be an emerging sociological reality in the industrial nations of Western Europe, Japan, the Soviet Union, and, particularly, the United States. Bell identifies five dimensions or components of the postindustrial society. The first is the change in economic primacy from goodsproducing manufacturing to services. Even agrarian societies can contain a high percentage of individuals engaged in providing services, but these are largely of a personal sort, such as household servantry. What is distinctive about postindustrial societies is the growth in the number of persons providing services in transportation, communications, health, education, research, and government (Bell 1973, p. 15). A second, related, dimension refers to changes in occupational distribution leading to a preeminence of what Bell calls the professional and technical class, whose jobs require a college education. Scientists and engineers are the strategically important groups within the professional-technical category. The significance of scientists and engineers is made clear in Bell’s third dimension: the centrality of theoretical knowledge as the source of innovation and policy formation in postindustrial societies. What is decisive here, according to Bell, is the primacy of theory over empiricism and the codification of knowledge into abstract systems of symbols that can illuminate many different areas of experience (1973, p. 20). This in turn makes feasible a fourth component, the increased planning and control of technological growth. Modern industrial economies experienced enormous growth due largely to technological innovations,


81

but these innovations also produced deleterious side effects such as environmental pollution. According to Bell, the development of new computer-based modeling and “mapping techniques” makes it possible to plan and assess technological growth more rationally. Finally, the fifth dimension of postindustrial societies is their capacity to develop a new intellectual technology for dealing with “organized complexity,” the management of large-scale systems containing large numbers of interacting variables that must be coordinated to achieve specific goals (Bell 1973, p. 29). By substituting algorithms for intuitive judgments, the new intellectual technology is better suited to define rational goals and to identify the means and costs of achieving them. Bell’s vision of postindustrial society, either as a speculative construct or as an emerging sociological reality (he employs both conceptions interchangeably throughout the book), is, he admits, a utopian perspective (Bell 1973, p. 33). But he also argues that a major obstacle to its concrete realization derives from the fact that the idea of rationality upon which it depends lacks a proper justification: A technocratic society is not enobling. Material goods provide only transient satisfaction or an invidious superiority over those with less. Yet one of the deepest human impulses is to sanctify their institutions and beliefs in order to find a meaningful purpose in their lives and to deny the meaninglessness of death. (1973, p. 480)

Concern over the lack of an adequate normative basis for postindustrial societies leads to an increasing emphasis in Bell’s work on the political and cultural realms, highlighted in the lengthy concluding essay in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. A postindustrial society is, in its initial logic, a meritocracy where differential status and differential income are based on technical skills and higher education (Bell 1973, p. 409). But the political ethos of postindustrial society is communal in that social goals and priorities are largely defined by national policy. In Bell’s words, the polity is “sociologizing rather than economic” because criteria of individual utility and profit maximization become subordinated to broader conceptions of social welfare and community interest (Bell 1973, p. 481). As a result, decision making becomes increasingly politicized, leading to an increase in group conflict. The crucial problem, then, for postindustrial societies is whether they can provide a common framework of values to guide the setting of public policy: “Politically, there may be a communal society coming into being, but is there a communal ethic? And is one possible?” (Bell 1973, pp. 482– 483). Bell’s reflections on modern and postmodern culture, to which we

82


now turn, are thus of central significance to his general theoretical project insofar as the lack of a rooted moral belief system is identified as the deepest challenge to the survival of postindustrial societies (Bell 1973, p. 480). From Aesthetic Modernism to Postmodern Culture

Bell explains the lack of a moral belief system or “transcendental ethic” in postindustrial societies in terms of an increasing decadence within contemporary culture that has produced a widening disjunction between the culture and the social structure. Although bourgeois societies in the nineteenth century were still relatively integrated wholes, according to Bell, insofar as their economies, cultures, and character structures were infused by a single value system (1973, p. 477), the source of their contemporary contradictions must be traced much further back to a fundamental idea in Western civilization since the sixteenth century: that the individual, not the group, is the basic unit of society (Bell 1978, p. 16). This primary assumption of modernity was expressed in the social structure through the rise of the bourgeois entrepreneur who, freed from the ascriptive statuses and checks on acquisition that marked traditional society, sought his fortune by remaking the economic world. At the same time, in the cultural sphere there arose the independent artist, similarly liberated from the medieval constraints of the church and princely patronage, who could write and paint what pleased him rather than what pleased his traditional sponsors (Bell 1978, p. 16). The bourgeois entrepreneur and the independent artist together represented the embodiment of the Western ideal of the autonomous individual who attained freedom through self-determination. Their dual development as autonomous agents, however, soon produced what Bell calls an “extraordinary paradox” whereby each came to fear the other and seek his destruction. The bourgeoisie, radical in the economic realm, became conservative in the moral and cultural realms, seeking to control its potentially disruptive energies by channeling them into a highly restrictive Protestant character structure and a concomitant set of attitudes toward work that feared instinct and spontaneity (Bell 1978, p. 17). In contrast, independent artists, set free from the bonds of tradition, began to explore precisely those aspects of life placed off limits by the bourgeoisie. First expressed in what Bell refers to as the restless vanity of the untrammeled self in romantics like Byron, artists glorified nonrational sentiments and emotions that were formerly associated with the demonic (Bell 1978, p. 17).


83

With the advent of aesthetic modernism by the middle of the nineteenth century, the digressive tendencies of romanticism were transformed into a full-blown rage against bourgeois values. Bell sees modernism as a response to two changes in nineteenth-century industrializing societies, one at the level of sense perception of the social environment, the other concerning the nature of consciousness about the self. The first was defined by a disorientation of traditional notions regarding space and time derived from a new awareness of light, sound, motion, and speed in communication and transportation technology. The second resulted from a breakup of the traditional religious worldview, encompassing a loss of belief in an afterlife and heaven and hell, and a corresponding consciousness of an immutable void beyond life (Bell 1980a, pp. 276–277). As an aesthetic movement, modernism is defined by Bell as consisting of an attack on rationality, a suspension of social and religious morality, and a preoccupation with limitless ends, paradigmatically represented in the writings of Baudelaire, Dostoyevski, Gide, and Nietzsche (Bell 1980a, p. 280). The common syntax of modernism in literature, poetry, painting, and music is the eclipse of distance, the erasure of boundaries that define the acceptable limits of artistic creation and form. Its common ethic is the enhancement of the self, the search for aesthetic fulfillment and creativity in intense experiences and sensations previously prohibited by religious taboo: In the cry for the autonomy of the aesthetic, there arose the idea that experience in and of itself was the supreme value, that everything was to be explored, anything was to be permitted—at least to the imagination, if not acted out in life. (Bell 1978, p. 19)

A parallel set of transformations took place at roughly the same time in the social structure, according to Bell. The individualistic economic impulses of the early bourgeois entrepreneur were held in check by Puritan restraint and the Protestant ethic, so that he worked because of his calling or to fulfill the covenant of his community. But here it was capitalism itself that undermined the moral restraint of the Protestant ethic: The greatest single engine in the destruction of the Protestant Ethic was the invention of the installment plan, or instant credit. Previously one had to save in order to buy. But with credit cards, one could indulge in instant gratification. (Bell 1978, p. 21)

Once again, religiously proscribed boundaries are erased and the common syntax Bell defines as an eclipse of distance emerges in the bourgeois social structure, now based on a mass-consumption economy

84


oriented toward the satisfaction of wants, that are essentially limitless, rather than of needs, which do have limits. (Bell 1978, p. 22).4 After World War II, with the collapse of the Protestant ethic, a modernist culture emerged in America that ironically spelled the beginning of the end of modernism as an aesthetic movement. Aesthetic modernism depended on a tension between its rebellious artistic expressions and the sober discipline of the bourgeois character structure to sustain its creative impulses (Bell 1980a, 1987). Although on the production side the capitalist economy still emphasized self-discipline, delayed gratification, and restraint, the increasing primacy of mass consumption lead in the opposite direction to hedonism and instant gratification, concretizing (and thereby sublating) the antinomian tendencies of aesthetic modernism to produce an adversarial modern culture that was thoroughly antibourgeois: Despite some continuing use of the Protestant Ethic, the fact was that by the 1950s American culture had become primarily hedonistic, concerned with play, fun, display, and pleasure. (Bell 1978, p. 70)

In the 1960s a postmodern culture arose that Bell describes as the logical culmination of modernism. It is represented in the social sciences in the theoretical pronouncements of Norman O.Brown and Michel Foucault, in literature in the novels of William Burroughs and Jean Genet, and, most significantly for Bell, in everyday life in the “porno-pop” celebrations of the counterculture (Bell 1978, p. 51).5 Bell identifies three interrelated features of postmodern culture. First, postmodernism has completely substituted the instinctual for the modernist aesthetic justification for life. Impulse and pleasure alone are real and life affirming, while everything else is neurosis and death (Bell 1978, p. 51). Second, traditional aesthetic modernism, however demonic, expressed its impulses in the imagination, within the constraints of art. By insisting on action rather than artistic expression as the way to knowledge, postmodernism abolishes all remaining boundaries between art and life (Bell 1978, pp. 51–52). Bell points out that the movement from artistic representation to concrete behavior has a long history in the West in esoteric religious traditions that sanctioned debauchery and other forms of unacceptable behavior in secret rites for those who had been initiated into their sects. What is unique about postmodernism, and constitutes Bell’s third dimension, is that what was previously limited to the initiated few in secret rites is extended to the general public: “What was once the property of an aristocracy of the spirit is now turned into the democratic property of the mass” (Bell 1978, p. 52). It is this “democratization of


85

libertinism” that for Bell constitutes the primary significance, and danger, of postmodernism, as it forms the basis for a widespread cultural movement that undermines the values and motivational patterns of “ordinary” middle-class behavior (Bell 1978, p. 52). Bell thus rejects all claims that the postmodern culture of the 1960s was in any way radical or revolutionary, calling it a “counterfeit culture” that produced little culture and countered nothing (Bell 1978, p. 81), since by the 1970s its rebellious aims had been safely harnessed by the capitalist mass-consumption economy: The impulse to rebellion has been institutionalized by the ‘cultural mass’ and its experimental forms have become the syntax and semiotics of advertising and haute culture. As a cultural style, it exists as a radical chic, which allows the cultural mass the luxury of ‘freer’ life-styles while holding comfortable jobs within an economic system that has itself been transformed in its motivations. (Bell 1978, p. 20)

For the masses there is now “pornotopia,” the tedious reveling in pornography and kinky sex, mass produced and marketed by commercial entrepreneurs (writers, moviemakers, musicians, magazine editors, and advertisers) (Bell 1978, pp. 144–145). With his critique of postmodernism as an extension of modernist adversary culture into everyday life, Bell updates his normative concern that contemporary postindustrial society (particularly in the United States) “lacks either a culture that is a symbolic expression of any vitality or a moral impulse that is a motivational or binding force” (Bell 1978, p. 84). He subsequently predicts and endorses a return to religion as advanced societies become aware of the limits to exploring the mundane and of the existential predicaments that for him constitute the essential character of culture (Bell 1978, p. xxix; also see Bell 1980b). In a review of the original hardcover edition of The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Wollheim (1976) suggests that Bell’s analysis might be better termed “the cultural consequences of capitalism.” Statements supporting the cultural contradictions argument that bourgeois morality has been undermined by the adversial forms of modernist and postmodern culture and others supporting the cultural consequences view that blames the hedonistic life-styles promoted by the marketing system of contemporary capitalism are, in fact, evenly distributed throughout the text. Bell’s preference for the first interpretation most likely stems from his culturally conservative interest in a return to religion, which in turn supports the view of radical critics that he is politically conservative as well. In the writings of Fredric Jameson, to whom we now turn, Bell’s disjunctive approach is rejected

86


in favor of an economic-based but eclectic Marxian perspective, supplemented by a selective incorporation of postmodern themes that Bell categorically dismisses as modishly superficial.

FREDRIC JAMESON’S MARXIST LITERARY THEORY Introduction

With his analyses of postmodern culture, Fredric Jameson has established himself as a leading figure in the emerging interdisciplinary field of cultural studies, itself an example of the postmodern phenomenon of boundary effacement. In a comprehensive review of Jameson’s intellectual output, Kellner (1989a) describes Jameson’s studies of postmodernism as a logical extension of his earlier work in literary criticism.5 Jameson’s first book, Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961), is an analysis of Sartre’s literary texts in which Sartre is seen as a paradigm of the nonconformist, critical intellectual who uses his vocation as a writer to address the central moral and political struggles of his time (Kellner 1989a). In the later 1960s Jameson turned to the more politically explicit themes in Sartre’s work, as well as those in Lukács, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, and Bloch, revealing an intellectual conversion to Marxist thought. The publication of his second book, Marxism and Form (1971), represents Jameson’s attempt to develop a dialectical form of literary criticism that incorporates themes from the major Marxist literary figures. Foremost among these themes are the continuing need for hermeneutic analysis and for some concept of totality, both targets for attack in French postmodern theory (Kellner 1989a). Throughout the 1970s Jameson continued to refine his conception of dialectical criticism, with two important modifications: first, he expanded his inquiries beyond literature to embrace broader artistic and cultural concerns (including film, painting, and cultural politics) in a series of essays, and, second, he initiated a sustained encounter with the powerful new challenger to Marxism on the continent, French structuralism, in his 1972 book, The Prison-House of Language. The aesthetic and cultural essays, many of them later published together in a two-volume work titled The Ideologies of Theory (1988a), range across a broad variety of topics and exhibit Jameson’s characteristic concern for situating his literary analyses within a more comprehensive historical and political framework. The book on structuralism is a critical interrogation of the structural linguistic model and its application to the history of thought, but here too Jameson’s goal is to appropriate structuralist approaches for his own hermeneutic and historical interests.


87

Two more recent book-length studies, Fables of Aggression (1979) and The Political Unconscious (1981a) together constitute Jameson’s attempt to establish an eclectic version of Marxist literary criticism that incorporates aspects of structuralism, psychoanalysis, and other competing approaches for the complex task of relating changes in literary form, modes of subjectivity, and socioeconomic transformations (Kellner 1989a). At the beginning of The Political Unconscious Jameson argues that one never really confronts a text immediately: Rather, texts come before us as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or—if the text is brand new—through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions. (1981, p. 9)

Cultural texts thus contain a “political unconscious,” buried narratives and social experiences that require a sophisticated hermeneutics to decipher (Kellner 1989a, p. 15). For Jameson, interpreting these buried narratives requires a Marxian hermeneutics that situates texts materially and historically to reveal “the construction of the bourgeois subject in emergent capitalism and its schizophrenic disintegration in our own time” (1981a, p. 12). Jameson begins his inquiry by examining the nature of myths and fairy tales found in precapitalist societies, which he calls “magical narratives,” that embody the collective experiences of relatively unified precapitalist modes of production. With the rise of capitalism new modes of experience and expression are represented by the emergence of the novel, which becomes the paradigmatic voice of bourgeois subjectivity (Kellner 1989a, pp. 15–16). Subsequent developments within capitalist society and bourgeois subjectivity are registered, according to Jameson, in changes in the form and structure of the novel. From the early novels of Balzac, where relatively coherent bourgeois subjectivity in capitalist society is registered by an omniscient narrator without a specific point of view, Jameson traces the progressive disintegration of the bourgeois subject in the novels of George Gissing and Joseph Conrad. Gissing’s work is seen as a sign of the bourgeois subject losing its confidence by the end of the nineteenth century, while Conrad’s novels are interpreted as exemplifying the increasing fragmentation of the bourgeois subject in the face of the dual processes of increasing commodification and imperialism in the twentieth century (Kellner 1989a). In Fables of Aggression Jameson extends his analysis to include more aggressive forms of literary reaction to the disintegration of bourgeois society and subjectivity in certain types of twentieth century moderism and fascism. The writings of Wyndham Lewis are taken as exemplary

88


here, with their emphasis on a strenuous, mechanical style that assaults established forms in literature, painting, and cultural decorum. Fascist aggression exhibited in the writing style of Lewis and other literary modernists is thus interpreted by Jameson as an extreme product of disintegrative tendencies in capitalist society (Kellner 1989a, p. 19). As I noted above, Jameson’s attempts to develop a complex model of dialectical literary criticism led him to incorporate concepts outside of, and even hostile to, Hegelian Marxist approaches, including Althusserian categories such as overdetermination, uneven development, and relative autonomy, as well as Freudian concepts like condensation, displacement, and regression, while he continued to argue for the centrality of Lukács’s emphasis on totality and mediation. Increasingly, however, Jameson’s Sartrean project of the critical literary intellectual addressing moral and political concerns also led him to expand his focus beyond the literary sphere proper to a wider cultural field in which literature was increasingly subsumed, and, in some ways, displaced (Kellner 1989a). From Literary Criticism to Postmodern Cultural Studies

Jameson’s initial forays into the arena of cultural studies are found in three film studies published in the early 1980s (Jameson 1981b, 1981c, 1982), but his first extended discussion of postmodern culture is contained in a 1983 essay, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.”6 There he identifies a common characteristic of postmodern cultural products in literature, film, art, video, and architecture as their emergence “as specific reactions against the established forms of high modernism, against this or that dominant high modernism which conquered the university, the museum, the art gallery, and the foundations” (1983, p. 111). The operative terms here are “established” and “dominant,” for the works of abstract expressionism, modernist poetry, the international style in architecture, Stravinsky, Joyce, and others, once perceived as scandalous and shocking, are now seen as dead, stifling, reified monuments that must be rejected by those who wish to say something new. A second quality of postmodern culture mentioned here is the effacement of established boundaries and artistic categories, foremost of which is the distinction between high and mass or popular culture. Contemporary artists and writers draw on achievements in advertising, television, Las Vegas strip architecture, grade-B Hollywood films, and airport paperbacks for inspiration in the same way that they consult the modernist masters (Jameson 1983, p. 112). Even the traditional boundaries of university culture are affected, resulting today in a new


89

kind of academic discourse simply called “theory” rather than political theory, sociological theory, or literary theory. In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” Jameson alludes to three defining features of emerging postmodern culture. In a subsequent essay, “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984a), he broadens and extends his analysis, identifying four constitutive features of postmodern culture, which include: A new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary “theory” and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose “schizophrenic” structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts; a whole new emotional ground tone— what I will call “intensities”—which can best be grasped by a return to older theories of the sublime; [and] the deep constitutive relationships of all this to a whole new technology, which is itself a figure for a whole new economic world system. (Jameson 1984a, p. 58)

The first dimension of postmodern culture, its depthlessness, refers to what Jameson sees as the fundamentally antihermeneutical character of contemporary artistic products and theories. He illustrates this point by comparing Van Gogh’s famous painting Peasant Shoes with Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes. According to Jameson, Peasant Shoes, one of the canonical works of high modernism in art, is hermeneutical insofar as “in its inert, objectal form, [it] is taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth” (1984a, p. 59). In contrast, in Diamond Dust Shoes “we have a random collection of dead objects, hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips, as shorn of their earlier life-world as the pile of shoes left over from Auschwitz, or in the reminders and tokens of some incomprehensible and tragic fire in a packed dance hall” (1984a, p. 60). In Warhol’s painting there is no way to situate its features into a larger life-context, making it impossible to interpret. Diamond Dust Shoes thus represents the emergence of a new kind of superficiality that Jameson associates with glossy color photographic images in advertising, whose revealed dependence on black-and-white negatives in other Warhol works suggest a mutation of the objectworld into a set of simulacra (copies for which no original has ever existed) (1984a, p. 60). Jameson detects a similar transformation in the anti-interpretive thrust of contemporary poststructuralist theory. Rejecting all hermeneutic or depth models of theory as metaphysical and ideological, while contradictorily implying truth status for the rejection itself,

90


poststructuralist theory is seen by Jameson to be a symptom of the very postmodern culture it seeks to describe. Jameson describes the second constitutive feature of postmodern culture, a weakening of historicity, in both collective and subjective terms. Collectively, he claims that today it is an “evident existential fact of life that there no longer seems to be any organic relationship between the American history we learn from the schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of the newspapers and of our own daily life” (1984a, p. 69). This trend in contemporary social life is reflected culturally in what Jameson calls a “linguistic fragmentation of social life” where parody is replaced by pastiche (1983, 1984a, p. 65). Modern literature was a fertile field for parody, according to Jameson, since the great modernist writers were defined by their unique personal styles, such as Faulkner’s long sentences or D.H.Lawrence’s nature imagery. Parody seizes on the unique idiosyncrasies of these individual styles to produce imitiations that mock the originals in terms of their eccentricities compared to the way people normally speak or write. Thus all parody is based on the notion that there is a general linguistic norm in contrast to which the styles of the great modernist writers can be satirized (Jameson 1983, pp. 113–114). Today, however, society has become increasingly fragmented, with different ethnic, gender, professional, and occupational groups coming to speak curious private languages of their own. As a result, “the advance capitalist countries today are now in a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm” (Jameson 1984a, p. 65), making parody impossible. In its place, pastiche appears, defined by Jameson as blank parody “without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists” (1984a, p. 65). With the collapse of the high modernist style, parody, and the normative linguistic base on which both depended, pastiche becomes the prevalent style in the contemporary arts, architecture, film, and literature where the styles of the past are cannibalized and randomly recombined. The effacement of history in contemporary culture is not accompanied, however, by indifference. Quite the opposite, according to Jameson, who detects in the current passion for the photographic image “an omnipresent, omnivorous, and well-nigh libidinal historicism” (1984a, p. 66). His examples here are taken from a popular form of mass culture, nostalgia films. Postmodern nostalgia films, beginning with American Graffiti (1973), involve a generalization of pastiche onto the collective level “where the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past is now


91

refracted through the iron law of fashion change and the emergent ideology of the ‘generation’” (Jameson 1984a, p. 66). In American Graffiti the missing past is the Eisenhower era of the 1950s, which is seen as representing the time when the United States was stable, prosperous, and world-dominant (Jameson 1984a). The same theme is present in another nostalgia film, The Shining, this time about the 1920s, when the American ruling class still projected a confident, class-conscious image of itself, openly and without guilt (Jameson 1981c). These films, as well as such other ones as Chinatown and Body Heat are postmodern, pastiche-structured works because they were never “a matter of some old-fashioned ‘representation’ of historical content, but approached the ‘past’ through stylistic connotation, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image, and ‘1930ness’ or ‘1950-ness’ by the attributes of fashion” (Jameson 1984a, p. 67). They are also ideological insofar as they express the longing for a return to “simpler” times when moral and class distinctions were clearly defined in black-and-white categories (Jameson 1981c). The nostalgic mode now is present even in films about contemporary settings, as if “we were unable today to focus on our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representation of our own current experience,” which Jameson sees as “an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history” (1983, p. 117). Accompanying the pathological weakening of history at the collective level is the equally deleterious fragmentation of the individual subject. The death of the subject is, of course, a well known theme in poststructuralist theory, but Jameson contextualizes it by offering what he calls a general historical hypothesis that “concepts such as anxiety and alienation are no longer appropriate in the world of the postmodern” (1984a, p. 63). He contrasts Munch’s modernist painting The Scream, that still expresses these concepts, with Warhol’s works on Marilyn Monroe, arguing that the latter represent a shift in cultural pathology “in which the alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject” (1984a, p. 63). Jameson employs Jacques Lacan’s theory of schizophrenia to more fully describe the contemporary condition of subjective fragmentation. In Lacan’s account, schizophrenia is explained in Saussurean linguistic terms as a breakdown of the relationship between signifiers (Jameson 1983, p. 119). The schizophrenic, unable to coherently link signifiers together meaningfully, lacks a sense of temporal continuity and is thus condemned to experience the world as a series of pure and unrelated presents in time. Lacan’s account of schizophrenia as a linguistic malfunction suggests a dual proposition to Jameson:

92


First, that personal identity is itself an effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future with the present before me; and second, that such active temporal unification is itself a function of language, or better still of the sentence, as it moves along its hermeneutical circle through time. (Jameson 1984a, p. 72)

Lacan’s theory provides an apt metaphor for the weakening of historicity at the subjective level, according to Jameson, because, “if we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life” (1984a, p. 72). Jameson offers several examples from postmodern art and literature whose forms resemble that of sentences in freestanding isolation, such as the music of John Cage, but he focuses especially on a poem, “China,” written by Bob Perelman, one of a group of San Francisco poets known as the Language Poets. The poem consists of twenty-six lines that seem to have no connection with one another. After briefly discussing Sartre’s account of Flaubert’s similar style, Jameson reveals that the lines in “China” are captions made up by Perelman to describe photographs in a book he came across while strolling through Chinatown (Jameson 1984a, p. 75). In Flaubert the discontinuous sentences, according to Jameson, were symptoms and strategies of a rejection of praxis, while Language Poetry has more in common with photorealist painting, where the objects depicted are taken not from the “real world,” but from photographs (Jameson 1984a, p. 75). Language Poetry, then, appears to embrace schizophrenic fragmentation as its fundamental aesthetic model while simultaneously exhibiting the triumph of the simulacrum through its intertextual structural form. Jameson’s third feature of postmodern culture, the waning of affect, is best understood as the affective outcome of the fragmentation of subjectivity. The problems of alienation and anxiety may no longer be with us in the postmodern world, but their dissolution is replaced by a new one: As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean, not merely a liberation from anxiety, but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling. (Jameson 1984a, p. 64)

Jameson is quick to point out that he is not implying that contemporary cultural products are devoid of feeling. Rather, these feelings or intensities “are now free-floating and impersonal, and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria” (Johnson 1984a, p. 64). He also argues that


93

the waning of affect suggests that the modernist preoccupation with temporality as expressed in high modernist literature has been eclipsed today by a dominance of spatial categories. Jameson’s examples of the waning of affect in postmodernism are drawn from a variety of cultural products, including Diamond Dust Shoes and Warhol’s paintings of Marilyn Monroe and other celebrities. But his meaning is conveyed most vividly in an extended quote from the autobiography of a schizophrenic girl who, upon hearing a group of schoolchildren singing a German song, is seized by a dazzling array of sights and sounds. In both the girl’s experience and the examples of postmodern art he cites, there is a feeling of temporal discontinuity where the present “suddenly engulfs the subject with undescribable vividness” (Jameson 1984a, p. 73). The nature of postmodern intensities is further explored by Jameson in a discussion of contemporary artistic renderings of cities and of the human body. Here he notes how there exist enormous contrasts between modernist depictions of the urban metropolis and postmodern photorealist cityscapes where “even the automobile wrecks gleam with some hallucinatory splendor” (1984a, p. 76), as well as between modernist human figures and postmodern works like Duane Hanson’s polyester figures. Jameson coins the phrase “hysterical sublime” to describe the novel experience imparted in these works, drawing on Edmund Burke’s original definition of the sublime as an awe-inspiring experience bordering on terror and Kant’s extension of this condition to the very possibility of representation itself (1984a, p. 77). The sensation of the hysterical sublime thus connotes a condition in which: the object of the sublime is now not only a matter of sheer power and of the physical imcommensurability of the human organism with Nature, but also of the limits of figuration and the incapacity of the human mind to give representation to such enormous forces. (1984a, p. 77)

The hysterical sublime for Jameson indicates a radical eclipse of nature in postmodern culture where the “other” of contemporary societies is no longer nature, but technology. More specifically, it is a new technology that constitutes the fourth feature of postmodern culture. Modernist culture from Italian futurism to communist art in the 1930s had exhibited a great enthusiasm for the transformative potential of industrial technology and the powerful machines it produced. But, according to Jameson, contemporary technological innovations are qualitatively distinct because they no longer contain the same capacity for representation. Here he contrasts the turbine engine, the railroad train, the grain elevator, and the smokestack, all of which he calls vehicles of

94


speed still concentrated at rest, with new machines like “the computer, whose outer shell has no emblematic or visual power…[or] the casing of the various media themselves, as with that home appliance called television which articulates nothing but rather implodes, carrying its flattened image surface within itself (1984a, p. 79). The invention of television and computers once again recalls Kant’s analysis of the sublime for, as machines of reproduction rather than production, they call for a kind of aesthetic representation distinct from the relatively mimetic imagery of speed-and-imagery sculpture found in modernist art. While some forms of postmodern culture still engage in relatively conventional thematic representation of content (about the process of reproduction), what Jameson calls the most energetic postmodern efforts go further to tap into the networks of the reproductive process itself. His primary example here is drawn from architecture, the cultural field that first stimulated his interest in postmodernism (see Jameson 1989). The postmodern building represents an evolution in built space with which individuals have not kept pace: “[T]here has been a mutation in the object, unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject; we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace…in part because our perceptual habits were formed in that older kind of space I have called the space of high modernism” (Jameson 1984a, p. 80). The building Jameson selects for extended discussion is the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, built by John Portman. The hotel features unmarked entrances, none of which leads directly to the registration desk; and elevators and escalators that largely replace human movement and lead to a lake, an atrium, and revolving cocktail lounges. Traditional directional markings were almost completely lacking when the hotel first opened, though color coding and other directional signals were later added. The fact that the building was designed to be almost impossible to get around in (to the particular dismay of merchants whose shops are well hidden on the various balconies) suggests to Jameson that this “postmodern hyperspace” has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surrounding perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. (1984a, p. 83)7

Although he devotes a great deal of attention to the revolutionary role of the new technology in postmodern culture, Jameson is equally concerned with demonstrating that technology is significant not so much in its own right, as Bell and other theorists of postindustrial society imply, but because:


95

it seems to offer some previleged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp—namely the whole new decentred global network of [multinational capitalism]. (1984a, pp. 79–80)

In so doing, Jameson further extends the disciplinary range of his analysis from cultural to social theory (Kellner 1989a). Postmodernism as the Cultural Dominant of Late Capitalism

Throughout his writings on postmodernism, Jameson has repeatedly maintained that the concept is not for him just another word to describe a new aesthetic or cultural style. Postmodernism is also a periodizing concept “whose function is to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order” (Jameson 1983, p. 113; also see 1984a, 1989). Consistent with his claim in the opening lines of The Political Unconscious that the slogan “Always historicize” is “the one absolute and we may even say ‘transhistorical’ imperative of all dialectical thought” (1981, p. 9), Jameson situates postmodernism as the specific cultural logic of contemporary multinational capitalism. He dates this new stage of capitalism from the postwar era in the late 1940s and early 1950s in the United States, with the 1960s as a key transitional period (1983, p. 113; also see 1984b). Jameson derives his characterization of multinational capitalism from Ernest Mandel’s book Late Capitalism (1975). Mandel rejects the currently fashionable contention that Marx’s theory is obsolete, arguing instead that contemporary late capitalism constitutes a third, purer, stage of capitalism characterized by a generalized industrialization of all areas of the economy and social life (1975, p. 387). In this third phase “an unprecedented fusion of science, technology, and production” (1975, p. 215) eliminates all remaining forms of precapitalist organization. For Jameson this results in a “new and historically original penetration and colonization of Nature and the Unconscious: that is, the destruction of precapitalist third world agriculture, and the rise of media and the advertising industry” (1984a, p. 78).8 Postmodernism is seen as the cultural dominant of late capitalism because, as Mandel’s model suggests, “aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of even more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at even greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to

96


aesthetic innovation and experimentation” (Jameson 1984a, p. 56). In similar fashion, realism and modernism are seen as culturally dominant in market capitalism and monopoly capitalism, respectively.9 Jameson seeks to avoid criticisms of his cultural theory as reductionistic by utilizing the Althusserian concepts of overdetermination, relative autonomy, and uneven development to describe the complex mediations between culture and mode of production (Jameson 1989). But he is equally concerned to counter the postmodernist resistance to global or totalizing concepts that characterizes poststructuralist approaches, which he views as another manifestation of the universalization of capitalism and the commodity form: Where everything is henceforth systematic the very notion of a system seems to lose its reason for being, returning by way of a “return of the repressed” in the more nightmarish forms of the ‘total system’ fantasized by Weber or Foucault and the “1984” people. (1989, p. 379)

The proper task of postmodern theory is to name the system, not to deny it, which also entails the recognition that any model of radical cultural politics today must take into account the obsolescence of the critical distance upon which previous forms of left opposition depended (Jameson 1984a). Since “we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration of it is complacent and corrupt” (1984b, p. 63), Jameson proposes a new conception of political aesthetics, which he calls “cognitive mapping” (see 1984a, 1988), as a way of representing the new spatial configurations in postmodern culture and society, allowing individual subjects to orient themselves locally and globally: The new political art—if it is indeed possible at all—will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, its fundamental object—the world space of multinational capitalism—at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this list, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. (1984a, p. 92)

CONCLUSION Although their analyses of postmodern culture exhibit obvious theoretical and political contrasts, Bell and Jameson do provide two of the more accessible discussions of postmodernism for sociologists, for each


97

advances a number of concrete claims regarding the structural and interactional processes of contemporary society, especially regarding the predominance of mass-mediated culture and the increasingly superficial character of everyday life, that are readily amenable to empirical investigation. For example, both introduce a class dimension into their depictions of postmodern culture. Bell identifies a “cultural mass” that consists “primarily of those persons in the knowledge and communications industry, who, with their families, number several million persons” (1978, p. 20). As the primary subscribers to postmodern culture, this group constitutes a “distinct cultural class” (Bell 1978, p. 41) whose influence far exceeds its numbers. Similarly for Jameson, postmodernism as an ethos and a life style is “the expression of the ‘consciousness’ of a whole new class fraction… variously labeled as a new petty bourgeoisie, a professional-managerial class, or move succinctly as ‘the yuppies’” (1989, p. 381). In neither case is it argued that the identified group constitutes a new ruling class, but in both cases the new class is seen as providing the cultural ideas and artifacts that prevail in the broader society, raising important questions concerning the role of classes in postmodern society. For many postmodernists, accessibility to more conventional modes of social inquiry is no virtue, and no doubt would be traced by them to Bell and Jameson’s modernist commitments to constructing historical narratives that account for the rise of postmodern culture, yet this clearly constitutes an attraction for many sociologists, especially those not well versed in continental philosophy. Another possible point of entry for those in sociology wishing to initiate a productive dialogue with postmodernism is Bell and Jameson’s explicit concern with normative issues. O’Neil (1988) takes this as a major theme in a comparative essay on their work. For O’Neill, despite their divergent political values, Bell and Jameson “both resort to a Durkheimian lament over the dissolution of the social bond” (1988, p. 498) and correspondingly exhibit a common “will to order” (1988, p. 503). O’Neill’s thesis is misleading insofar as Bell explicitly rejects Durkheim’s view of religion in favor of an existential one and Jameson’s will to order is based on Ernst Bloch’s Marxian interpretation of utopian thought, but O’Neill is certainly correct in focusing on the transcendental nature of their respective cultural politics. This transcendental element is better understood, however, as the normative component of their respective theoretical narratives, which distinguishes them from the antipolitical stance of many poststructuralist thinkers. Reviewers have been quick to point out problems with this aspect of Bell’s and Jameson’s analyses. In the case of Jameson, critics have questioned the viability of a cultural politics based on cognitive mapping

98


for the daunting task of overcoming multinational capitalism. In his defense, Jameson endorses cognitive mapping only as a necessary first step in the reconstruction of a worldwide socialist movement, but nonetheless the problem of grounding what is essentially an aesthetic form of opposition with other more concrete forms of political struggle remains. Bell bases his call for a return of religion on the premise that trends in contemporary society suggest that the postmodern counterculture of the 1960s, like the modernist aesthetics on which it is based, is exhausted and people are again becoming aware of the need for limits to their behavior. Since religion, according to Bell, has always thrived on the dialectical tension between release and restraints, he endorses its return as both imminent and desirable. However, one problematic feature of religion recognized by sociologists since the origins of their discipline is its exclusionary character. In Bell’s own work a disturbing example of this problem is illustrated where he lists what he refers to as the great historic religions, “Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism, and Christianity” (1980b, p. 335). By omitting Islam from the list, Bell inadvertently highlights the difficulty in seeing how religion can provide the basis for a renewed public morality in doctrinally heterogeneous contemporary societies. I hope I have shown here that Bell and Jameson’s studies of postmodern culture establish a strong case for the continuing need for critical, historical analyses of contemporary societies. Even those intrigued by such widely heralded postmodernist themes as “the end of the social” and “the disappearance of man” will hopefully view these as topics for concrete empirical investigation rather than as metaphysical manifestos to be accepted or rejected at face value.

NOTES 1. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism first published in 1976, but the 1978 paperback edition is cited here because it contains the important “Foreword” essay in which Bell spells out his positions in exceptionally clear fashion. 2. The End of Ideology essays were written over a ten year period from 1949 to 1959 and revised collectively as Bell’s Ph.D. dissertation for Columbia University. The majority of the essays contained in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism were written between 1964 and 1972 (Liebowitz 1985). 3. A second edition of the text was published in 1988 with a new “Afterword” in which Bell defends the end-of-ideology thesis in light of recent political developments. 4. Bell claims that this same development takes place in the political sphere as well where “unrestrained appetite” is institutionalized in the form of group entitlements (Bell 1978, p. 23).


99

5. My discussion of Jameson’s literary theory here relies heavily on Kellner’s insightful overview. 6. This essay was originally a 1982 lecture presented at the Whitney Museum. 7. Jameson’s analysis of postmodern architecture has become a hotly contested aspect of his theory of postmodernism. For especially rigorous critiques, see Davis (1985) and Hutcheon (1986). 8. For comparable attempts to theorize postmodernism in Marxian terms, see Harvey (1989) and Kellner (1989b). 9. In a 1987 essay on the “video-text,” Jameson suggests a semiotic correlate to the three stages of capitalism where, as capitalism developes, signifiers become increasingly autonomous and free floating.

REFERENCES Alexander, Jeffrey. 1982. Theoretical Logic in Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bell, Daniel. 1960. The End of Ideology. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. ____. 1973. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Basic Books. ____. 1978. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. ____. 1980a. “Beyond Modernism, Beyond Self.” Pp. 275–301 in The Winding Passage, edited by Daniel Bell. Cambridge, MA: Abt Books. ____. 1980b. “The Return of the Sacred?” Pp. 324–354 in The Winding Passage, edited by Daniel Bell. Cambridge, MA: Abt Books. ____. 1987. “Modernism Mummified.” American Quarterly 39:122–132. Brick, Howard. 1986. Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Davis, Mike. 1985. “Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of Postmodernism.” New Left Review 151:106–113. Gibbs, Jack. 1990. “Control as Sociology’s Central Notion.” Social Science Journal 27:1– 28. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell. Hutcheon, Linda. 1986. “The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History.” Cultural Critique 4:179–207. Jameson, Fredric. 1961. Sartre: The Origins of a Style. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. _____. 1971. Marxism and Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ____. 1972. The Prison-House of Language. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ____. 1975. “The Ideology of the Text.” Salmagundi 31–32:204–246. ____. 1979. Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lews, the Modernist as Fascist. Berkeley: University of California Press. ____. 1981a. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ____. 1981b. “From Criticism to History.” New Literary History 12:367–376. ____. 1981c. “The Shining.” Social Text 4:114–125. ____. 1982. “On Diva.” Social Text 6:114–119.

100


____. 1983. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Pp. 111–125 in The AntiAesthetic, edited by Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press. ____. 1984a. “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146:53–92. ____. 1984b. “Periodizing the Sixties.” Pp. 178–209 in The Sixties without Apologies, edited by Sonya Sayres. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ____. 1984c. “The Politics of Theory.” New German Critique 33:53–65. ____. 1986. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15:65–88. ____. 1987. “Reading without Interpretation: Postmodernism and the Video-Text.” Pp. 199–223 in The Linguistics of Writing, edited by Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant, and Colin McCabe. New York: Methuen Press. ____. 1988a. The Ideologies of Theory, Essays 1971–1986. Vol. 1, Situations of Theory. Vol. 2, The Syntax of History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ____. 1988b. “Cognitive Mapping.” Pp. 347–360 in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ____. 1989. “Afterword—Marxism and Postmodernism.” Pp. 369–387 in Postmodernism Jameson Critique, edited by Douglas Kellner. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press. Kellner, Douglas. 1989a. “Introduction: Jameson, Marxism, and Postmodernism.” Pp. 1–42 in Postmodernism Jameson Critique, edited by Douglas Kellner. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press. ____. 1989b. Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Liebowitz, Nathan. 1985. Daniel Bell and the Agony of Modern Liberalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Mandel, Ernest. 1975. Late Capitalism. Translated by Joris De Bres. London: Verso. O’Neill, John. 1988. “Religion and Postmodernism: The Durkheimian Bond in Bell and Jameson.” Theory, Culture, and Society 5:493–508. Turner, Jonathan. 1985. “In Defense of Positivism.” Sociological Theory 3:24–30. Wollheim, Richard. 1976. “Trouble in Freedonia.” New York Review of Books 23:35–38.

CHAPTER 5

Postmodernism and Feminism Sondra Farganis

Can teminist theorists be postmodernists? Can feminists be sociologists? Can there be a postmodern sociology or only a sociology of postmodernism? Posing these questions is not merely pedantic, for at root are larger epistemological and political issues about the nature of contemporary society. In feminist theory, attention is directed toward political and social structures. Questions are raised about the nature of being a woman, and attention is directed toward examining what is meant by the self: Are subjects stable entities or are subjects composed of conflicting parts with tenuous identities? What role does gender play in the life and mind of individuals? Feminist theory also address the signs and symbols of political and social life. It is, in the language of postmodernism, a discourse challenge. This chapter is situated within the context of the empirical rewriting of historical rules that the world in witnessing and is admittedly American in orientation. Societies are always in the process of change, but this seems particularly true today given the dramatic transformations that have occurred in the past few years. Some of the most fundamental assumptions about political and social relationships have been thrown into doubt, and the current phase of feminist theory as well as feminist politics is symptomatic of these dramatic changes. The fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the need to rethink even the most basic concepts concerning the state and civil society. American economic arrangements and the problems spawned by changing patterns of capital accumulation 101

102


and the growth of computer automation also suggest that American society stands at a key moment of social change. The reordering of power in world state systems, challenges to democratic party systems at home and abroad, the AIDS crisis, and the technological rewriting of birthing, life, and death practices are just a few instances of new scripts that present the American polity with new problems. The aim of this chapter is more narrow in focus than one that would provide an explanation of the new political ballgame; but its treatment of feminist theory and postmodernism recognizes the importance of each for new visions of the present and future. Therefore, I offer a brief history of feminist theory and postmodernism, an overview of the issues involved in their association, and an assessment of postmodernism’s limitations for the future directions of feminist theory and politics.

FEMINIST THEORY By “feminism,” I mean an ideology or belief system, an integrated set of theoretical assumptions that taken together structure a worldview that its adherents take to be true. It is grounded in a moral premise that assumes the injustice of treating men and women inequitably. Women are seen to be oppressed by men through long-standing historical structural arrangements that initiate, support, and legitimate that oppression (patriarchy). The objective of feminism is to be a handmaiden to a political movement which will undo this gendered domination. Although the movement need not be governed by a spiteful hostility toward men and could constitute itself as a vanguard for the improvement of all human relationships, its governing animus is grounded in a valuation of gender differentiation that has power implications and which has a general mindset on gender relationships. Is feminism so diverse that one should call its writings a set of theories rather than a theory? Or is it the case that in its theoretical and political opposition to the subjugation of women feminism has a unity that allows us to speak of it in the singular, as a concise form of thought and action? I believe the latter to be the case, and the analysis presented here appreciates the diversity of perspectives subsumed under the concept of feminism while emphasizing its shared worldview. Feminist theory has advanced a potent epistemological and discursive set of arguments. By placing gender front and center, it argues that we must look at the social world through the eyes of women to see how, for example, they perceive and experience issues of sexuality, family, education, and work. Where women have been omitted, they must be brought into the discourses, for these constitute

Postmodernism and Feminism

103

canons of knowledge that have implications for power. As Jane Flax (1990, pp. 43–44) writes, “The single most important advance in feminist theory is that the existence of gender relations has been problematized.” Gender is not taken as a given but is seen as a historical constellation of sex traits. There may be disagreements within feminist theory on aspects of gender: How does it relate to sex? How, precisely, does it structure perception? How does it interact with factors of race and class? Nonetheless, feminist theory, whatever its particular slant, highlights the importance of gender in understanding social structure, social processes, agency, and action. The emergence of feminist theory is connected in an inimicable way to the Women’s Movement: It helped to write and shape that movement and is tied to the kinds of social change for which the movement stands. Its reformulations interact in the dialectical way in which theory and practice stand in relationship to each other. Feminist theory contains, then, an explicit moral and political directive. It starts with the assumption that, by describing and explaining the social world as women see it, we obtain a new and fuller worldview. It proffers an explanation or a series of explanations for why women are found in positions of subordination. Feminism wants to expunge masculinist oppression from human relationships and regards itself as posing farreaching challenges to conventional social and political thought. Its emancipatory dimension intends to reveal patterns of domination so that these can be overcome. Whatever skepticism feminism might have about epistemologies rooted in Western notions of history and science, its political agenda aims to keep it from being paralyzed by doubt. Although classification systems are always neater and more composed than the reality that they intend to depict, for purposes of analysis we can use certain philosophical benchmarks to speak of the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement in the United States as comprised of three periods that are characterized by corresponding theoretical formulations. In the first phase, concerned with achieving gender equity through antidiscriminatory legislation, there was an affinity with liberalism and an account that treated men and women as subjects equal before the law, each entitled to objective and just treatment and opportunities. Women wanted what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution had given men: inalienable rights due one because of the distinctive human power of reason, the freedom to act in one’s own interest, and standing as a moral agent. Women did not want irrelevant differences to be used to deny rights of citizenry or to legitimate discriminatory political treatment. Rejecting the notion that inequalities are established by nature, they argued that differences are authorized and sanctioned by convention. Whatever biological

104


differences there are between the sexes matters little, if at all, provided that people are treated equally as individuals. By advocating women’s equal political status as individuals, however, the Second Wave encountered the same problems men experience with liberalism: the abstract idea of the individual, the valuation of individual rights over communal responsibilities, the artificial separation of the private and the public spheres, the contradiction of asserting freedom to be one’s own person while at the same time seeking government assistance in regulating private behavior. As a case in point, women call for freedom of choice with respect to abortion, but at the same time they seek government protection from the threatening actions of men in instances of psychological harassment, such as pinup pictures in the workplace, or of physical harm, such as rape. Or to cite another example, a woman may want the freedom to drink, smoke, and eat what she wants during her pregnancy, but she may need community support for a child born with substance-abuse characteristics. (Friedan 1977; Elshtain 1981, 1990; Jaggar 1983; Eisenstein 1984; Nicholson 1986; Fox-Genovese 1991). The feminist critique of liberalism, while appreciating the protections afforded women through equal rights, choices, and privacy, rests on four grounds: that “individual” really means “male individual”; that liberalism fails to live up to its radical claim for equitable treatment; that it misrepresents the relationship between the private and public by speaking of these as distinct rather than as intertwined spheres; and that, by failing to concern itself with the concrete experiences of everyday life, it ignores important social needs and communal responsibilities. The critique, in addition, borrows from the politics of the 1960s a concern not for what people have in common but for what distinguishes them. Although neutral rules are good on paper as a way of assuring equity and are potentially beneficial in helping to eliminate differences, the latter constitute the everyday reality of peoples’ lives. The feminist argument that ignoring differences is a form of discrimination becomes central in postmodern feminist critiques. In the second phase, theoretical writings on feminism shifted from rights and analyses of legal discrimination toward an emphasis on examining women’s experiences, emotions, and feelings. There was no wholesale rejection of the idea that individuals are entitled to rights and liberties or of a need for opportunities to structure one’s life as one chooses, provided that others are not injured in the process, but there was an increased concern that rights must not undermine the needs of society for integrated relationships and a recognition of the debts owed to others.


105

This phase saw a celebration of women’s traits and it had methodological implications. It was argued that seeing the world through women’s eyes gains us not only a new perspective but one that is significantly better, that is, more inclusive and more life affirming. Women are credited with an epistemological advantage or privilege (Chodorow 1978; Gilligan 1982; Hartsock 1983; Harding 1986, 1991; MacKinnon 1989). In contrast to the first period, feminist texts of this second period emphasized the relationship of the psychological to the political, stressed the psychic nature of masculine oppression, and called less attention to the deprivation of political and economic rights. Feminist theory in this period called for treatment that respected differences and valued them, either by placing these on an equal level with masculine values or, better yet, by holding feminine values in even higher regard. As opposed to saying that men and women are equal in ability or potential, what has been called the woman-centered approach argued that men and women have different attributes and abilities but that society does not value them in the same way. Here, in contrast to what has been called “humanist feminism” (Young 1990, p. 161) with its rejection of gender differences, women were considered special and distinct, either because of their embodiment or because of the social roles they have come to play historically. In this “gynocentric feminism” (Young 1990, p. 161), with its emphasis on the caring and nurturing values attributed to women, women were held to have “a different voice” (Gilligan 1982) that evolved out of their different experiences and allowed them to constitute a distinct community. Seeing gender as the source for why persons think differently, feminist theory, in this phase after liberalism, set out to both articulate this different voice and to bring women to an awareness of their distinctiveness. Its intention was to build on the reality and potential in women’s differences and to use the Women’s Movement as a vehicle for turning the theory of differences into a practicum. Feminist theory here resembled Marxist theory, with its concepts of the unification of persons on the basis of shared interests, true and false consciousness, and the interpretive edge given to oppressed subjects (Hartsock 1983). Feminist theory during this period thus valorized women’s gender differences in positive terms. Despite criticisms we might make of the essentialist nature of the arguments found in feminists such as Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, Nancy Hartsock, and Sandra Harding, among others, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson (1990) were correct in appreciating the contributions they made. For, even if the genderspecific position was built on the dubious proposition that there is a deep sense of a gendered self and that gender is dimorphic, it gave “scholarly substance to the idea of the pervasiveness of sexism” (Fraser and

106


Nicholson 1990, p. 30). Furthermore, the arguments of a unitary women’s perspective sanctioned “the idea of sisterhood” (Fraser and Nicholson 1990, p. 30) even if “at the cost of repressing differences among sisters” (Fraser and Nicholson 1990, p. 31). Troubled by what they saw as exclusionary universalism in this trend of feminist thought, some feminist writers began to raise substantive questions about differences: What kinds are there? Are all worth preserving? Which can be changed and which cannot? Do differences themselves assume certain notions concerning norms or inherent sameness? The reaction against masculinism glorified women’s traits by asking what the world would look like if it were informed by such feminist values as nurturance, caring, expressiveness, and nonrepressesive relationships. However, attributing rationality, technology, and capitalism to men implied a turn away from history and its structural imperatives. Didn’t the second period do the same thing? Was it not also “totalistic, essentialist, or ahistorical” (Sawicki 1991, p. 13), lacking in cultural specificity just as it assumed a male-centered Western epistemology to be? And, furthermore, did a concern with gender difference not simply between men and women but also among women allow for positions on such matters as reproductive technologies that are not totalistic and that emphasize “resistance and ambiguity…as opposed to victimization and domination” (Sawicki 1991, p. 13)? Wouldn’t we need a less dualistic feminism than the one of the second phase? The problem for feminist theory, simply put, became one of emphasis. Can we reconcile the diversity of women’s experiences with the unity of feminine embodiment so as to retain the idea that women see the world in ways that men do not? Is it not simply that there are different ways of knowing but that these differences are not only a result of gender? Are these differences rooted in biology or in cultural practices? Are cultural factors so strong in the way in which they assess women to be alike that they produce in women an essential sameness? The emphasis one places on the differences between women and men has important political implications. Does one minimize or maximize these differences (Stimpson 1980)? Is progress to be measured in terms of obliterating sexual differences or in terms of elevating the feminine ones? Should social policies be written to reflect the similarities women have to men or to reflect differences between them? If there are no significant differences between men and women, then there ought to be no discrimination between them, and policies will be gender-neutral and equity will be a liberatory goal. If, on the other hand, there are significant differences between men and women, then gender neutrality is a naive point of view that masks masculine domination and, in the name of equity, makes women become like men.


107

The woman-centered phase of feminist theory wanted to hold onto some presuppositions, most particularly the notions of women’s special traits and gender oppression. At the same time, it saw the need to contextualize the role played by women in gendered structures. In some ways it shared ideas with both liberal and postmodern feminism; in other ways it opposed both. In the third phase, during which feminist theory joined forces with postmodernism, feminists emphasized the ways in which women are diverse. Gender, in fact, ought to be understood as a continuum, not a dichotomy (Kessler and McKenna 1985). Postmodern feminism questioned the liberal idea of the subject, emphasizing instead the ways in which forces outside the self constitute or affect it. The postmodern subject was radically historicized, and therefore the problems of will and responsibility that underlie liberal thought were reframed. Postmodern feminism sometimes questioned the naturalism and essentialism that was found in many texts of the woman-centered phase. Othertimes, postmodern feminism’s reticence to do so was more political than epistemological as it valued the womanly bonds and power relationships generated by woman-centered texts. The fact that there can be disagreement over meanings is integral to postmodernism, because words mean different things to different people and because social movements can so successfully and rapidly refashion language. Using the language of reproductive freedoms as an example, we can argue that, to the postmodernist, bodies are inscribed with cultural meanings, so that pregnancy and birthing practices mean different things to different people in different cultures. Since gender interacts with other important aspects of a person’s life, what a woman’s body symbolizes is a social question. Gender is not settled: it can be understood as a series of “signs” for understanding how culture and history intersect. Does this suggest that women might have different meanings about reproductive issues, including that of abortion? It would seem to be the case. Feminist theory does not reject the idea that an individual has a certain perspective or set of perspectives on the world, nor does it disavow the empirical and moral implications of this argument. The postmodern period, though, had to accommodate the idea of seeing the world as a woman would with the idea that there is no stable or consistent self, that is, no simple “woman” but rather a number of selves that occupy certain distinct positions. The term “self” was often replaced with “identity” in the discourses of this period. Postmodern theorists focused on the argument that all knowledge claims are limited, for the person always speaks from a space that takes into account other factors in addition to gender. As the Women’s Movement expanded its base, it called for the inclusion of different kinds of women with different feminine identities.

108


Often this call came in the name of similarities that overrode class, race, and sexual orientation and had no explicit links to the theoretical literature on postmodernism’s reading of subjects as fragmented and reality as ambiguous (Frye 1983; Hooks 1984; Spelman 1988; Collins 1990). As a movement for social change, the Women’s Movement challenges conventional ideas and seeks power to refashion classification systems. In Foucault’s terms, it is an organized effort to resist subscribed identities. Social movements transform subjective reality by reshaping old identities and providing new structures and new social bases through which new ideas are communicated. In the language of Alain Touraine, we might speak of feminist theory as a form of “intervention research” that aids and abets the Women’s Movement to engage in the kind of self-critique necessary for its responsible performance, for “actors do not limit themselves to reacting to situations but actually produce situations” (Touraine 1988, p. 26). Using the language of postmodernism, we can see these new social movements as a chorus of previously unarticulated voices and the Women’s Movement as a vehicle for giving new legal meanings to acts. To cite a single instance, it has named sexual harassment as an impermissible form of behavior. It has taken old practices and repositioned them. At the risk of generalizing too freely, we could summarize the body of work that now constitutes feminist theory in the following fashion. First, it rejects the Cartesian idea of the ego as an abstract, isolated individual. Second, in some instances it accepts the notion that there are public and private realms of action, spaces where personal and familial rather than civic and political considerations come into play, but in other instances it takes issue with this dichotomization of actions into neat personal and political packages. It recognizes a flow between the personal and the political, even as it redefines the personal as the political. Third, it raises questions about ideas of objectivity and neutrality, sometimes mounting a full-scale challenge to what feminists regard as Western-oriented/masculine-biased thought. In this vein, the fact/value distinction articulated by Max Weber (1949) is rejected as both impossible and undesirable. One often finds in feminist theory a critique of all thought that classifies phenomena in dichotomous fashion, but the feminist position on the fact/value distinction is not simply a rejection of yet another dualism. It discounts the idea of a value-free social science while applauding the kind of social analysis that wants to use its findings to improve society. Feminist theory rejects the distancing that conventional social science upholds as the only way to observe fairly. It stresses involvement and engagement, seeing itself as a bastion or bulwark for social change. If sociology is concerned with


109

the search for social structures, feminist theory is concerned with the search for oppressive social structures in order to challenge and change them.

DETAILING THE FEMINIST THEORY-POSTMODERNISM RELATIONSHIP When we speak of postmodernism, we are referring to conditions that prevail in the advanced or postindustrial societies. At any historical moment, there are patterns of being-in-the-world shaped by material factors and new definitions of legitimate forms of knowledge. Postmodernism has been brought about by changed technological conditions, although whether these are “good” or “bad” need not be of immediate concern. In postmodern arguments, these conditions are seen to be at odds with eighteenth-century beliefs in reason and science and in the possibility of discovering both scientific and moral truths. The principles of the Enlightenment were in their own time applauded as practices that replaced religious tradition and ascriptive authority. Now some argue that the Enlightenment failed because its ideas of equality and principles of reason were never realized; others argue that these principles have worked to benefit men at the expense of women; and still others contend that the principles are themselves faulty. Why should the rejection of Enlightenment principles appeal to feminists? Unquestionably, what is most attractive to feminists in postmodernism is its emphasis on difference, on the diversity, variety, and constructivism found in contemporary social life. Debunking ideas of human nature as traps to speak only about men, postmodern feminist theorists oppose essentialism and all other forms of foundational knowledge and truth. They reject universal ideas of reason and justice as masculine ideas specific to the needs of men, and to certain kinds of men at that. They recognize a usefulness in the ways in which postmodernism reorders boundaries, from its critique of objective/ subjective realms of knowledge (Nicholson 1990) to the critical initiation of dialogue between high and low cultural themes (Barthes 1975; Varnedoe and Gopnik 1990). Feminists see postmodernism as a way of including previously marginalized voices. Nancy Fraser (1989) appreciates postmodernism because it emphasizes concrete and particular struggles, links knowledge with power, and recognizes the political role played by experts and the adversary role traditional theory has toward social movements. By sensitizing academicians and activists to the importance of language, postmodernism, especially as found in the work of Michel Foucault

110


(1980a, 1980b) and Richard Rorty (1979), plays a key role in (1.) “situated theorizing,” that is, theory that rejects any Archimedean point (Fraser 1989, p. 7); (2) interventionist strategies; (3) recognizing ideas of alternative discourses; and (4) developing notions of dispersed power sites. Sex is understood as a discourse, or rather as a set of discourses, and empowers those who can fashion the way people think. Fraser understands the importance of the debates between Jürgen Habermas and the postmodernists as a microcosm of the questioning of theorizing that is grounded in humanistic and Enlightenment principles (Bernstein 1985; Habermas 1987). At issue in this debate are conceptions of human freedom—more precisely for feminism, who speaks for whom? who has the authorial voice? The debates in the writings of Simone de Beauvoir (1952), Carol Gilligan (1982), Alison Jaggar (1983), Iris Marion Young (1990), and Sandra Harding (1991) are, at root, what Habermas and Foucault are talking about: “For the feminist interrogation of autonomy is the theoretical edge of a movement that is literally renaming the social identities and historical self-interpretations of large numbers of women and of some men” (Fraser 1989, p. 52). To feminist sociologists influenced by the sociology-of-knowledge thesis of Karl Mannheim (1936, 1956) or Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s (1966) social construction thesis, postmodernism also allows for situating, historicizing, and contextualizing events. It demystifies theories and grand metanarratives. For those who see themselves as not having had their voice(s) heard in history, the postmodern paradigm makes a theoretical case for inserting the heretofore unarticulated voices of women in new scripts, new texts, and new discourses. It is a way of dethroning the old epistemology and those who held power through it. For feminists who are readers of social theory, it is a way of unseating an exclusively white male Eurocentric voice by exposing its exclusivity. There are different ways to describe the relationships among social theory, postmodern thought, and feminist theorizing. One is to examine how feminism developed as a theory in its own right as a consequence of perceived shortcomings in liberal, Marxist, socialist, and radical theories. This is the most common approach used by feminists themselves (Jaggar 1983). A second approach is to focus on the shared aspects of postmodern and feminist theorizing: the critique of foundationalist or essentialist thought; the use of a phenomenological accounting of social acts, actors, and texts in order to hear silenced voices; the focus on the constant tension between the subject and the object, the observer and the observed, the social analyst and his/her field of study—all of which call for a reformulation of the idea of objectivity; the emphasis on the embodiment of the authorial voice in time and space; and the critique of science and other authoritative narratives. The third strategy is to see


111

where there is a falling out between feminist and postmodern theory: whether either allows for a praxis grounded in a political critique based on certain moral assumptions; which makes linkages, and of what kind, between knowledge and power? Having laid out the first approach elsewhere (Farganis 1986a, 1986b), here I want to compare and contrast feminist and postmodern forms of theorizing by exploring the tenets of postmodernism that are at the core of feminist theory’s appropriation. A paradigmatic essay by Fraser and Nicholson (1990) succinctly states the case for postmodernism’s attraction for feminist theorists. First, postmodernism opens up the discourse to include a wide range of women, especially women outside the United States and women of color in the United States. Thus, postmodernism connotes a way that feminist theory can become more inclusive and be on constant alert for differences and for the specificity of cultural and historical instances. If previous scholarship left women out of the discourses completely, then early feminist theorizing left out many types of women. Now “the practice of feminist politics…has generated a new set of pressures which have worked against the metanarratives…. Poor and working-class women, women of color, and lesbians have finally won a wider hearing for their objections to feminist theories which fail to illuminate their lives and address their problems” (Fraser and Nicholson 1990, p. 33). We could argue along lines similar to those of Fraser and Nicholson that whatever else postmodernism may mean, it involves the recognition that conventional ways of understanding no longer work. Much of postmodernism is a critique of core modern principles, yet it is also a critique that grows out of those principles, in much the same way that Hegel’s synthesis develops out of the dialectical relationship of thesis to antithesis or that feminist theory grows out of liberalism. Admittedly, drawing lines or defining distinct periods in intellectual thought is not easy and certainly has an artificiality about it. There are, in fact, those who argue that postmodernism is not a new stage in human history but an advanced stage of modernism, allowing for the assumption that there are distinct characteristics that unite what is meant by the modern. For example, Fredric Jameson (1984) argues that postmodernism is, in effect, the cultural form of an advanced stage of capitalism and an expression of the multinational dimension of contemporary life. It might also be the case that postmodernism, as an academic movement, accords with significant demographic changes taking place in advanced societies like the United States and the impact of these on the university. Universities now include more women, more people of color, more children of the working class, more newly arrived immigrants, and more people who define themselves in terms of

112


identities grounded in sexual preferences and physical ability. We could argue that these new groups see the world differently than did the previously somewhat more homogeneous groups, and that feminist arguments that take into account the diversity of lived experience speak to these changes. Second, like feminist theory, postmodernism opposes the universalizing of arguments and positions. It allows us to see the social concreteness of our own thought and the thought of others. Postmodernism is a theory of limits, that is, of historical specificity. Theory and criticism “float free of any universalist theoretical ground…[becoming] more pragmatic, ad hoc, contexual, and local” (Fraser and Nicholson 1990, p. 21). Some feminists do argue that feminism itself is not a unitary ideal. In explaining why they have called their work Conflicts in Feminism, Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller write, “Feminism, like theory, is an activity that would only be imagined as unified and seamless under the illusion of a governing ideal…. But it is no improvement to displace one governing ideal by several disparate ideals of ‘woman’ or ‘truth’” (1990, p. 2). Third, postmodernism criticizes objectivity, which it sees as a modern assumption. It critiques it methodologically by showing that each observer sees the world from his/her own position; each brings a social and biological biography to the act of viewing. It criticizes it politically for not encouraging scholarship that might be used to improve the social order. Here too the emphasis is on a pragmatic rather than a universalistic conception of truth. Postmodern looks “more like a tapesty composed of threads of many different hues than one woven in a single color” (Fraser and Nicholson 1990, p. 35). There is an affinity between the work of Fraser and Nicholson and that of Jana Sawicki. Building on the work of Foucault, Sawicki (1991, p. 8) sees feminism “as a pluralistic and emancipatory radical politics.” As opposed to any objective idea of a self, postmodern thought encourages thinking of identity as both relational and as constantly being formed and reformed as it interacts with power at various social levels and sites. Postmodernism emphasizes the idea that persons are political actors with possibilities to rewrite history, and it allows for seeing that “we are both victims and agents within systems of domination, that our discourses can extend relations of domination at the same time that they are critical of them, and that any emancipatory theory bears the traces of its origins in specific historical relations of power/knowledge” (Sawicki 1991, p. 10). Does this mean, then, that the idea of women’s oppression is too universalistic? If modernism extolled the idea of history as a progressive unfolding of events, that is, of the condition of individuals improving as science was


113

used in the service of humankind, the events of the 1930s and 1940s, and of the decades that followed, shattered this belief. The underpinnings of science—logic, empiricism, objectivity—the entire project of rational analysis in fact, were open to question, so that any ideas that claimed transcultural and universal validity, including analyses of modernism and postmodernism themselves, were suspect. The questioning of science, rationality, and bureaucracy appears in social theory much earlier than in the postmodern debates—in the writings of Weber, for example—but in its opposition to the rational way of conducting our life and our politics, feminist theory sounds a very postmodern note with its examination of the gendered nature of reason. In its critique of objectivity, feminist theory describes Enlightenment values as being either masculine values or as having masculine consequences. Gender, for writers such as Fraser and Nicholson, becomes the theoretical tool to explain who benefits from Enlightenment values. Some postmodern feminist theorists go even further to argue that ideas such as equality and reason, in the form in which they are usually articulated, are flawed irrespective of our gender, for they suppress differences and feelings in the name of a detached authoritative voice: “The principle of equal treatment originally arose as a formal guarantee of fair inclusive treatment. This mechanical interpretation of fairness, however, also suppresses difference” (Young 1990, p. 11). A fourth point of affinity between feminism and postmodernism is the proponents’ mutual recognition of the importance of language. Postmodern feminist theory shifted its emphasis from criticizing oppressive male discourse to embracing myriad discourses. In earlier feminist theory, women were seen as being united by their shared oppression at the hands of men: men had power that they used over women. The enemy was identified in clear terms, and the theory became directly political and action-oriented. With the shift to a postmodern feminism, attention was directed to the varieties of discourses, to the many ways of being woman, to the multiplicity of sites at which we engage power. As new scholarship on women sensitized readers to the importance of language, feminist theory was understandably attracted to the argument that language is itself a social system. From Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1959) investigation of the linguistic sign to Roland Barthes’s (1975) enlargment of the meaning of texts, postmodernists viewed language as a code subject to culture and history. This path encouraged explanations of values and norms contextually, not morally and universally. Were it simply the case that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” we would have no quarrel with the use of certain terms to

114


define and describe human beings and their experiences, but in truth how we express ideas affects attitudes toward those ideas. A technical language affects understandings of actions and a gendered language structures perceptions of persons. Language affects the mind, for it can hide, obfuscate, redefine, and clarify meaning. Herbert Marcuse argued in OneDimensional Man (1964) that a language of technique had replaced the language of everyday life, and, as a result, the technocratic state invaded the citizen’s private space. To this one might add Jean Bethke Elshtain’s (1990, p. 138) assertion of the importance of academic debates: “[They] exert real effects on the lives of real people given the power to ‘name’ and to define we lodge in experts.” As Joan Scott (1990, p. 135) points out, language, broadly understood, matters because of the role it plays in constructing and communicating cultural practices: language as an ontological practice is praxis. The legitimation of the world into which we are born affects the ways in which bodies are understood—“read” or “discoursed,” to use contemporary terms. Through social roles, which include gender scripts, the individual participates in this process of legitimation, reading different scripts in different societies or reading scripts in different ways in the same society. Discourses and texts, be they on feminist theory or on the social sciences, generally come to play a legitimizing role in modern society, providing individuals with what Berger and Luckmann (1966, p. 84) call “integrated meanings.” Language and discourses, texts and the like, construct what kind of women exist, and women themselves can use the power of discourse, language, and texts to construct their own lives. Criticizing discourses, raising questions about their commonsense acceptance or the legitimacy of their scripted roles, is a political challenge to those who have formulated social regulations in particular ways. In this context, Fraser (1989, p. 161) emphasizes the importance of detailing not only women’s needs but what is meant by these needs and who is empowered to talk about them. To reiterate: Contemporary feminism shares with other critiques of modernism a questioning of the idea of reason and the scientific practices that originate from it. In its reformulations of ideas of subject and object, viewer and viewed, oppressor and oppressed, it raises radical questions about commonly accepted notions of science and truth. These questions are at the core of the debates that have occupied the attention of sociological theorists for over a century now. They center around two interrelated issues: the appropriate methods to be used in examining physical and social phenomena, and the political consequences of epistemological issues. The debates can be found, most particularly, in the writings of the neo-Kantians and in the early German methodological disputes (Weber 1949), in Mannheim’s sociology of


115

knowledge (Mannheim 1936, 1956), in the now-classic disputes between Theodor Adorno and Karl Popper (Adorno 1981), and in Habermas’s delineations of forms and interests of discrete knowledge systems (Habermas 1972). Feminist postmodernism asks not only if there is a single idea of woman but also if there is a single idea of truth. It asks if feminism has “an epistemological, ethical, or otherwise ‘essential’ core” (Hirsch and Keller 1990, p. 5). If the emphasis is on multiplicity and diversity—of truths, of meanings, of life-styles—and if moral ideals, like any other ideas, are to be contextualized and placed within a historical and social context, then what set of emancipatory practices can be articulated? If questions are raised about the universalizing aspects of certain modes of analysis— scientific theorizing, for one—then we must ask how feminism can itself claim any epistemic advantage. If, further, we criticizes the experts who have the authoritative voice to speak, say, in the name of science, might we then not ask by what or whose authority feminists speak in the name of that diverse group known as women?

TENSIONS BETWEEN POSTMODERNISM AND FEMINISM It should be clear by now why feminism bears an ambivalent relationship to postmodernism. Although both are a source of fear or alarm to some and are held in awe or reverence by others, they are not a tight fit with each other. Both have common historical roots, coming at a time that has seen the worst of worlds juxtaposed with a potential for the best. In the twentieth century, science is seen as a liberating force, one that can mitigate life’s worse problems, those of illness, poverty, and warfare, yet the wars of 1914 to 1918 and of 1939 to 1945 produced an ugly scenario of human evil, greed, and avarice. Postmodern scripts in particular emphasize the role played by science in war, most especially, in the initiation of atomic warfare and in the use of bureaucratic organization to institutionalize and legitimate Nazi objectives in the Holocaust. The distrust of reason also occurred in a context of colonial voices, internal and external, asking to be heard. Postmodernism has promoted self-assertion, identity, independence, and the validation of specific values at several levels (nations, tribes, races, religions, ethnicities, and genders). The emphasis is not on what people have in common—which colored earlier instances of nationalism—but what makes individuals and groups different. Feminist theory, which regarded women as subjugated,

116


appreciated the emphasis on the particular, the diverse, the distinct, and the marginal. But questions arise when postmodernism confronts the politics of feminism: Can we have pluralism and diversity without any specific country or group seeing itself as being not only different but better? And if one group considers itself superior, how is this superiority justified? Are those who do not see the world the same way tolerated? Politics must follow from the recognition of the varied situations of women, what Harding (1986, p. 163) refers to as “fractured identities.” Is there, though, any consensus to which we can appeal that is above the fractures? In considering why feminists might be skeptical of postmodernism, the key issue centers around feminist theory as both a theory and a politics. How do we develop a politics, given postmodernism’s heavy emphasis on the shortcomings of any theory that has a moral vision that transcends the individual spectator? Seyla Benhabib (1991) points to the limitations of the idea of rationally constituted social action—which she sees as essential for a feminist social movement—if subjects are so situated in language and discourse as to lack the critical distance to think and reflect upon the conditions for social change. Women must be both a character in their story and the author of that story at one and the same time; that is, they must have some vantage point—denied to them by postmodernism—from which to gauge and assess their actions. Benhabib (1991, p. 146), calling for the “responsibility of normative justification,” asks “how in fact the very project of female emancipation would even be thinkable without such a regulative principle of agency, autonomy, and selfhood” (1991, p. 140). What guides our political actions? For postmodern feminists, there is no single way of being woman but many, each constructed by the varied aspects of our identity: class, race, sexual orientation, age, physical and mental abilities. Gender scripts are very complex, and perhaps it is erroneous to believe that any single attribute, be it gender or class, can explain human behavior. At best, explanation might have to take into account a wide range of attributes that people possess and a wide range of situations in which they find themselves. We could argue that the diversity of gender, not its binary opposition, is its charm. Yet if feminist theory has had to do battle with the idea of differences between men and women, postmodernism adds to the fray the idea of differences among women. If women are so different, might they not find it difficult to agree on political strategy, action, or politics? If there are differences among women, are there similar differences among men such that we cannot assign the idea of oppression to the masculine gender? Is there some shared essential female essence that overcomes differences and unites the


117

Women’s Movement that postmodernism does not recognize? Is the agreement that feminist postmodernists have on theoretical issues, then, less forthcoming on political issues? Postmodernism could impede feminist practice if feminists take seriously the uncertainty, fragmentation, and elusiveness with respect to hard-and-fast definitions often found in postmodernism. When feminist theory was largely defined by standpoint theory, it held the epistemological tools to take “a woman’s position” on social and political policies. Under the rubric of postmodernism, however, this hegemony is threatened, and for good reason. The term “women” is not homogenous or unified. The actuality of women is not a cultural given but a cultural construct of factors such as class, age, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation that is always in the process of disuniting and reuniting. Women are like cultural narratives, often in conflict and irreconcilable one with the other. Studies reveal that a woman’s position on such issues as reproductive technologies, abortion, pornography, sexual harassment, and the ERA cannot be predicted from empirical data (Tong 1983; Luker 1984; Weitzman 1985; Mansbridge 1986; Epstein 1988; Elshtain 1990; Fox-Genovese 1991). Many women in the United States are not interested in feminism or at least do not adopt feminist positions. These women still read traditional women’s magazines (although these have changed since the early 1960s), support the cosmetic industries, engage in beautification of the body, spend lots of money on clothing, are married or want to get married, and value traditional gender roles, especially as these relate to marriage and the family. If we look at advertisements, books, music, and television, we see images of women quite different from the image of women presented by feminist theory. Does postmodern feminism claim to speak for those women who are not feminists? Flax writes: Our own search for an Archimedes point may conceal and obscure our entanglement in an episteme in which truth claims may take only certain forms and not others. Any episteme requires the suppression of discourses that threaten to differ with or undermine the authority of the dominant one. Hence, within feminist theory a search for a defining theme of the whole or a feminist viewpoint may require the suppression of the important and discomforting voices of persons with experiences unlike our own. The suppression of these voices seems to be a necessary condition for the (apparent) authority, coherence, and universality of our own. (1990, pp. 48–49)

She argues that feminist theory cannot embrace an exclusively socially constructed view of gender, a skepticism toward grand narratives, and reductionist ideas on the virtues of women and the vices of men. She also

118


warns against privileging certain persons and texts, even if these have feminist characteristics. Postmodernism is at odds with key concepts used in feminist theory and the Women’s Movement because it privileges neither rationality, feelings, emotions, nor intuition. In denying objectivity, in deconstructing subjectivity, and in criticizing foundational thought, postmodernism sides with those who argue that our identity is culturally contingent. In its opposition to the privileging of reason and rationality in Enlightenment thought, postmodernism argues that what constitutes facts, proof, and evidence is a result of paradigmatic change. It calls into question the idea of a single standpoint or perspective from which to view subjects and objects in the world. Can it escape asking whether all standpoints, even its own, are equally valid? If political and even ethical positions are always based on what Benhabib (1991, p. 146) calls “situated criticism,” is the theorist exempt from choosing between conflicting or competing positions or politics? If the feminist grounds her choice on a politics that opposes gender oppression, on what grounds does the postmodernist choose? And would not the postmodernist have to criticize the feminist grounding? If applied to feminism, postmodernism would alter both feminist theory and its practice. What is attractive to many feminist theorists about postmodernism is its emphasis on deconstructing previous thought systems that exclude or are prejudiced toward women and its emphasis on persons as political actors with possibilities to rewrite history. But what criteria do the feminists use to validate what Benhabib (1991, p. 146) calls the “responsibility of normative justification”? And could others use a postmodern theoretical approach to deconstruct feminism itself? While some have gone so far as to say that in embracing postmodernism, feminism gives legitimacy to all voices and thus weakens its own (Di Stefano 1990, pp. 63–82), other feminists support postmodernism if it allows for political action of a localized, particularized, but nonetheless radical kind (Sawicki 1991). The issue is whether feminist theory, by recognizing differences and privileging multiple voices and sites can (1) protect feminist thought from foundationalism, (2) avoid the cacophony that often accompanies the recognition of knowledge’s sociality, (3) nurture a more pluralistic and even tolerant notion of personhood, and (4) write an emancipatory politics from a position that denies privilege.

POSTMODERNISM, FEMINISM, AND SOCIOLOGY Practioners of feminist sociology emphasize not the abstract concept of “woman,” but real women. If women, like men, are socially constructed,


119

then they are in a dialectical relationship with the world by which they are shaped even as they act to shape it. Women are as varied as their social practices and the social contexts into which they are born. Whereas women might have a voice that is “different” from that of men, they are also different one from the other, be it through their biology, their psychology, their social standing, or any combination of these and other factors. In decentering the subject, that is, in detailing how different women are one from another—in matters of race, class, sexual preferences, ability, age, ethnicity, and religion—women are seen not to constitute a single identity but many diverse identities in a larger social context. Feminist sociological analysis emphasizes both the unifying factor of gender and the social forces that break it into diverse parts. Feminist sociology would not impose meaning on women but would see the world through their eyes. Some writers (see Smith 1987; Stacey and Thorne 1985; Andersen 1988; Bologh 1990; Collins 1990) argue that conventional sociology has been written from the standpoint of an empowered class of men who examine structures and functions of institutions and organizations that exclude or silence the worlds in which most women operate. Paralleling arguments made by advocates of the “new social history,” feminists argue that sociology’s positivistic orientation and its linguistic codes have oriented it toward elevating the macro- over the micro-level. In the policy field, debates over legislation specific to pregnant women are illustrative of the problem we face in trying to reconcile differences with equitable treatment. Are women to be treated differently from men, so as to allow for their needs when they are pregnant, or is their pregnancy to be seen as a form of disablement not all that different from incapacitation sometimes experienced by men and non-pregnant women? Real people, Young (1990, p. 96) argues, are not like the abstracted, reflected-upon person of theory but are nuanced, fleshand-blood individuals with differences: “This deontological reason cannot eliminate the specificity and variability of concrete situations to which the rules must be applied; by insisting on the impartiality and universality of moral reason…it renders itself unable rationally to understand and evaluate particular moral contexts in their particularity.” Persons have different standpoints, different places from which they actually live and move and think, and justice requires not that we detach ourself from individual particularities but that we engage and sympathize with them. But how? Liberal theory argues that by deemphasizing differences, that is, by treating different people in the same way, we envalue the idea of personhood. Feminist theory exposes the charade of liberal detachment. Postmodernism emphasizes difference as the authentic characteristic of

120


lived experience and devalues the equitable treatment of persons as a false way of taking into account what people are really like while masking power relations: “The ideal of impartiality…denies difference” (Young 1990, p. 10), while it “reduce[s] differences to unity” (Young 1990, p. 97). As Young argues, “Claims to impartiality feed cultural imperialism by allowing the particular experience and perspective of privileged groups to parade as universals,” and “the conviction that bureaucrats and experts can exercise their decision-making power in an impartial manner legitimates authoritarian hierarchy” (1990, p. 10). The impartial view, that is, the opposite of a concrete and situated view, is a transcendental “‘view from nowhere’” (Young 1990, p. 100): it is a place no one can occupy, a mythological point devoid of passion and feeling. In rejecting a politics that supports goals of equitable opportunity and equitable treatment, Young argues that “an emancipatory politics that affirms group difference involves a reconception of the meaning of equality. The assimilationist ideal assumes that equal social status for all persons requires treating everyone according to the same principles, rules, and standards. A politics of difference argues… that equality as the participation and inclusion of all groups sometimes requires differential treatment for oppressed or disadvantaged groups. To promote social justice…social policy should sometimes accord special treatment to groups” (Young 1990, pp. 157–158). Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) social constructionist approach, which anticipates many postmodern themes, has been criticized as historicist, perspectivist, and relativist. Berger and Luckmann see theorizing itself as a cultural activity, as does postmodernism. If Benhabib (1991, pp. 146– 147) is correct in claiming that postmodernism denies feminist theory the utopian thinking it needs if it is to construct an ethical politics, then a sociology of Weberian principles also denies a critical social theory. As a social movement, feminism must have a way of laying claim to moral truths if it is to be politically effective. If there are no certain truths, then on what grounds are feminist objectives to be followed? Would not feminism be courting disaster if it uncritically sought either postmodernism or traditional sociology as its ally? As Dickens and Fontana point out in their introduction to this volume, two approaches are given prominence in postmodern analysis: (1) the analysis of signs, symbols, and language, particularly as these provide knowledge of the structure of social institutions, processes, and relationships and (2) the critique of Enlightenment principles as these become the basis for the perspectival critique of truth systems (particularly positivism). If there is a general attack on knowledge systems as we have understood them in the past, then we can appreciate how farreaching is Habermas’s notion of a legitimation crisis.


121

For social theory, the question is how it can accommodate itself to postmodernism. Will it accept it and offer itself as an interpreter of the zeitgeist by elevating the sociology-of-knowledge tradition out of a relativized Marx or a perspectivist Mannheim to the post of determining what sociology, as a discipline, can do? Or will it, again following Marx or Mannheim, interpret postmodernism as the logical handmaiden of late capitalism, in the Jamesonian mold? Can there be a postmodern sociology, or is Mike Featherstone (1988, p. 205) correct in arguing that “we must relinquish the attractions of a postmodern sociology and work towards a sociological account of postmodernism”? For many sociologists, the feminist case for examining the social world through a gendered orientation (Smith 1987) can be made the core of an improved sociology; for others, the emphasis in feminist theory on the contextualization and specification of social actors and actions remains within the logic of the sociological tradition. A central problematic for classical social theory has always been the question of how individuals shape their society, how, in current terminology, they provide the agency that resists the determination of structures. Phenomenological sociology, with roots in Weber (Schutz 1967) claims that we can speak only with our own voice and that we can see the world through the actor’s eyes. In fact, it is ironic that the current demise or at least weakened state of sociology comes at a moment when one of its central principles, the sociality of persons, is a key ingredient in the postmodern text. In an age when physics promotes a theory of relativity and psychology emphasizes object relations theory, sociology’s idea of the social construction of the lifeworld should place it in the advance guard of contemporary thought. Marx laid the groundwork for the idea of a dialectical relationship between self and society and nature and culture; Weber critiqued positivism, objectivity, and neutrality; and Mannheim founded the legacy of relational as opposed to objective truth, a precursor of philosophy’s recent turn to pragmatism. In its critical mode, sociology sees itself as a form of reason that is at least partially disengaged. Here it is in direct conflict with a postmodern perspective that is cynical of both reason and any disengagement that founds “privileged” discourse. Nonetheless, we could argue that Schutz’s “objectivity within a subjective framework” thesis is more sound and useful than the abject cynicism that postmodernism suggests. Sociology already has the tools for analyzing which cultural discourses are privileged and why; moreover, postmodernism’s lack of discussion of social structures and its preoccupation with texts and authors often directs the reader’s attention away from the political realities of inequalities, including gendered ones. Certainly we should examine, investigate, analyze, or deconstruct differences and privileges, always using a

122


particular language that is culturally and historically rooted, but this has always been the task of sociology. In addition, we can do sociological analysis using the conventional tools of social science (quantitative or interpretive) and still ask what we would research, for whom, and for what purposes (Bauman 1988). To reiterate: For both feminist theory and politics, postmodernism raises several serious problems. First, what criteria does one use in justifying political action if there can be no appeal to values that transcend time, place, and specific interest? As Benhabib (1991, p. 142) notes, “While it is no longer possible or desireable to produce ‘grand narratives’ of history, the ‘death of history’ thesis occludes the epistemological interest in history and in historical narrative which accompany the aspirations of all struggling historical actors. Once this ‘interest’ in recovering the lives and struggles of those ‘losers’ and ‘victims’ of history are lost, can we produce engaged feminist theory?…Can feminist theory be postmodernist and still retain an interest in emancipation?” How can we have “coherent resistance to repressive political regimes” (Hekman 1990, p. 175) if we do not have a set of rational and logical principles to which to appeal? Does Foucault’s argument for localized sites of resistance offer any real way out? Second, we must face the issue of how to value the idea of human agency without incorporating liberal notions of individualism that deemphasize the sociality of personhood. Put differently, how can one come to terms with the dialectical relationship between the social actor and the social order in which the individual finds himself or herself? This problem is at the heart of much classical social theory and is not new to either postmodernism or feminism. We want to reconstitute the subject so that the idea of the individual as an agent in self-and social change is not obliterated, while at the same time recognizing the parameters that bound ideas of agency to concrete interdependent others. In addition, how would the subject know how, when, and why to act if he or she is not a “self” but a myriad association of complex intersections leading to a diverse set of selves?

CONCLUSION The Women’s Movement must hold on to the political agenda that is its defining characteristic and the series of political texts based on certain moral principles respecting gender. Were it to ally itself with postmodernism, feminist theory would be faced with the problem of defending its truth claims as it presents arguments and formulas for the very deconstruction of those claims as well as for the idea of gender itself.


123

How can it write a radical politics from so many different sites, with so many decentered subjects? The movement has to ask if it is possible to assume a bipolarity of gender without buying into the very dualism it has criticized as central to women’s subjugation. Does a bipolar view of gender eliminate the very diversity of being a woman that has enriched the movement and allowed it to go beyond the white, middle-class orientation it was accused of having in its early days? Or is there something in the experiences of all women that unites them and pits them against those who share a similar unity of status? Is there a culturally dominant set of sex roles that persons have to adopt, or is there more fluidity than arguments incorporating attacks on a heterosexist and masculinist hegemony suggest? The analysis presented here detects certain serious consequences for the Women’s Movement were there to be a wholesale adoption of postmodern tenets. These consequences would produce unsettling results for feminist theory and, in turn, for the movement with which it is in liaison. There is an understandable attraction to postmodernism, given its emphasis on turning away from abstractions and toward particular experiences of everyday life. It taps into the sociality of lived experience, including areas that are not in the realm of the rational, scientific, and bureaucratic. It is very much at home with ambiguity. At the same time, by emphasizing differences—the multiple ways of ordering, experiencing, and giving meaning to life—postmodernism makes the task of political organization more difficult. We need a politics built on carefully articulated moral choices that defy deconstruction. Postmodernism does not resolve the epistemic quagmire of how to choose which demon to follow, although it confronts the political person with far more demons than previously imagined. It does not establish the criteria we would use for evaluating knowledge, nor does it specify how to justify the struggles in which we are engaged. Insofar as feminist theory has set itself the task of uncoupling truth and power, it would seem, then, that any more sustained liaison with postmodernism is unadvisable.

REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor W. 1981. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. Translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby. Brookfield, VT: Gower. Andersen, Margaret L. 1988. Thinking about Women: Sociological Perspectives on Sex and Gender. New York: Macmillan. Barthes, Roland. 1975. S/Z. Translated by Richard Mills. London: Jonathan Cape. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1988. “Is There a Postmodern Sociology?” Theory, Culture, and Society 5:217–239.

124


Beauvoir, Simone de. 1952. The Second Sex. Translated by H.M.Parshley. New York: Modern Library. Benhabib, Seyla. 1984. “Epistemologies of Postmodernism: A Rejoinder to JeanFrançois Lyotard.” New German Critique 33:103–126. ____. 1991. “Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance.” Praxis International 11:137–149. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Bernstein, Richard J. (ed.). 1985. Habermas and Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bologh, Roslyn W. 1990. Love or Greatness: Max Weber and Masculine Thinking—A Feminist Inquiry. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Chodorow, Nancy. 1978. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Di Stefano, Christine. 1990. “Dilemmas of Difference: Feminism, Modernity, and Postmodernism.” Pp. 63–82 in Feminism/Postmodernism, edited by Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge. Edelman, Murray. 1988. Constructing the Political Spectacle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eisenstein, Zillah. 1984. Feminism and Sexual Equality: Crisis in Liberal America. New York: Monthly Review Press. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1981. Public Man, Private Woman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ____. 1990. Power Trips and Other Journeys: Essays in Feminism and Civic Discourse. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Epstein, Cynthia. 1988. Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender and the Social Order. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Farganis, Sondra. 1986a. “Feminist Theory and Social Theory: The Need for Dialogue.” Sociological Inquiry 56:50–68. ____. 1986b. Social Reconstruction of the Feminine Character. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield. Featherstone, Mike. 1988. “In Pursuit of the Postmodern: An Introduction.” Theory, Culture, and Society 5:195–215. Flax, Jane. 1990. “Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory.” Pp. 39– 62 in Feminism/Postmodernism, edited by Linda J.Nicholson. New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1980a. A Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Book. ____. 1980b. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Translated by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mephem, and Kate Soper. New York: Pantheon Books. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. 1991. Feminism without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Fraser, Nancy. 1989. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fraser, Nancy, and Linda J.Nicholson. “Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism.” Pp. 19–38 in Feminism/ Postmodernism, edited by Linda J.Nicholson. New York: Routledge. Friedan, Betty. 1977. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell. Frye, Marilyn. 1983. Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press.


125

Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1972. Knowledge and Human Interest. Translated by Jeremy Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press. ____. 1987. Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Translated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Harding, Sandra. 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ____. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hartsock, Nancy C.M. 1983. Money, Sex and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism. New York: Longman. Hekman, Susan J. 1990. Gender and Knowledge: Elements of a Postmodern Feminism. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Hirsch, Marianne, and Evelyn Fox Keller. 1990. “Introduction: January 4, 1990.” Pp. 1–5 in Conflicts in Feminism, edited by Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller. New York: Routledge. Hooks, Bell. 1984. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press. Jaggar, Alison M. 1983. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld. Jameson, Fredric. 1984. “The Politics of Theory: Ideologicial Positions in the Postmodern Debate.” New German Critique 33:53–66. Kessler, Suzanne J., and Wendy McKenna. 1985. Gender: An EthnomethodologicalApproach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Luker, Kristin. 1984. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Berkeley: University of California Press. MacKinnon, Catherine A. 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. Translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. ____. 1956. Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mansbridge, Jane J. 1986. Why We Lost the ERA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press. Nicholson, Linda J. 1986. Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family. New York: Columbia University Press. ____. 1990. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–16 in Feminism/Postmodernism, edited by Linda J.Nicholson. New York: Routledge. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1959. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill. Sawicki, Jana. 1991. Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body. New York: Routledge. Schutz, Alfred. 1967. Phenomenology of the Social World. Translated by George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Scott, Joan W. 1990. “Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism.” Pp. 134–148 in Conflicts in Feminism, edited by Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller. New York: Routledge.

126


Smith, Dorothy. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Spelman, Elizabeth V. 1988. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon Press. Stacey, Judith, and Barrie Thorne. 1985. “The Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology.” Social Problems 32:301–316. Stimpson, Catherine R. 1980. “The New Scholarship about Women: The State of the Art.” Annals of Scholarship 1:2–14. Tong, Rosemarie. 1983. Women, Sex and the Law. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld. Touraine, Alain. 1988. Return of the Actor: Social Theory in the Postindustrial Society. Translated by Myrna Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Varnedoe, Kirk, and Adam Gopnik. 1990. High and Low: Modern Art/Popular Culture. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Weber, Max. 1949. Methodology of the Social Sciences. Translated by Edward A. Shils and Henry A.Finch. New York: Free Press. Weitzman, Lenore J. 1985. The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America. New York: Macmillan. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 6

The Future of Social Theory and the Limits of Postmodern Critique Robert J.Antonio Douglas Kellner

As part of a radical attack on Western rationalism, postmodern theorists reject claims that modern social theory can adequately articulate the contours of the current epoch, explain its crises, or promote progressive social change. Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and others contend that an epochal rupture, ending the modern era, has rendered modern social theory obsolete. In this chapter, we shall argue that postmodernists attack the fundamental assumptions and thus reject the very possibility of social theory. Their one-sided caricature, we will argue, fails to comprehend critical aspects of modern social theory that anticipate key elements of the postmodern critique. Lacking the resources of the modern tradition, postmodernists provide a pessimistic vision of the current era that prematurely pronounces the end of emancipatory movements and of critical theory. Nonetheless, postmodern theorists provide sharp theoretical and cultural criticism of the modern tradition, which challenges social theorists to rethink their assumptions, methods, and history.1 127

128


THE POSTMODERN CRITIQUE OF MODERN SOCIAL THEORY Since many postmodern critics are former Marxists who have rejected socialism and even welfare state reformism, they advance especially scathing criticisms of Marxism’s sweeping arguments about history and emancipation. Their experience with Marxism serves as an optic through which they view the entire tradition of modern social theory. In fact, they rarely engage the work of other classical social theorists in any detail. Consequently, the postmodern attack on classical theory is mostly indirect. In general, postmodern criticism implies that virtually all modern social theory springs from an uncritical Enlightenment faith in science and reason. This hyperrationalist inclination results in “master narratives” that present one theory or method as the singular key to knowledge and “grand narratives” or Eurocentric philosophies of history that liquidate historical differences and human diversity. Postmodernists imply that the fundamental assumptions of modern social theory lead inevitably to these dogmatic types of totalizing thought and, ultimately, to centralized systems of planning, control, and power that destroy individuality. Thus, the modern tradition’s core metatheoretical assumptions concerning “representation,” “social coherence,” and “rational subjectivity” must be abandoned. Extreme postmodernists attack the assumption that theory represents social realities.2 They reframe Jacques Derrida’s (1976) arguments that language is a form of “free play” independent of a “transcendental signified” and that the modern propensity to center on the meaning or central proposition of a text blurs differences and diminishes the richness of linguistic creativity. Severing the connection between signs and their referents, they attack the early modern idea of “representing” the “real.” Postmodernists transform these Derridian perspectives about language into a radical cultural critique that dismisses the idea that social theories can be evaluated according to how accurately they portray extralinguistic conditions. Their deconstructive attack on this primary assumption of modern epistemology is intended to free heterogeneous desires and signifiers from repressive linguistic constraints imposed by the semiotic control system. In this sense, the postmodern attack on Enlightenment thought and modern social theory is posed as a critique of domination. Taking an extreme postmodernist position, Baudrillard contends that the defining feature of the new postmodern era is that social reality has been evaporated into a contingent play of “simulacra”; signs and images have now replaced “the real.” Speaking explicitly of a new postmodern age, he states: “We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do

The Future of Social Theory

129

with a logic of facts and an order of reasons” (Baudrillard 1983a, pp. 31– 32). The proliferation of contradictory images and messages “implodes” the boundaries between signs and referents and between reality and fiction, dissolving the concepts of truth and meaning. Extreme postmodernists construct an image of humanity as homo significant, constituted by language, texts, codes, and images without connection to an external world. Thus, different social theories should be viewed merely as conflicting narratives or as incommensurable perspectives rather than as portrayals of external social realities that can be judged and evaluated on the basis of research and discussion employing intersubjective standards and procedures for determining valid knowledge. Focusing on pervasive cultural fragmentation and social disintegration, postmodernists reject the very possibility of coherent social structures and processes and thereby contradict a second core assumption of modern social theory. Even Fredric Jameson (1984, 1991), who continues to draw heavily on modern theory, describes postmodernity as an exceedingly complex matrix of discontinuous processes; of ubiquitous, instantaneous, and nonlinear changes; of fractured and overwhelming space; of cacophonous voices; and of divergent images and messages, all of which produce a schizophrenic fragmentation of experience. Accordingly, comprehension of the social is demolished by the “eclipse of distance” (Bell 1978, pp. 99–119; reworked by Jameson 1984, pp. 85–88), by implosive dedifferentiation of boundaries, and by the consequent incorporation of spectators into a dream world of media and consumerist fantasies. The obliteration of standards for interpreting the significance of events and for discerning between different pieces of information produces a one-dimensional indeterminacy and a nihilistic relativization of culture. Postmodern life thus is reduced to fleeting feelings and events devoid of meaning and value. Indeed, extreme postmodernists, such as Baudrillard (1983b, 1988, 1990) and Arthur Kroker and David Cook (1986) go so far as to speak of “the end” of the social, of meaning, and of history. For Baudrillard, events lack consequences beyond the moment; they shift so rapidly and so radically that their impact can hardly be felt. This saturation with divergent and fragmented messages reduces culture to mere “noise.” Due to mass indifference following from continuous novelty, routinization of spectacle, and excess of information, all interest in the past and the future is lost. From this perspective, social classes and other structured social relations are decomposed into a multiplicity of indeterminate, disconnected, and consequently incoherent events. The extremely fragmented and nonlinear quality of postmodern experience puts an end to patterned social phenomena, eliminating the objects of social theory—

130


obdurate social structures (e.g., class, gender, and racial hierarchies, bureaucracies, markets) and structured social processes (e.g., integration, differentiation, domination, exploitation). Under these postmodern conditions, the global discourses of classical theory become obsolete and irrelevant.3 Postmodernists also herald the demise of the philosophical concept of the “subject” that once undergirded early modern conceptions of representation. Classical social theorists believed that humanity had constitutive rational capacities providing people with critical distance from their emotional and habitual behaviors and with powers to regulate their relationships with their social and physical environments. Classical theorists believed that people can achieve relatively unambiguous understandings of the external world and apply this knowledge to improve their lives. They held that the emergence of science and the overall rationalization of modernity enhanced these capacities, and consequently increased individual autonomy. Heightened self-awareness and the ability for self-directed action were considered to be elemental aspects of rational subjectivity. By contrast, Nietzsche, the most important forerunner of postmodern thought, characterized the modern subject as a “little changeling” who should be disposed of; he argued that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; the ‘doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed” (1969, p. 45). The fictive subject is a by-product of conflicting desires and strivings that ultimately serve cultural repression. By turning people inward to internalized norms, self-control, and guilt, the myth of subjectivity transforms them into tame and conformist shadows of what they might be. Like Nietzsche, postmodernists reject the concept of rational subject individuality because it allegedly represses human difference, spontaneity, desire, and power. In this regard, Foucault contends that the modern subject is a product of Enlightenment efforts to make “man” an object of scientific knowledge and of social manipulation by new disciplinary and therapeutic institutions. According to his “genealogical” studies of the interplay of knowledge and power, the modern subject’s highly refined capacities for self-observation and selfregulation harden the society into a “panoptical” system of discipline and control. This elevates social domination and cultural homogenization to unimagined heights beyond that of traditional societies. Foucault contends, however, that the modern “episteme” of thought is crumbling as others have done in the past and that the subject will eventually disappear “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault 1973, p. 387).4 Baudrillard claims that the advent of postmodernity has already completely erased the subject. He declares that the “drama of the subject


131

at odds with his objects and with his image” has concluded and that “we” are now merely “terminals of multiple networks” and not creators of the script (Baudrillard 1988, p. 16; 1990). Given the fractal and multiple nature of postmodern individuals, the reign of the “rational” subject is over; it has been conquered by the object to which it must henceforth submit. Thus, whereas Nietzsche, and even Foucault, postulate the conception of active individuality struggling against the modern system of domination, Baudrillard holds that the rise of postmodernity has necessitated a complete surrender of the emancipatory hopes about increased self-consciousness, freedom, and social justice, which were all bound to the now obsolete notion of autonomous subjectivity.

CRITICAL VERSUS DOGMATIC THEMES IN CLASSICAL THEORY Classical theorists initiated the tradition of modern social theory by creating polar models (e.g., Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, mechanical/organic solidarity, feudalism/capitalism, agricultural/commercial society, military/industrial society), attempting to articulate systematically the dominant social structures and primary developmental processes (differentiation, centralization, rationalization, individuation, and urbanization) that were radically transforming social life from the local to the international level.5 Their maps of the new social topography of modernity were supposed to distinguish the most important differences between the new era and the traditional world. This systematic theoretical approach, however, was sometimes transfigured into dogmatic, ahistorical arguments about foundations or essentialized (reified) social traits, conditions, or processes. These errors contradicted modern social theory’s mission to foster the understanding and agency of historical individuals and communities. Classical theory was strengthened by its appropriation and reconstruction of the critical epistemology, skepticism, and ideal of relentless truth-seeking emphasized in early modern thought. Classical thinkers sometimes manifested a critical reflexivity that treated theories as ideal types or constructs that cannot exactly reproduce or mirror the social world. The most sophisticated methodological thinkers, such as Dewey and Weber, suggested a very complex interplay between theoretical ideas and social reality, implying that values and concepts contribute to constituting social facts as well as being shaped by them. Most theorists understood, however, that theories of broad scope always depend on especially precarious and imperfect balancing of the general and the particular and that they never capture the social world

132


in all its richness, particularity, diversity, and temporality. Yet, contrary to the postmodernists, classical theorists argued that their theoretical practices must be justified on epistemological and empirical grounds. They believed that systematic conceptualization based on careful sociohistorical inquiry could portray, with reasonable accuracy, the salient attributes of the portions of the social world selected for study, and that competing theories should be discussed, compared, and evaluated on this basis. Still, strong taints of the earlier, dogmatic faith in science, reason, and absolute truth contributed significantly to a dogmatic streak in classical theory. Positivistic views treated science as a secular religion with the power to detect a lawful order behind the complex flux of modern events, to provide nearly guaranteed solutions to new social problems, and even to validate and choose values. Classical theorists sometimes implied that the broadest social conditions and the future path of societal development could be precisely represented and controlled. Here, they claimed that the most advanced forms of modern reason operate unproblematically and serve purely as instruments of enlightened social management and change. Following the lead of Condorcet, early scientistic social theorists, such as Saint-Simon and Comte, first expressed this naive and potentially repressive postivistic point of view. While defending the validity of their substantive or methodological positions or of the worthiness of their new discipline, positivists often spoke of scientific investigators as neutral spectators and of “facts” as pristine realities unaffected by the interpretive process (appearing in identical form to all correct methodologists). Their Cartesian view of the all-seeing, impartial, scientific subject and their Newtonian conception of static, ultimate objects resulted in one-sided interpretations being granted irrefutable objectivity and universality. This dogmatic side of classical theory contained the seeds of twentiethcentury technocracy and elite planning, which are still alive today. Generally, classical theorists spoke far too reverently about their procedures, and in the process greatly exaggerated the objectivity and impartiality of their observations of social life. Unexamined presuppositions and conventional ideas in scientific dress, often connected to powerful material and ideal interests, were too frequently substituted for genuine theory, empirical inquiry, and criticism. But some classical theorists exposed the truth about how theoretical ideas can serve existing powers and how theorists must always be on guard against confusing legitimations with social realities. Early in the classical tradition, Marx’s critique of Hegel’s theory of the state and of the German “ideologists” illustrated powerfully that strong claims of neutrality and impartiality are not always innocent and can serve abusive


133

political ends (Marx 1967, pp. 151–202; Marx and Engels 1964). But Marx himself was too sanguine about the direction of history and essentialized the “real” interests of the proletariat, errors that derived, at least in part, from his overweening confidence in and effusive claims about the representational powers of historical materialism (Antonio 1990). Yet, most classical theorists still recognized that all portrayals of society are imperfect and must be subjected to potentially disconfirming inquiries. As Dewey (1988) argued, this experimentalist maxim was earlier a centerpiece of Renaissance and Enlightenment science, having already undermined the bases of the traditional forms of absolutism and transcendentalism. Dewey’s own sophisticated epistemology pointed to the inherently perspectival and interpretive nature of all theoretical practices. He also spoke of the rise of an entirely new antifoundationalist, “participatory” way of knowing that abandoned the subject/object dualism of Newtonian and Cartesian thought and that treated knowledge as inherently uncertain and radically historical. Through the lenses of these critical sensibilities, portrayals of social phenomena are envisioned as always being mediated by linguistic frameworks, communicative practices, divergent social locations, and normative and intellectual presuppositions. These critical themes, therefore, contradicted the positivist claims about exact representation of a pregiven social world. But the critical arguments held that theories, albeit imperfectly and partially, still portrayed external social conditions. For example, although Dewey rejected the idea that science represents or mirrors reality, he held that theory grasps the existential consequences of human actions and linkages between external events. Classical theorists realized that if their approaches were treated merely as narratives or perspectives, the nonarbitrary, intersubjective bases for discussing, evaluating, comparing, and disconfirming social theories would be eliminated. They believed firmly that the capacity for making systematic distinctions between ideas on the basis of their relationships to external circumstances was a powerful counterforce to demagoguery and mysticism, and consequently a necessary component of democratic discourse and reconstruction. Shifting to the issue of social coherence, classical theorists viewed society as a differentiated structural whole. Despite strong disagreement about the level of interdependence and types of connectedness, they still attempted to address the organizational properties and developmental processes that connected smaller groupings to larger societal or transsocietal units. In contrast to postmodernists, classical theorists believed that the social world has a complex coherence that could be

134


analyzed empirically and expressed theoretically. But they were not always mindful of the fact that social organizations and groups are not clearly bounded, seamless, and unproblematical totalities. For example, the organic metaphor, employed by many classical theorists, reified social structures and processes, exaggerated their stability and coherence, and greatly understated their decentralized, contingent, and nonlinear features. Consequently, classical theorists were often insensitive about local particularities and differences and about regional and national variations. These essentialist tendencies not only exaggerated the coherence of institutions and organizations but also tended to grant mechanistically determined evolutionary schemata universal significance that promised a homogenous, Eurocentric future for humanity. Some classical theorists attacked these dogmatic totalizations, anticipating postmodern arguments about social discontinuities, fragmented meanings, and decentered totalities (e.g., see Kloppenberg 1988). Addressing Western culture and, ultimately, his own practices, Weber (1958, p. 357) asserted that “culture’s every step forward seems condemned to lead to an ever more devastating senselessness. The advancement of cultural values, however, seems to become a senseless hustle in the service of worthless, moreover self-contradictory, and mutually antagonistic ends.” He implied that Western rationalism, carried to the extreme, itself verges on myth, a point later repeated by Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) and other critical theorists. Weber’s analyses of increasing cultural fragmentation and irreconcilable value conflicts, historical specificity, methodological broadsides against foundationalism and essentialism, scathing attacks on secular theodicies of evolutionary progress, penetrating analyses of the connections between rationalism and domination, and ardent defense of social and theoretical pluralism against the forces of cultural and intellectual homogenization all anticipated key postmodern positions. In Weber’s essay on “objectivity,” he spoke of “the hair-line which separates science from faith,” and he qualified his frequently misunderstood essay about “value neutrality” with the caveat that the border between “fact” and value can be clearly drawn only on an analytic level and not empirically (1949, pp. 9, 110). Note, here, that Weber put his primary methodological concepts in quotes to communicate their problematical nature and to avoid naive objectivism. He argued that external reality is constituted of an “infinite multiplicity” of properties and possible causal relations and that a “hiatus irrationalis” exists between theoretical concepts and the conditions that they signify. Consequently, he considered the Cartesian claim about scientific ideas reflecting reality to be an “absolute absurdity” (Weber 1975, p. 217, n 22).


135

Despite his highly qualified idea of science and his somber vision of “unbrotherly” modernity and the “iron cage,” Weber did not reject rational thought or abandon science for narrative. Rather, he defended systematic inquiry and theory, arguing that the empirical uncertainties and ethical ambiguities arising from the contradictory life orders, conflicting values, competing discourses, and clashing interests of modernity must be faced with “intellectual integrity” or sober realism (Weber 1958, pp. 129–156). A complete rejection of rationalism, he argued, would simply give license to the unreflective, uncritical, and cynical pursuit of vulgar material and ideal interests, which already dominated the politics and culture of his day. Weber still relentlessly pursued the global projects of grasping disenchantment, rationalization, and bureaucratization on a world-historical scale. But while attempting to theorize about the extraordinarily complex, differentiated, and pluralistic features of modernity, Weber affirmed a critical rationalism based on the awareness of the limited, uncertain, partial, and historical character of all scientific knowledge. Classical theoretical assumptions about the ability to portray social life and about social coherence depend on beliefs in the rational capacities of human individuals. But classical theorists often overemphasized the homogenizing features of socialization, equating rational individuality with the passive reception, internalization, and application of social norms and values. This conformist conception of subjectivity anchored broader theories that overstated societal integration and consensus and that understated the capacity for resistance and the differences between individuals and subgroups. For example, functionalist theory, which dominated American sociology in the 1950s and 1960s, emphasized the relatively unproblematical internalization of norms and implied an overly integrated and distorted vision of the postwar United States based on mistaken conceptions of sweeping “value consensus” and institutional legitimacy (see Parsons 1971). The topic of the social subject (especially the connection of rational human agency to emancipatory social change) has been an intensely debated issue among neo-Marxists, poststructuralists, and feminists. Orthodox Marxists once spoke confidently about overcoming “false consciousness” and about the fragmented working class inevitably awakening as a unified revolutionary proletariat. Class fragmentation and political, ethnic, religious, and gender segmentation were at first dismissed as epiphenomena that merely postponed the arrival of the revolutionary proletariat. But when it became obvious that capital’s homogenizing power was not sufficient to eradicate these social distinctions, some Western Marxists searched for a substitute emancipatory subject or a plurality of subjects and, more recently,

136


debated whether the conception ought to be dispensed with entirely. The essentialized conception of the collective subject, however, sidetracked many Marxist theorists from historical and material forms of inquiry, which constitute the richest features of this tradition.6 But other classical theorists (e.g., Mead 1967; Simmel 1964) had already developed highly differentiated conceptions of the “social-self,” contradicting conformist and homogeneous portrayals of subjectivity. For example, Mead argued that determinate individuality arises from a person’s responses to his or her unique pattern of associations (although biology and biography also contribute). In his view, socialization is a differentiating as well as a homogenizing force. Even simple societies are sufficiently complex to ensure human diversity, but the individuating conditions are multiplied by modernity’s highly diverse, increasingly voluntaristic, and constantly changing networks of association. Responding to the heterogeneous social circles of this differentiated environment, every individual develops a multiplicity of selves, each fitted to the specialized niches of her or his contrasting social contexts. Since each person has a unique pattern of associations and unique linkages to each affiliation, each has a different and dynamic ensemble of partial selves.7 Moreover, Mead and other pragmatists attacked the tendency to treat the rational capacities of the self as an imperious ruler over human activities and experiences. For example, they held that thought follows as well as leads practices. And they did not privilege cognitive capacities at the expense of sensuousness, emotion, sympathetic identification, and other feelings. Mead’s decentered conception of subjectivity, however, still presumed a “complete self” (reflecting the “unity and structure of the social process”) that mediated its underlying multiplicities. This larger social-self provides sufficient integration of the personality to maintain continuity and identity between different social settings, to facilitate new associations, to foster critical thought and action, and, ultimately, to serve as a basis for individual autonomy (Mead 1967, pp. 142–144). In Dewey’s view, most modern social relationships are continually negotiated in response to dynamic social processes and shifting meanings. Such exposure to highly divergent individualities with clashing points of view in diverse contexts, he held, expands the powers of interpretation, sympathetic identification, tolerance for ambiguity and difference, and, in particular, “communication.” These capacities make possible a less repressive integration of the self and society open to new forms of ethical criticism, social conflict, and rebellious solidarity (e.g., of women, workers) favoring individual and cultural diversity (Dewey and Tufts 1983). According to Dewey’s and Mead’s theory of the self, voluntaristic


137

social arrangements never emerge smoothly from collective subjectivity and normative consensus but instead must be achieved on the basis of contingent, problematic, and sometimes conflictual communicative processes between individuals with varying interests, perspectives, identifications, and feelings. In contrast to Weber, they believed that the differentiated and conflicting features of modernity hold out distinct possibilities for wider democracy and new forms of voluntary cooperation. The pragmatists argued that societal differentiation favors critical rationality, diversity, openness, flexibility, and justice, not merely irrationalism, cultural fragmentation, disintegration of the self, and domination. Classical theorists saw modernity’s new types of complex social organization and consequent interdependencies to be dialectically related to opposing forces producing social and cultural fragmentation. Their standpoints for criticizing society and proposals for social change closely considered the interplay of these integrating and fragmenting conditions. In particular, their “immanent” criticism identified tensions between emergent democratic ideals and modernity’s characteristic forms of domination, oppression, inequality, and polarization. They constructed critical normative standpoints informed by their empirical analyses of basic constraints, contradictions, and possibilities arising from the new social structures, social processes, and systems of meaning. As with their central metatheoretical assumptions, classical theorists’ historical method of social criticism sometimes resulted in dogmatic, pseudosociological pronouncements (e.g., about the “inevitable” direction of history and about historically “valid” normative and political perspectives), but at other times they expressed a critical sensitivity to concrete resources for developing new forms of social value, aspiration, identity, solidarity, and struggle in light of the historical blockages to and opportunities for realization of a freer and more just social life. Although relentlessly attacking the untrammeled pursuit of private interest in modernity, Durkheim (1964) still detected aspects of the new division of labor producing new forms of autonomous individuality, cooperation, and dependence, which generate their own “intrinsic morality” stressing equality and freedom. Despite the prevailing state of inequality and unfreedom, he argued that traditional forms of ascription were being eroded, that new democratic ideals were being forged, and that new social struggles favoring a more just and egalitarian social order were emerging. In similar fashion, Marx addressed the contradictions between capitalism’s democratic ideology and its increasing poverty and class divisions. He hoped to translate this historical contradiction into an instrument of working class struggle and emancipatory social change. Besides repression, Marx believed that capitalism produces new “modes

138


of cooperation,” needs, and solidarities that radicalize the bourgeois conceptions of freedom, equality, and affluence, and that turn them against the existing forms of coercion and exploitation. His type of critical social science aimed to give voice to these historical contradictions and to urge associated individuals to transform the nascent ideals into liberated social relations and structures (see Marx 1973; Marx and Engels 1964). Marx and Durkheim, however, also spoke dogmatically about the path of societal development, greatly exaggerated the prospects for achieving consensual normative standards, and overestimated the chances for realizing freedom and justice. Although classical theorists claimed to abandon philosophical “grounds,” they often treated the progressive features of modernity too optimistically, transforming them into transcendent warranties about a more democratic future. But, as we explain below, postmodernists overreact to this tendency of modern social theory, constructing, in response, a scenario of overwhelming social and cultural fragmentation that eliminates the historical bases of immanent critique and limits progressive changes to the local and individual level or collapses, á la Baudrillard, into apolitical nihilism and cynicism.

THE WAR AGAINST TOTALITY AND THE END OF EMANCIPATORY POLITICS Shifting from classical social theory to postmodern theory, we enter a different socio-political universe. The Lyotardian battle cry to “wage a war on totality” and warnings about the affinity of “grand narratives” for totalitarianism attack the global features of modern social theory and, especially, of those critical approaches deeply rooted in Enlightenment radicalism and Marxism (Lyotard 1984, p. 82). Postmodernists argue that efforts to grasp society as a whole and to use this type of theory to serve radical or reformist mass movements have culturally and politically repressive consequences. Moreover, they hold that cultural fragmentation has destroyed the sociocultural matrix for the modern style of historically based social criticism and progressive social movements. In their view, critical social theory, bourgeois values, and democratic politics are all moribund today. Postmodernists execute a deconstructive critique of modern social theory with the intent of establishing entirely new bases for social and cultural criticism. Concurring with Nietzschean arguments concerning the decline of individuality, Foucault’s (1979) genealogy of “disciplinary” society describes the ordering and reduction of “human multiplicities” by a new


139

secular morality that utilizes the therapeutic ideology of helping others to justify overarching social control. Foucault argues that sweeping forms of modern surveillance and discipline emerged in the newly created prisons, mental hospitals, and other asylums of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The methods of these panoptic regimes spread rapidly to new sites. Emergent medical, psychotherapeutic, educational, and welfare professionals instituted a “universal reign of the normative” based on all-pervasive self-surveillance and self-discipline. This distinctly modern system of control everywhere “differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes…[and] normalizes.” Normalization here refers to processes by which diverse individuals are transformed into homogeneous subjects, useful and docile beings who adjust comfortably to social domination. Baudrillard (1983a), however, declares that the modern disciplinary order described by Foucault has been superseded by postmodern “simulation,” “deterrence,” “fascination,” and “discontinuous indeterminism.” Instead of social domination based on a mixture of direct coercion and self-regulation, the semiotic control system operates by “programming” and “indefinite reproduction” of disjunctive models. Change occurs randomly through mutations in “sign production” rather than through creative acts by rational subjects. The meaninglessness, fragmentation, immediacy, disorientation, and indifference of postmodern culture annihilates all referents and dissolves the boundaries between fantasies, ideals, myths, and facts. These conditions, for Baudrillard, immobilize all truth discourses and moral rhetorics; political events, like the Watergate or Iran-Contra hearings, are reduced to simulations of scandal that deter people from recognizing the fundamental bankruptcy of the bourgeois system as a whole. The normative and societal bases for immanent criticism are demolished, in Baudrillard’s scenario, because postmodern “hyperreality” evaporates all animate critical values and completely eliminates any possibility for progressive social movements or social reforms. Although Baudrillard’s position is admittedly extreme, other postmodernists agree that the Left’s historical method of normative critique is useless today. Even Jameson (1984, 1991), who continues to identify with Marxist theory, speaks of “a linguistic fragmentation of social life” that impoverishes normative languages and paralyzes immanent social criticism. The “stupendous proliferation of social codes” and the transformation of language into a mélange of contentious “jargons” and “badges” (of competing professional groups, status orders, and class fractions) puts an end to critical values and active publics. Jameson argues that postmodern “hyperspace” eliminates “negativity,” “opposition,” and “critical distance.” The discursive field thus lacks any

140


trace of a “great collective project” or, even, living critical ideals. These postmodern cultural conditions end the Enlightenment dialectic of mass emancipatory movements arising from the historical contradictions between democratic ideology and capitalism. During the Frankfurt school’s “dialectic of Enlightenment” phase, critical theorists came to similar pessimistic conclusions about the historical resources for progressive social change. 8 To recover oppositional thought, they also argued that the exhaustion of bourgeois values requires a shift from historical immanent critique to a fundamental critique of Western rationalism. Critical theorists’ search for an alternative standpoint led them to an aesthetic vision of transcending the constraints of the current era (e.g., Adorno 1984). They agreed with Nietzsche’s (1969) argument that art, in direct contrast to science, morality, and mass movements, is “fundamentally opposed” to today’s rational modes of domination. Only aesthetic sensibilities can escape instrumentalization. Although postmodernists forego critical theory’s strong emphasis on “redemption,” they draw heavily on Nietzschean aestheticism. The postmodern version manifests a celebratory attitude about the liberating nature of unleashed desire and nonrational modes of individual expression and feeling (see Carroll 1987; Shusterman 1988). A basic thrust of postmodern aestheticism upholds the vitalistic quest for experience and individualist flight from the disciplining, normalizing, homogenizing tentacles of rational culture. Presumably, this requires new organizational spaces for enriching needs and providing sufficient resources to realize them. However, postmodernists do not articulate the new institutional contexts and politics of their aestheticism. Moreover, as Weber feared in his later years, vitalistic and antimodernist impulses within Nietzschean aestheticism could be mobilized for political demagoguery. Regardless of Nietzsche’s strong individualist and antinationalist emphases, some early-twentiethcentury popularizations fused his vitalistic themes with chauvinism and militarism. Habermas (1987) points out that these tendencies contributed to the cultural climate that gave rise to the Nazi regime, and, consequently, he sharply criticizes the resurgence of antirationalist aestheticism within postmodernist thought. Postmodernists are amnesic ab out fascism and about the earlier counter-Enlightenment reactionaries who used the alleged irrationality of the subject to justify the need for authoritarian modes of thought and institutions. Yet, even if fears about authoritarianism are excessive, postmodern aesthetic individualism, combined with a cynical attitude about critical values and emancipatory movements, provides a very thin basis for social criticism or progressive politics.


141

While Foucault’s analyses of the dialectic of domination and resistance hints at a critical micropolitics, his broader arguments about the interpenetration of power and knowledge suggest that domination flows from virtually every niche of modern society and culture.9 The system of control is so monolithic and overpowering that it is hard to envisage how any meaningful social change might take place from within. Moreover, his rejection of macropolitics undermines efforts to develop theoretical languages to address regional, national, or international publics about global social issues (e.g., class divergence, gender or discrimination, or environmental degradation) and to facilitate largescale collective actions or interventions. Lyotard implies that critical theories calling for sweeping sociopolitical transformations ultimately favor totalitarian domination. He disparages attempts at mobilizing the masses to create broader modes of radical democratic societal consensus as intrinsically repressive. In his view, all schemes of macrotheory and politics are “terroristic.” Instead, Lyotard wants to replace global discourses with microscopic theoretical practices that stress playful participation in a wide variety of language games (Lyotard and Thébaud 1985). Yet he does not explain how these heterogeneous microdiscourses will escape hermetic particularism and irrelevancy. In this regard, mainstream sociology is already a “postmodern” discipline; its extreme subdisciplinary differentiation, intellectual fragmentation, and multiplicity of specialized voices have put an end to master narratives and grand narratives. But the absence of broader languages to foster communication between hyperspecialized subdisciplines and to draw out the public significance of sociological knowledge has generated cynicism and indifference about sociology. The lack of strong currents of global and critical theory within professional circles greatly diminishes the resources for sensitizing social scientists to the broader contexts of specialized work and for stimulating public discourse about it. Furthermore, if one accepts Baudrillard’s claims that today’s confused and apathetic masses are capable of nothing more than mindless consumption of mass-produced images, then critical awareness and the formation of socially responsible publics is impossible. Critical theorizing is consequently a wasted effort. No oppositional politics are possible in Baudrillard’s postmodern nightmare. Even aesthetic revolt is futile because when “art is everywhere,” the avant-garde becomes another variant of conformist simulation. With all possibilities for active social transformation foreclosed, theorists themselves have no option but to play simulation games, combating indifference with greater indifference. Baudrillard hopes that these “fatal strategies,” which are intended to

142


amplify conformity, consumerism, and apathy, eventually will cause the system to collapse from ennui and implosion (Baudrillard 1983a, 1988, 1990). In attempting to save cultural criticism from modern social theory, postmodernists abandon the language of large publics and transformational politics. And those who retain hopes about micropolitical critiques (for example, Foucault, Lyotard) do not explain how these discourses will overcome the extreme political fragmentation, media white-out of surplus information, and mass cynicism that they themselves describe. Yet, even if the micropolitical messages somehow get through, it is entirely unclear how they could possibly alter the centralized organizational sites of social control, planning, and distribution that have decisive effect on the patterns of individual wellbeing and suffering or how they would promote liberation on the local level. In this regard, Fraser and Nicholson argue that the postmodernist war against totality forbids the global perspectives necessary for critical social theory: One familiar, and arguably essential, genre of normative political theory: identification and critique of macrostructures of inequality and injustice which cut across the boundaries separating relatively discrete practices and institutions. There is no place in Lyotard’s universe for critique of pervasive axes of stratification, for critique of broad based relations of dominance and subordination along lines like gender, race, and class. (1988, pp. 377–378)

Postmodernists, moreover, do not seem to understand that emancipatory movements can be enormous inspirations for struggles and reforms on the local level. Sometimes large, coercive organizations have to be eliminated, transformed, or, at least, the top officials turned over in order to create opportunities for successful micropolitics. But even when an emancipatory movement fails, it sometimes creates cultural resources in the form of collective memories, heroic folklore, and exemplars for future generations struggling against similar repressive forces. For example, the failures of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia and the suffering of those who heroically resisted the “normalized” regime were later forged into rebellious solidarities that brought down the repressive regime some twenty years later. The cultural meanings of such memories do not die easily, and they often become richer after many generations. Postmodern thought does not have a language to recover these living bonds of shared history and to grasp how they contribute to social solidarities, movements, and ruptures. Recent mass democratic struggles demonstrate dramatically that it is the idea of an “end to history” that is exhausted, not these cultural resources.


143

Regardless of the attacks on totalizing theory, however, postmodernists themselves speak of an epochal break with modernity and of a postmodernization process producing worldwide dedifferentiation in which previously segmented cultural and social domains implode into one another. The scope of Marx and Engels’s scenario of capitalist rationalization pales in comparison with this media-based juggernaut of postmodern homogenization. In this regard, postmodernists remain directly in the tracks of the grandest tradition of modern social theory. But their radical break, with its metatheoretical bases and fetishism of particularity and difference, releases them from responsibility to theorize about these global structures and processes systematically, to defend the implicit normative standpoints that guide their cultural criticism, and to reflect critically on and articulate the possible political consequences of their approaches. Consequently, postmodern theories do not elaborate new opportunities for overcoming repression and for initiating democratic societal reconstruction. And should these possibilities ever become too obvious to ignore, they still can be trivialized as mere “simulacra,” as “deterrents,” or as indirect expressions of “cooptive” power. Overall, postmodernists have not demonstrated why their postpolitical aesthetic individualism opposes rather than affirms technocracy and consumer capitalism (see Shusterman 1988). In the end, postmodern discourse may itself reflect the limited horizons, distorted aspirations, and refracted vision of an isolated and alienated intelligentsia within a social order sliding toward more extreme inequality and polarization, about which they are unable to theorize.

CRITICAL SOCIAL THEORY AND CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY After World War II, critical theorists feared that their wartime nightmare about “total administration,” “the culture industry,” and “instrumental rationality” had come true in the affluent “one-dimensional society” of the 1950s and early 1960s. In their view, the consequences of postwar affluence and the capital-labor compromise—automobiles, suburbs, shopping centers, televisions—translated bourgeois values into the culture of mass consumption and integrated the working class into the system. The new order appeared to evaporate the cultural space for critical thought and action and oppositional strategies. Liberals, too, heralded a society without conflict. The trends toward educational expansion, increased meritocracy, new informational technologies, service sector growth, social and political pluralism,

144


consumerism, state welfare provisioning, Keynesian economic policy, and diminished class conflict were interpreted as constituting a qualitative rupture with industrial capitalism. The United States had seemingly unlocked the secrets of permanent economic growth and of effective technocratic management of its remaining social divisions and problems. Soon the rest of the world would follow the “lead” nation into the new “postindustrial” terrain of societalwide abundance, a universal middle class, and the end of ideology. Most liberal social theorists declared that the old models of capitalism and socialism were exhausted. But postwar thinkers greatly overestimated the prospects of the socioeconomic reorganization. In the early 1970s the highly competitive international economic climate eroded abundance and ended the capitallabor accord, while racial violence, urban blight, Vietnam protests, political scandals, resource dependency, deindustrialization, sharper class inequality, increased poverty, and other severe social, economic, and political dislocations and conflicts put an end to arguments about postindustrial consensus and legitimacy. By the late 1970s free-market thinking returned with a vengeance in the ruins of welfare state politics. Neoconservative, conservative, and even “neoliberal” thinkers now praise the virtues of a service economy driven by informational technologies and by highly mobile, post-Fordist business organizations free of government and union interference. In the new sociopolitical climate postmodernists speak of a hypertechnocratic society lacking potential for emancipatory change and demanding entirely new theories and politics. However, the question should be posed whether they, like their postwar counterparts, have been too hasty in their claims about a fundamental epochal rupture. Is postmodern theory a reaction to the ending of the postwar conjuncture rather than to an epochal transformation? Might it be nothing more than a fleeting response to the conservative hegemony in the West during the late 1970s and 1980s? Does the idea of an “end to history” make sense in the context of the events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the war in the Persian Gulf, and the resurgence of nationalism, ethnic conflict, and class polarization all over the world? Will a sharp change in the political economy and consequent new sociopolitical dynamics suddenly make the approach obsolete? Does postmodern theory express the dawn of a new era or is it just playful subversion responding to a narrow range of transitory conditions? Postmodern approaches cannot really address such questions. Regardless of the affirmative tones about pluralistic discourse, postmodernists’ dismissive claims about the bankruptcy of modern social theory establishes, implicitly, the hegemony of their own position over competing accounts of the historical conjuncture. More importantly, their


145

rejection of the basic assumptions of social theory destroys the discursive basis for engaging other theories. The legitimacy of social theory, and for that matter all social science, as a mode of discourse, rests on the idea that the status of theories ought to rely, ultimately, on systematic methods and inquiries that determine their truth or falsity on empirical grounds. If all social theories are viewed merely as perspectives or narratives, then they are likely to be discussed only on the basis of tastes, material and ideal interests, values, and instrumental consequences rather than on how accurately they portray social conditions. The issue, here, is not that social theory or research could ever be evaluated solely on the basis of empirical criteria. We agree with critical epistemologists that views of the social world are never free of the effects of values, interests, and other presuppositional factors. Our point is, instead, the need to preserve the ideal of truth seeking; by this we mean emphasizing the normative primacy of intersubjective procedures of empirical inquiry and systematic conceptualization in discussions about the evaluation of and choices between competing theories (Antonio 1991). Analogous to critiques of classical Marxism’s homogeneous proletarian subject, postmodernists can be accused of an essentialist reduction of discontinuous, nonlinear, and divergent cultural phenomena into a single “dedifferentiated” totality. Given the extreme segmentation of contemporary society, even Jameson’s (1984, 1991) somewhat qualified view of postmodernism as a “cultural dominant” is merely a hypothesis calling for systematic conceptualization and inquiry. Although modernity and postmodernity are not self-evident entities, they are generally undertheorized in the postmodern literature. This is not at all surprising because postmodernists fail to distinguish historically based global theories from the objectionable types of master narratives and grand narratives and thus reject all forms of systematization per se. Yet, rejecting the fundamental assumptions of modern social theory robs postmodernists of the theoretical and empirical resources needed to gain adequate historical perspective about their own views and to avoid reproduction of the homogenized totalities of “dialectic of Enlightenment” critical theorists and postindustrial liberals. Theorizing about postmodernity demands a periodization and geographical localization of an extremely broad and complex set of phenomena. The project calls for elaboration of the societal network of interdependent institutions (e.g., economy, polity, forms of association, and systems of belief ); analysis of the key developmental processes and features that produce the major institutional and sociopolitical changes, or “postmodernization”; description of the ensemble of artistic, musical, architectural, and other postmodern

146


cultural forms; and inquiry into the complex of sociocultural conditions (e.g., dedifferentiation, flatness, indifference, loss of distance) producing the postmodern structure of experience. These theories would synchronically map society’s core social structures and diachronically elaborate its central developmental patterns and processes. Also, by definition, postmodern implies comparative knowledge about the key continuities and differences between the two eras. Theories of postmodernity, therefore, require equally systematic understanding of modernity. The discordant mix of decentralizing and centralizing tendencies and the web of national and international interdependencies have never been greater than they are today. Postmodern portrayals of transnational cultural changes themselves demonstrate the need for new global theories, as do the trends toward increased internationalization of the economy, transnational despoliation of the environment, and restructuring of the world political order. The current features of corporate capitalism, with its exceedingly complex mix of bureaucratic and post-Fordist organizational forms (characterized by highly centralized financial control and widely dispersed organizational loci) and its vast diversity of information production and management (with their selective secrecy and rampant propaganda), demand broad and balanced consideration of macroscopic structural and cultural conditions. Global theoretical practices, consequently, are still valuable means for addressing the holistic problematics inherent in today’s major social crises, transformations, interdependencies, and solidarities. Specialized types of social science, postpositivist metatheories, new theories and politics of the local and particular, and postmodernist criticism itself all provide resources to help contemporary global theorists avert the dogmatic features of their classical predecessors. We also believe that these same conditions call for new critical theories of society. Giving up the historical basis for social and cultural criticism without a careful reckoning of the prospects for social change merely leads to resignation, irrationalism, and demagoguery. Against postmodern aestheticism and vitalism, we believe that the method of seeking critical standpoints and modes of discourse historically rooted in existing social structures, values, symbols, and movements, or, at least, in emergent or potential social conditions, is still a valuable legacy of modern theory. New critical social theories must be anchored normatively in differentiated historical subjects who are capable of forming themselves into publics (through their communicative capacities and selforganizational activities) rather than in the homogenous will of emancipatory subjectivity. Any reconstruction of the conception of


147

collective emancipation should be sensitive to the postmodern themes of plurality, difference, and heterogeneity. To gain deeper historical perspective, missing in postindustrial, dialectic of Enlightenment, and postmodernist thought, critical theorists should read events of the current conjuncture in the context of the long duration of social and cultural development. This type of knowledge prevents amnesia about tendencies of past societies that may recur again, creates distance from the immediacy of the present, and assists in the always uncertain process of sorting narrow and transitory historical events from those that arise out of enduring conditions or structures with widespread intergenerational impact. The upheavals and changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union prove that even four decades of authoritarian control did not destroy oppositional thought or the historical bonds of national, ethnic, and religious community. It should remain an open question, subject to critical inquiry, whether cultural and human resources exist within capitalist societies, especially the United States, for a reawakening, renewal, and extension of democracy. However superficial and contradictory the state of contemporary culture, it is doubtful that historical experience has been so obliterated that all traces of solidarity and struggle have been eliminated. Normative ideals are rooted in the history of specific cultural communities. If critical theorists are serious about attaining a public, they must carry out “constructive” (as well as deconstructive) genealogies to uncover and reformulate historical sources of communal memory, identity, and culture; emergent or possible sources of solidarity: and unmet needs and suffering that could be translated into critical normative languages serving the interest of social justice and wider democracy. We are not suggesting that postmodern criticism simply be dismissed out of hand. Postmodernists have confronted novel and important social and cultural conditions. They challenge social theorists to address questions about new technologies, new configurations of mass culture, new modes of experience, and expression, new forms of interpersonal relationship and identity, and new types of cultural criticism. Ironically, despite their attacks on totalizing theories, postmodernists have themselves revived the global discussion of modernity and generated productive discussion about the broadest issues and crises. Their playful criticism has also been a subversive force against academic pretentiousness, formalism, and isolation. Furthermore, postmodernists point to a very real disintegration and decline of public life and public discourse in the professionally compartmentalized and instrumentalized worlds of the social sciences and humanities as well as in broader society. In this regard, they have

148


remained in the critical tradition of classical social theory and of recent theorists who have continually attempted to renew the tradition. Postmodernists, ultimately, dramatize the need for social theorists, scientists, and critics to rethink the connection of their work to the broader society and to reflect critically on the presuppositions, meaning, and purposes of their practices. If the postmodernist challenge is taken up, their hostile parries might ultimately lead to a renewal of the very types of social theory they have declared to be in eclipse.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research was supported by Kansas General Research Grant #3216– 0038. We wish to thank David Dickens for criticisms of earlier versions of this chapter and Steven Best for his criticism of earlier versions and ongoing discussion.

NOTES 1. This chapter builds on ideas in our forthcoming book Theorizing Modernity (Antonio and Kellner, in press). The approaches to social theory (i.e., classical theory, modern theory, and postmodern theory) discussed in this chapter are ideal types. Obviously, we cannot take account of all the complex, differentiated, and conflictual features of the extremely broad discourses they signify. Following the conventional meaning, we use “classical social theory” to refer to the Western intellectual tradition emerging with the works of Saint-Simon, Comte, and the young Marx through the period of Durkheim, Weber, and Mead. Like postmodernists today, they framed broad theories of epochal change articulating what they believed to be the core features of the new era. Classical theorists also articulated the basic metatheoretical assumptions of social theory and sociological inquiry as part of their substantive efforts to theorize about modernity. We use “modern social theory” to refer to these early theorists and to later thinkers who followed their lead. Although today’s modern social theorists express a much wider range of methods and substantive approaches, they still accept the core metatheoretical assumptions of their predecessors. The term “postmodern thought” refers to approaches that execute a partial or complete break with modern social theory. Although we attempt to explicate the meaning of postmodern thought in this chapter, this conception poses particular difficulties because conventional usages have diverged widely and sometimes retain important themes from the modern tradition. 2. In our critique, we emphasize primarily, but not exclusively, the more extreme postmodern approaches, by which we mean the work of thinkers such as Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Kroker and Cook (1986), who speak of a radical rupture in history and of the complete exhaustion of modern culture, politics, and theory.


149

Other theorists often associated with the postmodern movement, such as Jameson (1984), and Laclau, and Mouffe (1985), combine postmodern and modern elements in their thought and retain some optimism about the continued effectiveness of social criticism and progressive social movements anchored in modern cultural resources. See Best and Kellner (1991) for discussion and analysis of the many varieties of postmodern thought. 3. We employ the term “global” to refer to the broad purview of classical theories and their emphasis on macroscopic structures and processes. Classical theorists asked several types of global questions: What is the structure of this particular society as a whole? Where does this society stand in human history? What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? (Mills 1961, pp. 6–7). Also, as we argue, they addressed transsocietal matters related to the rise of modernity in the West. Our use of “global” should be distinguished, however, from contemporary usages referring exclusively to transnational social and economic structures, for example, Robertson (1990). 4. Although Foucault was critical of representational thought and implied that a postmodern episteme began emerging in the 1950s (1989, p. 30), he primarily addressed the emergence of modernity and emphasized rationalization rather than postmodern fragmentation. Moreover, in his later work, he developed more positive notions of the subject (see note 9). 5. The dogmatic and critical themes are difficult to present because they pervade classical theory, appearing throughout the works of individual theorists and even on single pages of their texts. Therefore, we cannot unambiguously identify particular theorists as either critical or dogmatic. For detailed discussion of these contrasting themes and for more concrete examples from the literature, see Antonio and Kellner (1992). A much more comprehensive version of this argument is presented in our forthcoming book Theorizing Modernity, in which the significant differences and common themes and positions of the various thinkers are scrutinized. 6. Marx’s own discussion of subjectivity was contradictory. Throughout his mature work, he implied a proletarian philosophy of the subject and a much more differentiated individuality (emergent from capitalism’s material wealth, cultural richness, and social complexity). Marx expressed both essentialist and historical views of the subject. However, the fashionable criticism of the homogeneous collective (proletarian) subject, which has often been used by postmodernists and other critics to dismiss Marx’s work completely, fails to draw out this contrasting side of Marx’s work (Antonio 1990). 7. The premiere theorist of the social self, Mead was particularly emphatic about this point. He states: “The fact that all selves are constituted by or in terms of the social process, and are individual reflections of it…[is not incompatible with] the fact that every individual self has its own peculiar individuality, its own unique pattern…since, that is, each is differently or uniquely related to that whole process, and occupies its own essentially unique focus of relations therein—the structure of each is differently constituted by this pattern from the way in which the structure of any other is so constituted” (Mead 1967, pp. 201–202). But the idea that modernity generates richer individuality was stressed by many classical theorists. For example, Marx (1963, pp. 122–123) argued that modern social complexity with its specialized networks of social social cooperation and cultural diversity generates

150


autonomous and highly articulated individualities with differentiated needs and attributes. 8. Although an affinity exists with the postmodern critique of rationalism, the critical theory of the Frankfurt school, even during its “dialectic of Enlightenment” stage, stayed closer to Marxism by retaining conceptions of material substructure and of an active subject (see Dews 1987; Kellner 1989). 9. It should be noted that near the end of his life, Foucault reappraised the Enlightenment and increasingly focused on ethics, freedom, and “technologies of the self.” Likewise, Lyotard, in the 1980s, took a more positive stance toward the Enlightenment and Kantian philosophy in particular, moving away from the aesthetic individualism that informed some of his earlier works. Yet, the changes themselves suggest that these thinkers were aware that their earlier positions are problematic. For more on these developments, see Best and Kellner (1991).

REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor W. 1984. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Christian Lenhardt. London: Routledge. Antonio, Robert J. 1990. “The Decline of the Grand Narrative of Emancipatory Modernity: Crisis or Renewal in Neo-Marxian Theory?” Pp. 88–116 in Frontiers of Social Theory, edited by George Ritzer. New York: Columbia University Press. ____. 1991. “Postmodern Storytelling vs. Pragmatic Truth-Seeking: The Discursive Basis of Social Theory.” Sociological Theory, 9:154–163. Antonio, Robert J., and Douglas Kellner. 1992. “Metatheorizing Historical Rupture: Classical Theory and Modernity.” Pp. 88–106 in Studies in Metatheorizing in Sociology, edited by George Ritzer. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. ____. In Press. Theorizing Modernity. London: Sage. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983a. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Phillip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e). ____. 1983b. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. Translated by Paul Foss, PaulPatton, and John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e). ____. 1988. The Ecstasy of Communication. Translated by Bernard Schutze and Coline Schutze. New York: Semiotext(e). ____. 19 90. Fatal Strategies. Translated by Philip Beitchman and W.G.J.Niesluschowski. New York: Semiotext(e)/Pluto. Bell, Daniel. 1976. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. 1991. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogation. New York: Guilford Press. Carroll, David. 1987. Paraesthetics. New York: Metheun. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dewey, John. 1988. John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 4, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John, and James H.Tufts. 1983. John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 7, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.


151

Dews, Peter. 1987. Logics of Disintegration. London: Verso. Durkheim, Emile. 1964. The Division of Labor in Society. Translated by George Simpson. New York: Free Press. Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage Books. ____. 1977. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. ____. 1989. Foucault Live, edited by Sylvére Lotringer. Translated by John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e). Fraser, Nancy, and Linda Nicholson. 1988. “Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism.” Theory, Culture, and Society 5:373–394. Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse on Modernity. Translated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Adorno Theodor W. 1972. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Seaburg Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1984. “Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146:53–92. ____. 1991. Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kellner, Douglas. 1989. Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity. London and New York: Polity and Johns Hopkins University Press. Kloppenberg, James. 1988. Uncertain Victory. New York: Oxford University Press. Kroker, Arthur, and David Cook. 1986. The Postmodern Scene. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Translated by Winston Moore and Paul Cammack. London: Verso. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lyotard, Jean-François, and Jean Loup Thébaud. 1985. Just Gaming. Translated by Wlad Godzick. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marx, Karl. 1963. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers. ____. 1967. “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State,” Pp. 151–202 in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, edited by Lloyd Easton and Kurt Guddert. New York: Anchor Books. ____. 1973. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Vintage Books. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1964. The German Ideology. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Mead, George H. 1967. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: Phoenix Books. Mills, C.Wright. 1961. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Grove Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Translated by Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage Books. Parsons, Talcott. 1971. The System of Modern Societies. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Robertson, Roland. 1990. “Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as the Central Concept.” Theory, Culture, and Society 7:15–30. Shusterman, Richard. 1988. “Postmodernist Aestheticism: A New Moral Philosophy.” Theory, Culture and Society 5:337–355.

152


Simmel, Georg. 1964. Conflict and the Web of Group-Affiliations. Translated by Kurt Wolff. New York: Free Press. Weber, Max. 1949. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Edited and translated by Edward A.Shils and Henry A.Finch. New York: Free Press. ____. 1958. From Max Weber. Edited and translated by H.H.Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. ____. 1975. Roscher and Knies: The Logical Problems of Historical Economics. Translated by R.I.Frank. London: New Left Books.

PART II

POSTMODERN RESEARCH METHODS

CHAPTER 7

Semiotics and Postmodernism M.Gottdiener

An understanding of semiotics is essential for an appreciation of postmodernism. Not only do the arguments of well-known postmodern thinkers, such as Derrida, rely on a knowledge of semiotics, but the entire trajectory of thought that begins with poststructuralism draws on the internal critiques of semiotic models. Because the debates surrounding the demise of structuralism and the rise of postmodern ideas were centered in France, particularly in the milieu of the Parisian intellectual, taking up popularized postmodernist ideas without an understanding of this context can result in serious blunders. This is so even if the difficult written texts can be read in the original French. Many of the commentaries on postmodernism by sociologists that have appeared recently lack just such a context and consequently an informed understanding of semiotics. Postmodernism as depicted by theorists and critics in the United States is almost exclusively about deconstructionism and the problematic of representation in a postmodern world, where truth-claims are regarded as lacking validity because language itself is viewed as a mode of representation. This particular version of poststructuralism follows the epistemological critiques of Derrida, Lyotard, and, in the cultural realm, Baudrillard. Furthermore, such arguments are based on a particular version of semiotics, namely, the approach of Saussure, which is absolutely central to the postmodern attack on knowledge and representation. Among the sociologists in the United States following this tradition are Lemert (1979), Denzin (1986), Manning (1988), and Brown (1987). 155

156


The arguments of the French postmodernists should really be called post-Saussurian. Their ideas, such as Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal, have been appropriated uncritically by many American postmodernists, without benefit of discussion, as if they had sprung, like Athena, full-blown from some Gallic source of intrinsic truth. It may come as a surprise that the deconstructionist or post-Saussurean tradition is not the only model of the sign or the only understanding we possess regarding representation and its problematic. This chapter addresses the subject of semiotics and traces ideas in France that eventually developed into what is commonly viewed as postmodernism. In addition, however, by keeping the focus on semiotics itself, I shall discuss alternative approaches to the analysis of culture, for the present largely ignored, which stand in alternative relation to the received orthodoxy of deconstruction and the Saussurean tradition. In the concluding section, I shall discuss how semiotics can be applied to the sociological analysis of culture despite the problematic of representation and its various epistemological critiques.

THE ORIGINS OF SEMIOTICS: SAUSSURE AND PEIRCE Ancient civilizations possessed medical practitioners, some of whom were successful because the penalty for failure in cases involving royalty was usually death. These ancient physicians lacked a germ theory of disease and treated all illnesses by their symptoms. For every sign of distress— coated tongue, for example, or skin pallor—there were certain prescribed remedies that apparently had some effect. From this ancient practice arose the first definition of the Greek notion of semiotics—the study of medical signs, or symptomology. More recently semiotics has become a mode of knowledge, of understanding the world as a system of relations whose basic unit is the sign; that is, semiotics studies the nature of representation. As Eco (1976) has observed, the sign is “a lie”; it is something that stands for something else. At almost precisely the turn of the twentieth century, two academics on two separate continents began independent investigations into the relation between knowledge and signs. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857– 1913), a professor of linguistics at Laussane, Switzerland, and Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), a philosopher at the University of Chicago, independently developed the basis for the modern study of semiotics, or the “life of signs in society.” Both men explored the problem of knowledge arising from the idea that our modes of understanding the world depend on language, itself understood as an organized system of

Semiotics and Postmodernism

157

signs. However, their respective semiotic theories were quite different. I shall argue below that Peircian semiotics implies a type of cultural analysis that offers a fruitful alternative to the better known Saussurean tradition that forms the basis for prominent postmodern modes of inquiry, such as deconstructionism, Baudrillardian reductionism, and contemporary textual analysis. From its origins, semiotic analysis proceeded by explicating particular models of the sign. The need for a clear model of the sign should be kept in mind when reading so-called semiotic analyses in contemporary social science literature that are simply modes of discourse, or jargon, lacking a systematic specification of the signifying process. Ferdinand de Saussure

My discussion of Saussure and Peirce will be brief and confined to the immediate question of sign models. Saussure, a linguist, was concerned with developing a general theory of natural language. Whereas each spoken language uses different words, words in every language are used to denote much the same things. That is, all societies have culture in common, even if their languages differ. Saussure employed the concept of the sign to specify a means of studying these commonalities. According to Saussure, a sign consists of two separate components: a signifier, or the acoustic image of the spoken word as heard by the recipient of a vocal message, and a signified, or the meaning called forth in the mind of the recipient resulting from the stimulation of the signifier. The sign, for Saussure, is a dual unity of signifier and signified. Unity is effected by culture, where the assignment of some signifier, such as the word chair, to some signified, in this case, a piece of furniture upon which to sit, what a particular community of users understand a “chair” to mean, occurs by cultural prescription. The system of meanings and their words, along with general rules of combination and protocols of usage, is known as language. Hence language is a structure that codifies words and their meanings. Saussure called this structure, which exists outside the individual, la langue. Through training as children we learn, or are socialized into, a language, which we then call on to convey our thoughts. The individual act of discourse Saussure called la parole, or speech. Saussure recognized that language possessed structure and that it was a phenomenon of culture. This led to several other recognitions. The structure of language was doubly articulated. That is, there were two distinct ways meaning was conveyed via structure. First, any utterance consists of a chain of words that unfolds over time, or diachronically, according

158


to the syntagmatic axis. Each of the words conveys the meaning of the sentence by existing within a context of other words. The set of rules governing the placement of words is known as syntax, and the meaning that emerges from the place of each word in the sentence occurs metonomically, which is another name for the diachronic axis. For example, the collection of words “boy, dog, the, the, fed” possesses meaning when we arrange them syntagmatically as “The boy fed the dog” according to socially prescribed rules of syntax. In addition to the syntagmatic axis, each use of a word is an occasion to choose from a set of associated words. The presence of any given word, such as “boy,” implies the existence of many absent words that could similarly have been deployed, such as “youth,” “male,” “tyke,” and so on. The absent but associated words constitute the paradigmatic axis of meaning. Correct usages of words are governed by the rules of semantics. Furthermore, because the meaning of words arises in part by contrast to what is absent (by what each word calls forth according to its associations), this axis is also known as the metaphorical dimension or the synchronic aspect, that is, distinctions frozen in time. The syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes comprise the structure of language, and their presence constitutes a system of signification that arises due to the combinatory rules of association and juxtaposition that is called a code (Eco 1976, p. 8). Semioticians have shown how other cultural manifestations, such as cuisine, can also be considered systems of signification because they possess a structure much like that of language (Lévi-Strauss 1969). For Saussure, meaning is created diachronically and synchronically by precisely the same mechanism, namely, difference. What is juxtaposed word by word and what is chosen and what is not chosen, or associated and deferred, is defined by difference. Meaning, for Saussure, is always produced by the operation of difference according to the two axes of juxtaposition and association. Later we shall also see how this assumption is important for deconstructionism. Saussure’s approach was concerned with the problematic of communication as it was based in linguistics. But the second global dimension to his work concerns his interest in language as a manifestation of culture. For all languages, the unity of the signifier with the signified is a cultural convention. This unity is instantaneous in the mind of the receiver, but is a conditioned response to the stimulus of the acoustic image. Saussure’s sign, then, is conditioned by cultural processes. One of the most important aspects of a sign for Saussure is its arbitrary, conventional nature. There are no universal, transcendent causes that compel the assignment of a particular signifier to a signified. Rather, in language, the social process of interaction among a community of


159

speakers defines appropriate signifiers for every signified and also regulates the range of meanings for each signifier. A second feature of Saussure’s scheme is his argument that signs are used for communication, that is, they are intentional. As Eco (1976, p. 14) remarks, According to Saussure, signs “express” ideas and provided that he did not share a Platonic interpretation of the term “idea,” such ideas must be mental events that concern a human mind. Thus the sign is implicitly regarded as a communicative device taking place between two human beings intentionally aiming to communicate or to express something.

Finally, Saussure also suggested that culture is a pan-linguistic phenomenon. That is, semiotics, or what he called “semiology,” was a way of studying all cultural forms because they too are structured like a language. In brief, the features of axiological structure, metonymy and metaphor, conventionality, and the sign as the unity of the signifier and the signified can be applied to all aspects of culture, for example, to fashion, architecture, or cuisine. Although he did not develop this argument, others did, including the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the literary critic Roland Barthes, as we shall see below. Charles Sanders Peirce

Peirce was a philosopher at the University of Chicago during a time when American pragmatics b ecame a new and important philosophical force. Peirce shared several similarities with Saussure, whom he did not know. He too developed an approach to the study of signs, which he called “semiotics”—the name that came to define the field (as opposed to Saussure’s “semiology”). He also, like Saussure, never systematized his writings on the subject in the form of a book. We receive the work of both men through their collected papers and notes from students; in Saussure’s case, the famous Cours de linguistique generate published originally in 1915, and in Peirce’s case, his collected papers (1931). Beyond the rather amazing temporal coincidence and the general commonalities listed above, their work was very different. Peirce was not a linguist but a philosopher, and he was concerned not with language per se, but with how people think. In particular, his interest was in the concept of truth-claims. Realizing that the understanding of language was essential to any study of truth, he therefore sought to classify language as a mode of information rather than as a mode of communicative interaction

160


between two or more active subjects. Peirce’s semiotics was a theory of logic that depended on language structure. For Peirce, truth-claims, or meaning, arise through language only when an idea or concept can be related to something else already existing in the mind of the interpreter. This is very much like the notion of the signified in Saussure. Unlike Saussure, however, Peirce conceived of the sign as a three-part relation: a vehicle that conveys an idea to the mind, which he called the representamen; another idea that interprets the sign, which he called the interpretant; and an object for which the sign stands. As Peirce (1931, p. 1.339) suggests, A sign stands for something to the idea which it produces, or modifies. Or it is a vehicle conveying into the mind something from without. That for which it stands is called its object, that for which it conveys its meaning; and the idea to which it gives rise, its interpretant.

Saussure was concerned with language as a mode of communication; he did not consider, in his system, whether or not an objective world was essential to language. Peirce, in contrast, was no idealist. He believed the real world existed and that it played a role in signification. For example, he states immediately after his definition of the sign that “ the object of the first representation can be nothing but a representation of which the first representation is the interpretant” (1931, p. 1.339). But behind the series of interpretants, there always existed an “absolute object.” In this very significant difference, we are able to specify why Peircian semiotics implies an analysis of culture that includes its material forms, whereas Saussurean semiology possesses formidable contradictions when applied to nonlinguistic aspects of culture. According to Eco (1976, p. 94), I suggest that the essential lesson of Peirce is that the Object is never obliterated; it is only absent (effaced?). And this provisional absence or effacement of the Object is in turn the aspect of Peirce’s semiotics which motivates the distinction between language and culture—which makes language/culture dialectically complementary—just as Saussure would have wished, had he persisted in investigating what enabled him to posit langue/parole not just as a distinction but an integrated distinction, as organic solidarity.

Peirce was a thinker who arranged his concepts according to threes. His model of the sign, as we have seen, encompassed three entities, although strictly speaking, as Eco points out above, the object world lies in the background and semiosis consists of the relation between the representatem, which is very much like Saussure’s signifier, and the interpretant, much like Saussure’s signified. For Peirce, however, the sign


161

“stands for” some object only because the relation between representation and the object world is mediated by the interpretant. Peirce conceived of the interpretant as a “psychological event” in the mind of the interpreter. It is an idea, or another sign, which helps explicate the first sign by way of contrast. But, as a sign, it too can be divided into its triadic elements. Hence semiosis for Peirce was a process of infinite regression. The latter idea was taken up by the deconstructionists in their own critique of Saussure. Meaning is always deferred, always in a state of becoming through contrast between sign and sign (its interpretant). As Eco notes, Peirce’s model of the sign relates language to culture in a more global way than did Saussure. One aspect of this distinction is manifested in their respective classification of signs. For Saussure, there is only one sign—the unity of the signifier and the signified. Saussure’s sign is part of a system of communication and is motivated (intentional), even if it is arbitrarily fixed by social convention. Peirce, in contrast, following his passion for triads, conceives of the sign as assuming one of three forms: 1. A symbol is “a sign which would lose the character which renders it a sign if there was no interpretant” (Peirce 1955, p. 104). It is closest to what Saussure meant by the sign—a vehicle that stands for something else which is understood as an idea in the mind of the interpretant. For Peirce too the symbol is conventional and regulated by culture; it is a sign by virtue of some law or rule. 2. An icon is a sign that conveys an idea by virtue of its very close reproduction of the actual object or event. International traffic signs, which must transcend particular languages to convey an idea directly, are examples of icons, as are the religious pictures used in the Russian Orthodox church. Icons are weakly motivated or unmotivated, a distinction not found in the system of Saussure. 3. An index is an unmotivated sign. Its meaning is established in the mind of the interpretant through experience or pragmatic understanding of the material world. The association of lightning and thunder is an index. We see the lightning and anticipate the thunder. We “understand” the meaning of this index as “a storm.” Conditioned responses, such as the ringing of a bell and the presentation of food, are also indexes. Peirce’s index, unlike Saussure’s concept of the sign, allows for the nonhuman evocation of signs and also defines systems of signification, such as those built on icons and indexes, that are not systems of communication (that lack the intentionality of the emitter). A system of objects, such as dress, may be a system of signification but not of communication in the Peircian approach. Hence, not all cultural systems are true languages for Peirce.

162


Peirce’s triadic system of semiotics is more powerful than Saussure’s, but it is not without its own problems. Peirce did not make clear, for example, what happens to the triadic conception when the object does not exist, such as the sign “a unicorn” or in the case of an actual lie (see Eco 1976, p. 58). Saussure understood the unity of signifier and signified as a mechanism of culture. Ultimately these rules were grounded in a cultural code, which Saussure called language and which was the rulebearing structure that produced a system of signification. Peirce’s rules of correspondence are culturally conceived only with regard to symbols. It is less clear what the function of social codes becomes in the Peircian system. Peirce attempted an elaboration of signs to deal with the subtle problems of inference, but his classification scheme is so complex that it has not been used by subsequent semioticians. The set of correspondences that would allow for a codified system of signification requires further refinement than that provided by Peirce. In sum, however, Peircian semiotics improves on Saussure in the following ways. First, it acknowledges the existence of the object world, thus avoiding idealism. Second, it provides a powerful classification of signs that includes unmotivated signification and hence deals with all of culture—not just with language or systems of communication but with all systems of signification. Third, because all symbols are interpreted by another idea that is itself a sign, there is no clearly defined signified correlated specifically to a signifier. Meaning is always a volatile process of interpretation. As we shall see, this Peircian idea became a central tenant of deconstructionism and the critique of Saussure that Derrida calls the “metaphysics of presence.”

APPLICATIONS AND ELABORATIONS OF SEMIOTICS Since the 1920s, hundreds of semioticians have labored to improve on the ideas of Saussure and Peirce (see Eco 1976; Hervey 1982). Semiotics became an international phenomenon with important schools in Czecheslovakia, Greece, Italy, Canada, and, most prominently, France. In this section I will consider some of the main applications of the semiotic approach. To date, Saussure has been the more dominant figure in semiotics, having an especially profound influence on French intellectual life. Peirce did not enjoy much of a following, with the possible exception of the brilliant University of Chicago semiotician Charles Morris (1946), until recently. Saussure’s concept of la langue influenced Durkheim, particularly with regard to the latter’s concept of collective representation, and became, after its encounter with Marxism and Freud’s theories, the basis for the French version of structuralism. Among the French, the two


163

most important applications of semiotics are found in the works of Roland Barthes and Algirdas Greimas. Roland Barthes

Perhaps the most significant post-World War II book on semiotics is Barthes’s Elements of Semiology (1967). In this elaboration of Saussure, Barthes developed an extremely influential theory of the sign. According to Barthes, a sign, as articulated by Saussure, is principally a form of denotation. That is, the signifier names directly a particular object or marks out plainly to what it is referring. In addition, however, signs can also refer to culturally determined implications or connotations, which have additional meanings. Thus, the word axe denotes a particular tool for chopping wood. The possession of an axe in some cultures, however, may also connote a high social status. Hence the meaning of objects involves higher-order levels of connotation that are linked in more substantive ways to cultural processes than merely through the mechanisms of denotation detailed by Saussure. For Barthes, the sign can itself become a signifier of another sign, a connotation or second-order sign, that signifies a cultural value, such as status. For Barthes, systems of signs articulate with cultural values or ideology, producing richer structures of meaning than Saussure recognized. Barthes’s pathbreaking work on the semiotics of culture, Mythologies (1972), elaborated on this tiered view of signification and became a model for the analysis of ideologies as cultural forms. In this work, he introduces the notion of the myth. Just as a sign, the unity of the signifier and the signified, can itself be a signifier of another, connotative signified, the levels of connotation can develop further to where the connotation becomes its own referent, reaching the level of myth. So, for example, as the sign “axe” passes to the connotative level of high status, it can become linked with a state of being connoted by an ideology of high-status living that includes other associations: technological sophistication, modernization, progress, mastery of social change, and so on. In this case, the axe represents the myth of modernity with all its connotations of industrialization, wealth, and privilege, and it endows the possessor with the power of mastery over the myth. When myths are powerful forces in social organization, as both Durkheim (collective representations) and Marx (ideology) observed, material objects are less important than their connotations. Thus, the axe—what kind it is, how sharp, its utility in the field, and so on—no longer matters in the myth. What counts is mere possession or the image of the axe. Barthes’s fondness for the role of myth as image led him to

164


produce several masterpieces of cultural criticism, including case studies of professional wrestling, food, the face of Greta Garbo, and the promotion of automobiles (1972), as well as analyses of images themselves, as in his works on fashion photography (1983) and architecture (1986). In a classic example from Mythologies, Barthes discusses a picture on the cover of Paris Match of an African soldier saluting the French flag. The scene denotes an act of national allegiance and connotes military discipline, patriotism, and nationalism. Thus the image has several levels of meaning. But, for Barthes, what was most relevant was that this sign of allegiance by an African in the French army was also a signifier of colonial subservience. It constituted another sign at the higher level of myth, namely, the personification of imperialism and the French subjugation of African people. The image encapsulated “colonialism” with all its connotations, while the material reality of a staged salute—a relation between one individual and a flag—pales in comparison to the myth. Later, Jean Baudrillard seized upon this discovery of Barthes to the point of questioning whether reality exists in a society driven by such ideologically loaded images. Algirdas Greimas

Greimas is not widely known in the United States, but he is the premier semiotician in France, having recently retired from the Sorbonne. Greimas absorbed the criticisms of structuralism, which became essential to any Parisian intellectual’s work after the 1970s, but he retained his fondness for Saussure. He pursued the latter’s project to develop a general theory of semiotics that would include all systems of signification, including metalanguages of scientific discourse that have the ability to comment on and analyze object languages of the primary level of experience (1976). Greimas’s general semiotic theory, therefore, is a tool for interpretive analysis. The key in Greimasian analysis is the identification of oppositions in a text. These oppositions, in turn, constitute a code for regulating the structure of meaning in systems of signification. If the sign is most important to a Saussurian semiotic analysis, binary oppositions and the identification of codes are primary for Greimas. Greimas extended his interpretive paradigm to include the structure of social action (1976), creating a general semiotic approach to all of culture. While maintaining ties with structuralism, Greimas’s theory also acknowledges the role of individual volition. Action produces a sequence of interactions in social situations, which he considers a “narrative.” The “actant” is a formal role in any sequence of action or narrative, and the


165

whole is regulated by an “actantial grammar,” which is the structure of acceptable behaviors and interactions as regulated by the social code. For example, Greimas (1986) analyzes urban space according to spatial oppositions, such as expanse versus space, here versus elsewhere, and enclosed versus enclosing. Every particular place, or “topia,” has a meaning only because it can be contrasted by the inhabitant to a place that exists elsewhere, even in fantasy, or a “heterotopia.” Elaborate fantasy worlds, of course, are called “utopias.” These place oppositions articulate with various social values or judgments of meaning, or even ideologies, which can themselves be ordered by oppositions, such as sacred versus profane, private versus public, superior versus inferior, and masculine versus feminine. Finally, the value oppositions that Greimas applied to place can constitute codes, or what Greimas calls axiological isotopes, by structuring environments and their interpretation by users (Greimas 1986, p. 34). Greimas’s approach can be extended to other forms of culture. However, like Saussure’s, his semiotic analysis is confined to the sign, or the unity of the signifier and the signified. Since only the universe of signs exists, reality is a metaphysical concept. In this sense he differs from Peirce, Barthes, and advocates of sociosemiotics (see below). Most postmodernist examples of semiotic analysis in contemporary social inquiry are closest to Greimas’s structuralism, even if they are unaware of his scheme. There, the text is taken as the object of analysis in isolation from society, and the independent interpreter is privileged as the sole source of distinctions and observations. Much of this work remains a static, academic exercise, giving rise to the objection that anyone’s interpretation is just as good as anyone else’s because the synchronic bias of semiotics seals itself off from connections to social practice and social context. As we shall see, the sociosemiotic perspective seeks to remedy these shortcomings.

POLYSEMY, POSTMODERNISM, AND POST-SAUSSUREAN SEMIOTICS The statement “The horse is brown” combines subject and predicate to denote substance. It is the kind of straightforward example of what Saussure meant by meaning conveyed as a string of signs. Few examples of communicative discourse among humans, however, follow this simple universe of denotation and substance. Statements such as “The horse is agitated,” which impute subjective and even pejorative states to subjects, are complex utterances that are open to interpretation. A receiver of such a message, for example, may observe the same horse and disagree. The truth-value of the statement can be questioned. When truth-values are

166


thrown into doubt by language, an epistemological crisis can result. This issue was precisely the concern of Peirce, who labored hard to establish conditions under which language could convey absolute knowledge, assuming that absolute knowledge can be attained in some sense. The complexity of language and the relation of utterances to truthclaims was not a concern of Saussure. The latter posited the existence of a structure, la langue, that exists in the minds of socialized residents of society and that instantly links signifiers with signifieds. Meaning was a simple matching game. Structuralists, such as Lévi-Strauss, took such correspondences to great heights in explaining social phenomena. The Saussurean model was radically undermined in a brilliant critique by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1976), who, by so doing, also helped bury the structuralist enterprise. Derrida criticized Saussure’s assumptions about language and correspondences for subscribing to a “metaphysics of presence.” By this he meant to underscore the fallacy of conceiving of signs as the simple unity of signifier and signified through the mechanism of la langue. For Derrida, there are no one-to-one correspondences, and signifiers are always open to interpretation. More specifically, Derrida refers to Saussure’s assumption of correspondences as assuming there exists a transcendental signified that can circumscribe the meaning of any signifier. Recall that in Peirce’s model one interpretant always led to another, one sign was always interpreted by another sign, and so on. As it turns out, Derrida was influenced by Peirce at a time when the attack on Saussure and all of structuralism was raging in France. As Derrida states (1976, pp. 48–49), Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified, which, at one time or another, would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign. I have identified logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence as the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire for such a signified. Now Peirce considers the indefiniteness of reference as the criterion that allows us to recognize that we are indeed dealing with a system of signs. The thing itself is a sign.

Actually Derrida was voicing a complaint against Saussure’s model of semiotics that was commonly dealt with by other semioticians. As early as the 1950s, Roland Barthes, for example, discussed the problems raised by the presence of polysemy, namely, the ambiguous nature of the signifier and the possibility (likelihood, actually) that any given signifier would be interpreted as linked to a different signified by different people. Circumstance and context in communication count for so much that meaning is always volatile, and any putative suggestion of a transcendental signified, as in Saussure, seems ignorant of the basic facts of human discourse.


167

It was for this reason that Barthes turned his attention to the social techniques that constrained meaning, that roped it in according to welldefined codes of interpretation. Prior to his conversion to poststructuralism in the 1970s, Barthes, like Foucault, was more concerned with the issue of power and how it operated to constrain the volatility of polysemic discourse. He called the mechanisms of normalization and control of language logotechniques. In his study of fashion (1983), for example, he showed how the seemingly incredible variety of appearance choices were actually constrained by the language of fashion reporting. Using aleatory mechanisms, fashion linked signifiers of appearance with signifiers of status and desirable psychological states. Such writing utilizes the chain of signifiers observed by Peirce for a very distinct purpose by channeling the flow of meaning through logotechniques to make the desired associations between the image of a commodity and the social codes of status or even sexual desire. Lévi-Strauss (1963) was also not immune to the problem of polysemy. He discovered its operation as a phenomenon of status. In a study of the tribal settlement space of the Winnebago tribe, he observed that, although there was a dominant conception of this space that interpreted it as a meaningful cosmological entity, there was also a second competing conception of this space that belonged to the lower class of the tribe. In short, the same signifiers possessed different signifieds, and these in turn were structured by the class and status divisions of the society. Very much the same source of polysemy exists in advanced societies, where the divisions are even more complex, making interpretive schemes highly fragmented. The discovery of polysemy, or what Eastern European semioticians such as Bakhtin (1982) called the multivocal aspect of the sign, was the undoing of formal structuralist semiotics. Among pure semioticians, only Greimas, Eco, and Bakhtin have attempted to deal with the challenge of polysemy. Virtually all other semioticians who worked from the model of Saussure, such as Barthes, quickly abandoned semiotics for deconstructionism. As Derrida implies, the latter asserts that meaning is a never-ending chain of interpretation and that both discourse and the text remain open-ended to free associations based on the play of difference among signifiers. There is only the text, that is, the chain of signification, and signifieds remain beyond the reach of interpretation. For deconstructionists, polysemy undermines all grand systems of meaning and interpretation. Philosophy as a system of substantiating the truth-claims of language could never be anything more than writing, and all epistemological inquiries are merely systems of representation. This position ignores the role of speech and language in everyday communication, and indeed, for Derrida, the issue is not

168


the relationship between everyday meanings and social practice but of articulating a philosophy of consciousness independent of social context. The discoveries of Barthes regarding the role of myth in society took a particularly acute turn with Baudrillard. According to Barthes, every object of use becomes encoded with its social function, so that the object itself is a sign-function. In a society where an axe signifies status in addition to being used as a tool, even if that status is simply “tool user,” the axe becomes a symbol or sign-function of status. As I noted above, Barthes was principally concerned with second-order signfunctions that he called myths. In this case, the object itself was unimportant in comparison with the image and how it functioned as a condensation point for some ideology. Baudrillard developed Barthes’s idea to an extreme. For him, the media has so pervaded our everyday life with the ideological myths of advanced capitalism that reality itself does not exist for us. We are all trapped in a hyperreality, which is defined as a universe of images. Every object, every image merely operates as a second-order sign-function of mythical proportions. What counts now is how we label people and objects, not the things themselves. Within this idealist world, we live by feeding off the images that the media constantly make for us. Meaning is encapsulated in an immense post-Saussurean world of self-referencing signifiers that make sense only because they define some difference with other signifiers. For example, in fashion, what is popular today—say, longer hemlines—is so only because its image differs from the fashions of yesterday—say, shorter hemlines. The intrinsic utility of a hemline length has long since disappeared from social consciousness. What counts today is simply the image, the signifier, created by difference in the giant system of signification known as “fashion” (Barthes 1983). Baudrillard, Barthes, Derrida, and other deconstructionists accept Peirce’s concept of infinite regress—meaning arising from the endless play of signifiers—because signs are defined by other signs. But no deconstructionist accept’s Peirce’s epistemological position that, in the end, we must acknowledge that a real world exists. Furthermore, for Peirce and other pragmatists, our knowledge of the world is ultimately useful knowledge that involves, in part, the useful manipulation of the object world. There is a contextual basis to truth-claims. All utterances and actions have consequences, and our understanding of the world is built upon such feedback. According to the epistemological position of deconstructionism, in contrast, all knowledge is representation and, as a text, is polysemic and open to various interpretations. As is well known, this position wreaks havoc with metaphysics and calls into question the Western world’s


169

notion of science, which for Derrida and others is always a form of writing. However, these insights are built up by ignoring two dimensions of reality: that it has a material basis, and that social life is based on interaction (with actions, communications, and consequences). In this fundamental sense, we see the close connection between the dominant versions of postmodernism and semiotics and their mutual basis in idealism. A number of other semioticians, while appreciating the work of Barthes on myth and Derrida’s critique of Saussure, take a different approach—for example, Greimas, Eco, and those in the Eastern European schools of Prague, Vilna, and Russia. Eco (1986, p. 84), for example, disagrees with the deconstructionist conception of meaning as the free play of signifiers. He suggests that this is a form of idealism and that meaning must always, in the final analysis, be linked to signifieds, or meaning systems operating as codes. To assert otherwise, as the deconstructionists have done, is to suggest that the entire universe of all meanings would, through unending infinite regress, be contained in every text, and there would be no point in writing or creating anything new. Postmodernists following Baudrillard also seem to suggest as much with claims that reality has disappeared and has been replaced by the hyperreal. In short, despite the dilemma of polysemy, there are constraints to meaning that reign in the free play of signifiers. Perhaps the most formidable of these is the presence of the material world itself, with its nonsemiotic processes of economics and politics. One obvious set of constraints arising from the nonsemiotic realm concerns the varied manifestations of power. As Foucault has shown, knowledge and technique controlling the mind and body are engineered into material forms and social regulations as a means of social control. But deconstructionists have little to say about power, just as they ignore social interaction. Hence, Baudrillard’s symbolic reductionism ignores the real world. It is quite surprising how many analysts in the United States have been willing to accept this extreme position. Postmodern positions have considerable value as long as we accept the Peircian assumption regarding the final constraints on sign-value as arising from the material world and, as Foucault points out, its hierarchical structures of power. Myth and the hyperreal complex of the consumer society, which is modulated and controlled by power and agency, do not obliterate everyday life. The latter still retains enough degrees of freedom for use values to reassert themselves and for subjectively defined actions to reorder the relation between the individual and society (see Lefebvre 1971; de Certeau 1984). These propositions and others are addressed by sociosemiotics, an alternative approach that

170


takes as its object of analysis the articulation between sign systems and exosemiotic processes (see Gottdiener and Lagopoulos 1986; Gottdiener 1985). One way of validating the need for sociosemiotics is to look at how semiotics has been used to date by sociologists. For the most part, semiotic terms, such as “icon,” are used as lay words without technical meaning, while the word “semiotics” itself is used as a synonym for a rather conventional form of discourse analysis (see Denzin 1987; Lemert 1979). A common error among symbolic interactionists in particular is to conflate Peirce and Saussure, thereby arriving at a thoroughly confused model of the sign (Manning 1988; Denzin 1987; Perinbanayagam 1985). Finally, there seems to be little understanding that semiotic analysis requires movement beyond the sign to a conceptualization of culture as a system of signification within which signs are elements. Thus, although some sociologists have mentioned the importance of context in the analysis of signs (Denzin 1987), they have not specified the place of context in a system of signification. The failure to understand the technical aspects of semiotics is also evident in the hypostatization of postmodern discourse under which semiotic analysis is automatically assumed to be present simply by invoking the appropriate terms, such as signifier or icon (see Fontana and Preston 1990; Denzin 1986). For example, it is suggested that Baudrillard has articulated a semiotic approach to culture (Denzin 1987) when, in fact, his approach already assumes the irrelevancy of any cultural analysis in a social period of simulation. Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal is a one-dimensional umbrella that covers all distinctions and makes analysis unnecessary. In his example of Disneyland (1983), for instance, no model of the sign or analysis of codes and systems of signification is offered. Baudrillard disposes of Disneyland quickly. It is a simulation pure and simple: “It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality [i.e., ideology], but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, no longer exists” (1983, p. 23). For Baudrillard, not only is Disneyland hyperreal, but so is all of Los Angeles, and by way of implication, so is everyplace else in the United States: “Disneyland is presented as an imaginary, in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact, all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of hyperreal and simulation” (1983, p. 23). But, many of us who live in the United States are convinced of the materiality of existence here and of the fact that social spaces are staging areas of social interaction. So, we must acknowledge that, while there is a certain truth to Baudrillard’s observation, it is a limited one. In the following section I will suggest that


171

a sociosemiotic approach can improve on this reductionist application of semiotics to culture.

SOCIOSEMIOTICS The basic premises of sociosemiotics are as follows: 1. Signs capture the articulation of universes of meaning and the material world. Behind the infinite regress of meaning there exists a real objective world or objective referent, as Peirce suggested, even if the object is a constructed element of fantasy, such as a unicorn, that exists as part of a text or material image. That is, one has to at least have seen some image of a unicorn, or some lexicographic description, to “know” what a unicorn is. Deconstructionism has never been anything more than a philosophy of consciousness. Postmodern analysis of culture based on it deals only with the conception of culture, that is, the mental image. Sociosemiotics, in contrast, accounts for the articulation of the mental and the exosemiotic, material dimension of daily life along with signifying practices within the larger social context. 2. Systems of signification are multileveled structures that contain denotative signs and, in addition, the particular cultural codes that ascribe social values to them, or the connotative ideologies of culture, as Barthes called them. For sociosemiotics, all meaning arises from this more articulated, codified dimension. The principal epistemological position of sociosemiotics is that connotation precedes denotation. Both the produced object world itself and our understanding of it derives from codified ideologies that are aspects of social practice. The latter articulation constitutes the object of analysis for socio-semiotics. In contrast, deconstruction relies on the critique of representation by an independent interpreter of culture without the need to connect with social context or daily practice. 3. Although there is a level of everyday life that is characterized by the complex connotations of the hyperreal—the modes of representation that focus on the image and its manipulation by the media, as Baudrillard claims—this does not imply that signifieds no longer exist. Meanings are themselves grounded in everyday life experience. Experience is the encounter with the material world that gives rise to and supports the value systems or codes of culture. New signifieds are constantly being created by people through social interaction and lived experience (Gottdiener 1985). Deconstructionism, in contrast, ignores social interaction and the dynamics of communication.

172


4. Signs circulate in advanced societies between the level of lived experience, their creation through use values in everyday life, and their expropriation by the hierarchical systems of power, including their use for exchange-value in the marketing of commodities (see Gottdiener 1985 and below for a more detailed discussion). Thus signs are not only symbolic expressions but also expressive symbols that are utilized as tools to facilitate social processes. 5. The sociosemiotic approach utilizes a model of the sign that deconstructs the articulation between sign-value and material life. This perspective borrows from the work of Eco (1976), who extended the ideas of Peirce, and the decomposition of the sign devised by the Danish linguist Hjelmslev (1969). The sign is composed of a signifier and a signified, or what Hjelmslev called the expression (signifier) and the content (signified). Each in turn can be divided further into a substance and a form, as indicated in Figure 7.1. With this model it is possible to describe the way cultural codes articulate with material forms. Ideology is defined according to sociosemiotics in a nontotalizing manner as the value systems of social groups. Value systems are correlated to the content of the sign, and materiality is correlated to the expression of the sign in Figure 7.1. For example, (1) The substance of the content would be overarticulated culture, that is, the culture of a society as a whole. The form of the content, in contrast, would be a specific ideology that has been codified in practice and can be materialized in the object world. (2) The form of the expression refers to the specific morphological elements that correspond to the codified ideology, whereas the substance of the expression refers to objects themselves, which correspond to codified ideology and which exist materially, even if that materiality is simply a text, in the case of fictitious objects. (These levels of the sign are indicated in Figure 7.2.). (3) Every sign is part of a system of signification, which is structured by the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes. Polysemy involves the intersection of several forms of codified ideology for any given cultural expression. Polysemy indicates that several signs exist for any given material object, and these belong to different sign sys-

FIGURE 7.1. The decompostion of the sign according to Hjemslev (Eco 1976).


173

FIGURE 7.2. The decomposition of the sign according to sociosemiotics.

tems, or axiological isotopes in Greimas’s terminology. The understanding of difference comes from an understanding of the social codes that produce different value systems or connotative relations with material objects. Socio-semiotics can be used in textual analysis as explored by deconstructionists, but its main purpose is to analyze the phenomena of material culture, such as the interplay between advertising, Baudrillard’s sign values, and the objects of everyday life—cars, electronic commodities, houses, shopping centers, malls, fashion, and so on. For example, the phenomenon of Disneyland has been analyzed using semiotics and in structural terms (Marin 1984) as well as sociosemiotically (Gottdiener 1982). Marin’s analysis is typical of post-Saussurean semiotics in that it offers a static rendition of sign oppositions uncovered by the author himself. According to his analysis, the oppositions nature/ machine, past/ future, reality/fantasy, and so on, structure the space of the park. The premise of sociosemiotics, in contrast, is that any cultural object is both an object of use in a social system with a generative history and a social context and also a component in a system of signification. The basis of sociosemiotics is polysemy and the need to analyze the articulation of several sign systems for any given cultural object from the point of view of both the producers of culture and the consumers of culture. Often this process entails interviews and the analysis of printed documents or historical accounts. In this precise way sociosemiotics overcomes the structuralism of semiotics and does away with total reliance on the independent analysis of the interpreter. Disneyland in Anaheim, California, is second only to Disney World in Orlando, Florida, as the most popular attraction on the globe. Disneyland can be analyzed as the intersection of several codes and according to the sociosemiotic decomposition of the sign (in Figure 7.2). The two dominant sign systems are the production code of Walt Disney, who designed the park, and the consumption codes of American mass culture with its variety of sign systems.

174


Production Codes

According to historical records (see Gottdiener 1982), Walt Disney sought to re-create the sheltering environment of his small-town midwestern past. Here the materiality of petit-bourgeois life intersected with the fantasy world of the young male child. The staging area for these simulations is the re-creation of a midwestern small town circa 1920, the time of Disney’s youth. The entrance to Disneyland is called Main Street, and it re-creates the town. Disney even built a private office on the second story of one of the building’s so that he could look out at the daily throng of visitors passing through his town. Beyond the central place are the various magic kingdoms. As a whole, these correspond to the backyard space of the town where Disney lived and where he romped with his friends in fantasy play. There are four major realms: Frontierland, Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, and Adventureland. Each defines a separate sign system, or theme, which is carried out in specific rides. These sign systems are drawn from the fantasy realms of childhood play, including historical sagas, fairy tales, science fiction, and exotic adventure stories that were characteristic of children’s literature and young adult culture during Disney’s formative years. If we consider the model of the sociosemiotic sign above (Figure 7.2), then, with regard to producer codes, we have the following correspondence: 1. The substance of the content is the generalized desire of Disney to recapture his happy childhood in a small midwestern town before World War II and represents his own personal worldview. 2. The form of the content is the arrangement of Main Street and the backyard realms of play comprised by the four different fantasy worlds. 3. The forms of the expression are the specific design motifs and architectural units that exist as thematic elements, or expressive symbols, organized as the individual rides engineered as amusements, such as the pirate and Caribbean decor in the ride “The Pirates of the Caribbean.” The Disney theme parks have another feature that can be located at this same level of the sign. Despite Disney’s personalized vision that informs the structure of the park, he also allowed corporate sponsors from American capitalism to associate themselves with individual rides. Hence, in Disneyland, rides have signs posted in full view of users announcing that they are “brought to you by” various large corporations. These endorsements exist at the level of the form of the expression and they link up with the ideology of capitalism as the substance of the content.


175

In sum, the articulation of corporate capitalism with the personalized vision of Disney is a source of polysemy in the production of signification within Disneyland. (Disney World carries this even further.) Thus: 4. The substance of the expression is the actual material object that acts as a sign vehicle to convey the themes of the individual rides, such as the boats that transport visitors through “The Pirates of the Caribbean,” the rail propulsion devices, animated figures, lighting, sets, and elaborate facades. The corporate sponsors provide their own signs—the logos of their respective companies. Every ride is an individual sign, which is then woven into the system of signification (the themes of the four different realms plus Main Street) and then connected to the overarching sign of Disneyland itself as “the happiest place on earth.” Consumption Codes

The theme park provides a source of physical amusement and ludic experience. Its enjoyability is structured by its meaning, which is produced by difference: the difference between everyday life and the experience of the park itself, and the differences among the separate sections of the park, among the different rides, and so on. Difference is produced according to several concrete metonymical oppositions between life in the park and the daily life of suburban Los Angeles. These oppositions create the systems of signification that organize the experience of the visitor to the park. Every visitor experiences the theme park in his or her own way. Consequently, the environment gives free reign to the infinite regress of signification at the consumption level of the sign. In a previous study (Gottdiener 1982), the profusion of polysemic signs was ordered according to the metonymical oppositions Disneyland represented when compared with the suburban world of Los Angeles. As Table 7.1 indicates, nine axiological isotopes (in Greimas’s terms), or contrasts, were used to represent these oppositions. The sociosemiotic reading can go much further. Metonymical contrasts exist within the space of the park. The user wanders from one ride to the next, each generating comparisons or differences with previous rides, previous realms, and the like. Metaphorical contrasts are rich, as are the associations users bring to the park and the rides themselves. The park is a simulation, but it is not the simulation itself that is consumed in self-referential fashion, as Baudrillard and his followers sug-

176


TABLE 7.1. A Comparison between the Oppositions:

gest. Rather, it is the experiential contrast, or difference, between simulation and the material reality of everyday life outside its borders that defines the appeal of the park. The personalized sign systems of the users articulate with simulation in the ludic space of the theme park, contrasting with lived experiences and articulating with media images, myths, and consumer fantasies. Only this complex articulation with its oppositional differences, and not the symbolic reductionism of the postmodernists, can adequately capture the appeal of the theme park.

SOCIOSEMIOTICS AND POSTMODERNISM In the United States, a particular brand of postmodernism has achieved orthodoxy among theorists. It is strongly influenced by Derrida, among those engaging in textual analysis; by Lyotard, among those concerned with the philosophical issues of epistemology; and by Baudrillard, among those interested in cultural analysis. This orthodoxy derives from the internal critique of French intellectuals laboring within the Saussurean tradition and eager to break the bonds of structuralism. Sociologists who have dabbled in postmodern criticism seem overwhelmingly enraptured by this particular French tradition. A great deal of attention has been lavished on the alleged effects of the disappearance of the signifieds, the polysemic basis of textual interpretation, and the fallacy of foundationalist analysis (see Game 1991). Peircian semiotics plays the minor key in this academic symphony. The project of the early Barthes, the work of Eco, the anti-Saussurean semiotics of current critics such as the semiotician Prieto, the philosopher Vattimo, and those in the sociosemiotic tradition are all largely ignored. One purpose of this chapter has been to lay the foundation for an inquiry into alternative semiotic models and their implications. It is not possible to pursue this subject at greater length here in any detail. But let me comment further, in schematic terms, on how sociosemiotics contrasts with the received orthodoxy of the French


177

postmodern school and especially with its reduction of cultural analysis to textual analysis alone. 1. Culture is not simply understood as a system of signification but as a sign system articulating with exosemiotic processes, especially those of economics and politics. Semiotic analysis that confines itself to the sign alone (the “left side” of the Peircian triad) can only describe symbolic relations. Sociosemiotic analysis, which includes the symbolic/ nonsemiotic articulation, helps explain symbolic relations. 2. Baudrillard’s “hyperreality,” or simulation, is an extreme case of semiosis that accounts for only that part of social interaction which is most influenced by the production of images and simulations in society. Signs, however, circulate according to several statuses, with sign value as only one phase (see below). 3. Meaning is not produced through the free play of signifiers alone. Rather, signification is constrained by the forces of power in society, or what the early Barthes referred to as the “logotechniques” of symbolic control. The study of power is neglected in postmodern textual criticism, although it was an essential aspect of poststructuralism to which we need to return. As Deleuze (1988) suggests, it was Foucault who demonstrated conclusively how the “substance of the expression” is the mechanism of power which constrains the play of signification. Understanding this point and its importance in cultural analysis is an essential aspect of sociosemiotics. Material forms, such as the theme park or the shopping mall, are engineered for effect, just as are Foucault’s prison, clinic, and hospital. The role of the “substance of the expression” is also neglected in contemporary symbolic interactionism, which fails to account for the place of objects as expressive symbols in interaction. Material forms, such as the prison or the mall, represent the condensation of past knowledge and ideologies that have materialized technique, modes of desire, and knowledge for social control. 4. Postmodern criticism should not be confined to textual analysis alone or to the critique of forms of representation. It should inquire also into the ways forms of representation structure everyday life. To forget everyday life and the users of culture is to neglect the formative aspect of culture itself. Furthermore, forgetting the role of power in society, as indicated in number 3 above, compounds postmodern ignorance. In short, it is necessary to pass beyond critiques of representation and textual criticism to engage in critical discourse. Exactly how and under what circumstances such critical inquiry can proceed in an age where philosophy and, especially, metaphysics are dead remains an uncompleted project. But some, such as Gianni Vattimo, Richard

178


Hebdige, and Douglas Kellner and Robert Antonio (see Chapter Six), are addressing this issue. 5. Sign production and consumption represent neither a hegemonic system of advanced capitalism (Jameson 1984) nor a simulacrum where reality no longer exists (Baudrillard 1983). Rather, signs are understood as the basis of culture according to stages of sign production and consumption as part of a complex articulation with exosemiotic processes in society. Gottdiener (1985) described in detail the way cultural forms are produced and reproduced within the larger context of advanced industrial capitalism. Starting at the level of everyday life, the symbolic world and the object world are coterminous, and objects become signfunctions of use through connotative ideologies. Meaning is created, according to the sociosemiotic model of the sign, in two distinct ways. Either objects, such as a car, are encoded with new meanings, such as “status,” “owning the latest,” or the like, or the car itself is modified to link up with alternative codes, such as the modification of the “low rider” subculture, modifications for specialized work, and so on. All of these variations, however, are understood at the level of the sign as a use-value in daily life. In a second stage, all use-values are exploited by the economy of capitalism for their respective exchange-value. Encoded objects are expropriated by the economy, and their exchange-value is maximized by production and marketing schemes. Thus the use-value of cars in daily life enables manufacturers to differentiate commodities through objective design features. One brand, for example, is labeled as a “safe car,” another is marketed as a “go-anywhere-vehicle” with four-wheel drive, other cars are engineered for status, and so on. It is the conversion of use-value to exchange-value that circulates the signs of daily life at higher levels of society. The critical theorists of the Frankfurt school asserted that the symbolic differences between products were spurious, yet, as indicated above, they have their foundation in the use-values of everyday life and provide the impetus for the circulation of signs in society. In the third stage of sign circulation, we arrive at the position of Baudrillard. The marketing of commodities to users generally ignores use-value itself and concentrates on second-order connota tions, or mythical, hyperreal associations depending on the image rather than the object. Cars are shown in advertising, for example, driving fast and effortlessly in simulations of country roads, open and scenic landscapes, or at the beach. The reality of stop-and-go freeway traffic is always ignored. Cars are also equated with sexual desire, associated with the nighttime, entertainment, male-female heterosexuality, phallocentric


179

positioning of the object, and so on, that is, with anything but the very mundane task of commuter transportation. The world of mass culture and advertising has given us many ways to express the car as the hyperreality of daily life. And with those images they have also positioned us, as separate, hyperreal, but fragmented selves, within the world of simulation. In short, the sign-function of the car circulates in society propelled by powerful forces of daily use, capitalist exchange, and the world of marketing or advertising. These separate realms are linked by the circulation of signs. As indicated in a previous study (Gottdiener 1985), cultural criticism of this phenomenon does not take the form, as it does in much postmodern analysis, of some independent decoding or deconstruction of cultural signifiers. Rather, analysis should seek to tease out the separate sign levels—use-value, exchange-value, signvalue—and their associated processes of sign production and circulation in order to recapture original signifieds of cultural creation through daily practice. In the end, the critical stance seeks to penetrate the hyperreal fog of the image world and recover the lost signifieds of everyday life, of the daily use-values that comprise the basis of lived experience. Subcultural analysis, therefore, is an adventure in the recovery of those lost signifieds that have been obliterated by the modes of representation associated with exchange and domination. A critical approach to postmodern life would expose the hierarchies of meaning constructed by the logotechniques of power. With this latter aim, sociosemiotics links up with some poststructualists, especially Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and the early Barthes, and even the critical theory of the Frankfurt school tradition. In conclusion, the sociosemiotic approach points the way toward some important future applications. First, I propose that the deconstructionist approach to culture does not fit well the case of material culture and should be replaced by the analysis of sign circulation and the search for lost signifieds as outlined above (see Gottdiener 1985). Second, future work in cultural studies should explore the world of material culture as the foundation for communicative actions. Although Baudrillard is correct to point out the tendency of experience to be reduced to simulation and hyperreal models, particularly by the substitution of a mass-mediated virtual reality for reality itself, he is only half right (Kellner 1989). Action organized through the use of objects as a means of expression characterizes much of culture. In the latter activity, meaning is volatile and subject to polysemic sources. Sociosemiotics seeks to account for polysemy. Studies of culture can document the role of power

180


in defining which meanings have greatest legitimacy and which are relegated to obscurity and sent to the margins of social discourse.

REFERENCES Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1982. Dialogic Imagination. Translated by C.Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barthes, Roland. 1967. Elements of Semiology. Translated by A.Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang. ____. 1972. Mythologies. Translated by A.Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang. ____. 1983. The Fashion System. Translated by M.Ward and R.Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. ____. 1986. “Semiology and the Urban.” Pp. 87–98 The City and the Sign, edited by M.Gottdiener and A.Lagopoulos. New York: Columbia University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Translated by Charles Levin. St. Louis: Telos Press. ____. 1983. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e). Brown, Richard H. 1987. Society as Text. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Denzin, Norman K. 1986. “Postmodern Social Theory.” Sociological Theory 4:194–204. ____. 1987. “On Semiotics and Symbolic Interaction.” Symbolic Interaction 10:1–19. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by G.C.Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Eco, Umberto. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ____. 1986. “Function and Sign: Semiotics of Architecture.” Pp. 55–86 in The City and the Sign, edited by M.Gottdiener and A.Lagopoulos. New York: Columbia University Press. Fontana, Andrea, and F.Preston. 1990. “Postmodern Neon Architecture: From Signs to Icons.” Studies in Symbolic Interaction 11:3–24. Gottdiener, M. 1982. “Disneyland: A Utopian Urban Space.” Urban Life 11(2):139– 162. ____. 1985. “Hegemony and Mass Culture: A Semiotic Approach.” American Journal of Sociology 90:979–999. Gottdiener, M., and A.Lagopoulos, eds. 1986. The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics. New York: Columbia University Press. Greimas, Algirdis J. 1976. Semiotique et sciences sociales. Paris: Seuil. ____. 1986. “For a Topological Semiotics.” Pp 25–54 in The City and the Sign, edited by M.Gottdeiner and A.Lagopoulos. New York: Columbia University Press. Hervey, Sándor. 1982. Semiotic Perspectives. London: Allen and Unwin. Hjelmslev, L. 1969. Prolegomena to a Theory of Language. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1984. “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New left Review 146:53–92. Kellner, Douglas. 1989. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1971. Everyday Life in the Modern World. Translated by Sacha Rabinovitch. New York: Harper and Row.


181

Game, Ann. 1991. Undoing the Social: Towards a Deconstructive Sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lemert, Charles. 1979. “Structuralist Semiotics.” Pp. 96–111 in Theoretical Perspectives in Sociology, edited by S.McNall. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Schoepf. New York: Basic Books. ____. 1969. The Raw and the Cooked. Translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row. Manning, Peter K. 1988. “Semiotics and Social Theory.” Pp.80–98 in Actions and Structure, edited by N.Fielding. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Marin, Loius. 1984. “Utopic Degeneration: Disneyland.” Pp 239–258 in Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Morris, Charles. 1946. Signs, Language and Behavior. New York: Prentice-Hall. Peirce, C.S. 1931. Collected Papers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ____. 1955. Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Selected and edited with an introduction by Justus Buchler. New York: Dover. Perinbanayagam, Robert. 1985. Signifying Acts. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1966. Course in General Linguistics, edited by C.Bally and A.Sechehaye. Translated by W.Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill.

CHAPTER 8

Postmodernism and Deconstructionism Norman K.Denzin I went in search of astral America…I looked for it in the speed of the screenplay, in the indifferent reflex of television…in the marvelously affectless succession of signs, faces, and ritual acts on the road. —BAUDRILLARD (1988a, p. 5)1

My project is to show how deconstructionism may be employed as a postmodern research strategy for the interpretive study of contemporary society. In doing so, I draw upon my recent work on biographical method in the social sciences (Denzin 1989a) as well as my ongoing research on film and the American alcoholic (Denzin 1990a). I first discuss the definitions and assumptions of postmodernism and deconstructionism and then delineate various deconstructive strategies as they pertain to the critical, interpretive analysis of everyday life where biographies and selves circulate as differentially valued commodities (see Farberman 1981). I then provide a deconstructive reading of postmodernism through an analysis of a film, The Morning After (released in 1987),2 which itself embodies the contemporary, postmodern moment. My deconstructive analysis of this film builds upon other approaches to film criticism, including recent feminist film theory (see DeLauretis 1987; Gledhill 1985, 1988; Mayne 1990) to reveal how the postmodern and its representations contain their own deconstructive features. Finally, I argue for a version of cultural studies (see Hall 1980; Denzin 1989c) that situates deconstructionism within the interpretive tradition. 182

Postmodernism and Deconstructionism

183

A CULTURAL TEXT: THE MORNING AFTER Nine o’clock A.M., Thursday, November 28, 1986, Thanksgiving Day, Los Angeles. Alex Sternbergen, an alcoholic actress who no longer gets parts, awakens with a hangover in a strange bed, in a loft apartment next to the body of a man. “Eye on L.A.,” a local show featuring images of men and women working out (strikingly like those seen in Jane Fonda’s exercise videos), is playing on the television. Bobby Korschak, a photographer known as “the King of Sleaze,” is being interviewed. Laying her hand on the chest of the man beside her, Alex feels moisture and experiences a shock of recognition. It is blood. Fearfully crawling out of bed, away from the body, and quivering in the corner, she realizes that this is the “real” Bobby Korschack. A knife is sticking out of Bobby’s chest (“Hey, what are you trying to pull? Is that one of those tricks?”), and he is dead. She walks out of the bedroom into a stark, lifeless, white studio with blue and orange shades on the windows. A cat cleaning its paws on a counter turns and looks at her. She pours a straight drink of vodka from a bottle sitting on the bar, grasps her stomach, and runs to the bathroom. On her knees, hands around the toilet, she vomits, then gets up, washes her face, looks in the mirror, says “Congratulations,” and finishes her drink. Thus begins Alex’s morning after.3 This movie, part film noire, part thriller, part “woman’s film,” part “alcoholism film,” is a prime cultural text for a postmodern, deconstructionist reading. Its representations of “astral” woman, sexuality, violence, and the camera’s reflective gaze connote key postmodern interpretations of conservative, patriarchal values, which turn on the treatment of women as sexual objects. The film’s opening intertextual references to television, work-out tapes, and Jane Fonda’s offscreen personality point to two prominent features of contemporary life. Wherever one looks, the pervasive presence of the television screen as a gazing eye defines and shapes the contours of lived experience. And, the television screen is filled with popular culture figures who activate our filmic memories and connect our understandings of who we are to the values these public icons embody. We thus become everyday embodiments of these “astral” reflections. The Morning After is focused on a single alcoholic woman and her attempt to set her life straight after she is framed for a murder. Alex is a complex figure, romantically involved with two men, one (Jackie) whose sexual identity is ambiguous and another (Turner) whose redneck, all-American values contradict her feminist beliefs. She requires both men to become whole again. In this, she embodies the androgynous gender ethics that circulated in 1980s popular culture. Also, the film is set in Los

184


Angeles, the quintessential postmodern American city (see Baudrillard 1988a). The film situates violence and the unpresentable within the immediate world of lived experience. These features no longer exist only as faraway images on the television screen. Finally, the film’s time frame is the late 1980s. I will return to this text, and these features, after I have discussed postmodernism and deconstructionism.

DEFINING TERMS Both terms in my title are complex and require clarification. Postmodernism refers to many things. In the arts, architecture, and humanities, it signifies recent aesthetic developments that challenge conventional modernist conceptions of structure, meaning, beauty, and truth (see Lyotard 1984; Jencks 1985). In the social sciences, it connotes a nontotalizing, antifoundational form of theorizing about the social world (see Denzin 1986, 1991). Temporally, it refers to a period in world history extending from the end of World War II to the present (see Mills 1959; Jameson 1984). As a new historical era, postmodernism is most often defined theoretically in terms of the emergence of multinational forms of late capitalism, which have introduced a new cultural logic with new forms of communication and representation into the world system (see Jameson 1984, 1991). Most important, as the object of social inquiry, postmodernism refers to a new form of society, one that has been radically transformed by the invention of film and television into a visual, video culture. This transformation introduces a series of new cultural formations that impinge upon, shape, and redefine contemporary human group life. These transformations are anchored in a number of institutional sites, including the polity, the economy, the academy, and, especially, the mass media. In the sprawling urban shopping malls, in television soap operas, situation comedies, and evening news, in films like Blue Velvet (see Denzin 1988) and The Morning After, at the computer terminal, and in the eye of the omnipresent camera, postmodernism, like the air we breathe, is everywhere around us. The culture of postmodern society contains several contradictory features: an erasure of the boundary between past and present, often combined with a nostalgic longing for the past; an intense preoccupation with “the real” and its representations; a pornography of the visible; the commodification of sexuality and desire; celebration of a consumer life style that objectifies masculine cultural ideals; and emotional experiences shaped by anxiety, alienation, resentment, and detachment from others.


185

Deconstructionism is also a complex term. It is a concept most closely identified with the philosophical analyses of Jacques Derrida (see Lamont 1987). Derrida’s work may be read as a continuation of the attack on philosophy and social theory that traces its roots to Husserl’s critique of the empiricist crisis in Western thought. It also builds on Saussure’s structuralist theory of language, Nietzsche’s radical attack on objective systems of truth and knowledge, Freud’s critique of self-presence in consciousness, and Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics. Because of its critical engagement with structuralist linguistics, deconstructionism is a prominent approach in the contemporary poststructuralist movement in philosophy and literary theory. Like Foucault, Lacan, and the latter Barthes, Derrida undermines the notion of linguistic or social structure that is central to the work of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss. Methodologically, deconstructionism is directed to the interrogation of texts. It involves the attempt to take apart and expose the underlying meanings, biases, and preconceptions that structure the way a text conceptualizes its relation to what it describes. This requires that traditional concepts, theory, and understanding surrounding a text be unraveled, including the assumption that an author’s intentions and meanings can be easily determined. The key strategies of deconstructionism include: a rupture of the formulas that equate written words with spoken words, spoken words with mental experience, and voice with mind; demonstrating the fundamental indeterminacy of meaning; the textual production of the subject as a system of differences; an attack on mimesis (the ability of a work to represent experience); and the development of what Derrida calls grammatology (a science or study of writing, speech, and texts) that entails rewriting the history of writing, developing a new theory of writing, and developing a set of deconstructive grammatological practices (see Ulmer 1985, p. 6, and 1989). Deconstructionism is an integral part of the postmodern project. It too aims to clear away the wreckage of a cluttered theoretical past, which clings to preconceptions that are regarded as no longer workable in the contemporary world. In this way, Derrida’s project separates itself from sociologies that seek final, totalizing answers concerning the origins and causes of persons, structures, and intentions. It challenges sociology’s desire to secure a fully centered human subject comfortably situated in a world of roles, statuses, norms, values, and structured social systems. It also intends to expose the underlying ideological presuppositions that organize contemporary research and theory, and thereby to lay the foundations for a profoundly humanistic social science. It is alive to the experiences of troubled individuals who find themselves in existentially problematic situations where history and choices are made behind their

186


backs (Denzin 1989b). As a way of knowing, the deconstructive strategy involves the analysis of social and cultural texts, including film, music, news, fiction, and social science writing, that purport to speak to the lived experiences of interacting individuals. Deconstructionism is not without its detractors. It has been called a “dead tradition of thought” (Giddens 1987, p. 195); a “sociological nonstarter” (W.Griswold, personal communication, 1989); a profoundly pessimistic, apolitical view of culture (Eagleton 1989); a conservative debunker of traditional cultural values (Bernstein 1988); a precursor, and implicit supporter, of Nazism by critics who locate its origins in the early and middle writings of Heidegger and de Man (Todorov 1989); and a movement that is nihilistic, elitist, ahistorical, and esoteric (Winkler 1987). In a similar vein, postmodernism in the social sciences has been criticized as an exhausted, stagnant movement (Gitlin 1988), a metaphor that fails to account for “the long history— the long duree” of modernism (Hall 1986, p. 48), an unwarranted attack on the incomplete modern project of the Enlightenment (Habermas 1983), and a male-dominated perspective that excludes women (Morris 1988, pp. 12–13).

POSTMODERN TEXTS Texts produced in the postmodern temper display a tendency to efface the boundaries between the past and the present in a way that situates the subject (and the viewer and the reader as well) in a perpetual present that is flooded with signifiers from the past.4 This is postmodern nostalgia, which shows no respect for the integrity of the past. There is a parallel tendency in postmodern texts to bring the unpresentable (sexual violence, violent death, brutality, insanity, homosexuality, the degradation of women, sadomasochistic rituals, drug and alcohol abuse) before the viewer in ways that challenge “the boundaries that ordinarily separate private and public lives” (Denzin 1988, p. 462). The wild sexuality, degradation, and violence that these texts depict represent modes of self-expression that are horrifying yet fascinating (Denzin 1988; Baudrillard 1983). At the same time, postmodern texts frequently are organized under the rubric of the classic mortality tale (see Elbaz 1987), where a subject is taken through three steps: seduction, corruption, and redemption. This biographical trajectory (Denzin 1989a) is used as a vehicle for criticizing a corrupt, unethical society that has lost sight of traditional moral principles and values (see Denzin 1990e). These texts narrate a fictional morality that underlies the postmodern age. They resort to the oedipal


187

logic of competing father figures, one evil, the other good, and resolve ethical dilemmas through a nostalgia that returns the wayward subject to the traditional family setting (see Clough in press). Such tales have become valuable commodities in an age that has lost its footing, morally and aesthetically, recognizing only prestige and wealth (Baudrillard 1981). Underneath, however, these texts keep alive the myth of the autonomous individual who, having fallen and been corrupted by immoral persons, returns to the values of family and individualism in the end. These works thus nostalgically create a sublimating fantasy for consumers of popular culture that represses the “real” destructive forces for a world gone wild.5

POSTMODERN SOCIAL THEORY The collapse of grand theories in the wake of the advent of postmodern society and culture demands a radical reconceptualization of social theory that shuns positivist and neopositivist attempts (see Turner 1987; Giddens 1987) to analyze societies and cultures as totalities. Instead, postmodern social theory seeks to produce interpretive analyses that illuminate the social through a close-up analysis of social texts (see Denzin 1989d, 1990c). This antitotalizing stance derives from Lyotard’s claim that terrorism resides in all attempts to conceptualize societies as coherent, integrated entities: “The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one” (Lyotard 1984, p. 81). Postmodern social theory therefore makes no attempt to formulate a “science” called sociology. It argues that those who harbor such aspirations define their subject matter in terms of something that cannot be pointed to (society) and that this thing called society is found elsewhere, primarily in the interactions of individuals. Society is then surreptitously read from the actions of those people. For postmodern social theory, “scientific” sociology and its subject matter are conceptual inventions, revealing traditional sociology’s ongoing attempt to secure this status as a separate, legitimate, scholarly discipline. This argument suggests that the grand sociological masters (Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel) should be read as the producers of texts that reified a particular order of things in a particular historical moment. Their master works mapped a social world that never was and implicitly served certain ideological purposes, including new ways for the state to control the behaviors of its members.

188


In contrast, postmodern social theory orients itself to the contemporary, computerized, media-dominated world, where information technologies increasingly define what is “real.” It sees this as a world where symbols and meaning freely circulate within a system that has no apparent concrete anchoring in “reality” (see Manning 1987). The real has become the “hyperreal” (Baudrillard 1983) and things, including human beings, are now judged by their ability to match up against media representations. In the postmodern age, experience has been commodified, its meanings swirling about in an endless, “affectless succession of signs, faces and ritual acts” (Baudrillard 1988, p. 5). In this new context, human beings resist ceaseless pressures to become ideological constructions where they are transformed from concrete individuals into subjects who have artificially constructed needs, desires, feelings, and ideas (see Althusser 1971, p. 171). The postmodern person risks being turned into a sign whose meanings have been given in the media and its cultural texts (see Goffman 1974). How these systems of meaning (personal and public) anticipate, intersect, conflict with, and challenge one another becomes the central topic of postmodern cultural studies.

DECONSTRUCTION AND THE SOCIAL TEXT For Baudrillard, the present age is defined by what he calls “the third order of the simulacrum” (1983, p. 11),6 where a hyperreal logic of simulation organizes cultural experience. A thing is real if it appears real. Knowledge is true only to the extent that it conforms to simulated models of the real. This new situation produces a proliferation of social texts that purportedly map the world of concrete experience. Here nothing is ever outside a text (Derrida 1976, p. 35), for “no thing is ever outside language, and hence incapable of being represented in a text.” This being the case, the subject matter of postmodern interpretive studies must always be those texts that represent the social world. Deconstructionism, specifically oriented to the analysis of texts, is a method that is particularly well suited for postmodern social inquiry. Focusing on the problematic nature of presence, intentionality, rationality, and causality in textual production, deconstruction critically reveals the ways in which social texts are organized. The Logics of the Text

Conventional understandings have it that readers, writers, and speakers occupy concrete places in the here-and-now (e.g., on a page in a book).


189

In these places and spaces, they enunciate and articulate thoughts, intentions, and meanings that are organized in terms of a logical, sequential, linear order. These intentions and meanings are seen as clearly understandable to anyone who speaks (or reads) the same language as the speaker or writer. Derrida deconstructs this belief. According to Derrida, Western thought has been haunted by a metaphysics of presence, by the belief that the meaning of human experience can be most accurately rendered by a person who is fully present (and apparent) in speech or in a textual production. This is the heritage of the “logocentric,” which is the argument that presence is the locus of truth. The foremost example of logocentrism is found in what Derrida calls “phonocentrism,” the privileging of speech over voice and writing (see Dickens 1990). Both logocentrism and phonocentrism assume that individuals have direct access to their thoughts through language. This access produces a prefect merger of voice and work, and of being and meaning. In ordinary language, what a person says is what she means. A person knows what she means because she knows what she thinks. Consider the radical possibility that language does not facilitate this kind of understanding. Suppose that the signs that make up language can never function “without referring to another element which itself is simply not present” (Derrida 1981, p. 27) and that this results in each element being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of other elements of the system. This interweaving “[yields] text produced only in the transformation of another text…. Nothing…is anywhere ever simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces” (Derrida 1981, p. 27). This is Derrida’s position. Language always entails a process of deferral and delay. Language does not permit speakers or writers to ever have full access to the meaning they are attempting to convey. Nor can they ever be fully present to themselves. As they reach forward or backward to catch a thought, that thought blurs with another, and that other thought (or word) blurs with another, until what they attempt to write or speak becomes something that bears the traces and meanings of everything that has come before. Three important consequences follow from Derrida’s position. First, speech and writing are not direct mirrors to thought. Second, speakers and writers are never fully present to themselves. Third, texts are always parts of other texts; there is never a pure text. The logocentric fallacy, which has been present since the Greeks, according to Derrida, is responsible for this false picture of speakers, writers, and texts. This being the case, texts must always be read in terms of the strategies that writers convey as they consciously and unconsciously act as if they were fully present to themselves and their readers.

190


DOING A TEXT Four general questions now appear. The first involves the deconstruction of the author’s presence in the text. How, that is, are the author’s presence, authority, knowledge, voice, and values evidenced in the text? Whose voice tells the story, and how do the various voices that combine to tell a story give different versions of the same narrative? In The Morning After, the story is told from four points of view: Alex’s, Turner Kendall’s (her new boyfriend), the detective’s, and Jackie’s (her husband). Each version is slightly different, revealing different values and different problems. Whose story is it? On the surface it is Alex’s, but underneath it is also Jackie’s, and Alex and Turner’s together. Second, how do the norms of logocentrism articulate with the phenomenon of intertextuality, where one text is seen to be part of another, even as this is hidden? Return to Jane Fonda playing Alex Sternbergen in The Morning After. What viewer does not bring images of Jane Fonda doing aerobics to the film’s opening scene, or recall her performance as Bree, the prostitute in Klute (1971), or her earlier image as a sex-doll in the 1968 film Barbarella? It is not possible to just see Fonda as Alex, for, as Williamson (1987, p. 23) observes, our filmic memory leads us to carry the images of a star from one film to another. The image of Jeff Bridges in the film also invokes media memory (see Williamson 1987, p. 37), including his parts as the killer in Jagged Edge (1985) and the recovering alcoholic ex-policeman in Eight Million Ways to Die (1986). No film as a text is ever free from the effects of other texts. How this is the case must be shown. The third problem is to identity how logocentrism leads to the production of a text that appears to unfold in a linear, rational manner, from point A in time through points B, C, and D, and so on, to an end. The metaphysics of presence permits no gaps in time. Otherwise there could be no “now,” which is where presence makes itself known. The continuity of time, and hence of history, must always be fixed and certain and contained within the circle or logos of reason, which asserts that all that needs to be known can be known by logic and rationality (see Derrida 1983; Harvey 1985, p. 12). Applied to a specific text, this problem concerns temporality and a text’s construction of a reasonable, rational narrative that enunciates causes and effects, befores and afters, within an acceptable moral framework. Thus The Morning After takes Alex’s alcoholism as a given at the outset of the film, suggesting first that it was caused when she and Jackie separated ten years earlier and her career began to slide downhill. But later the film reveals that she was an alcoholic even before she met Jackie, for there was an earlier marriage in which she attacked her


191

exhusband with a knife during a blackout. The “real” cause of her alcoholism is never answered, for the film keeps moving backward in time when it addresses this issue. She stops drinking only after she meets Turner. The effects of being framed for the murder, meeting Turner, and being confronted about her alcoholism by him, as well as his near death, are connected to her becoming sober. These effects (and causes) are presented in a natural, linear, sequential cause-and-effect order. Temporality becomes narrative causality (see Ricoeur 1988). All that the viewer needs to know about Alex’s case is given from inside this rational narrative. Yet the film falters in those key moments when it establishes these causal points, for it gives no reasons why Alex would choose this time to become sober. The fourth issue relates to presence and is closely aligned with the concept of structure. Derrida challenges the notion of structure and the related idea of center. Recall his analysis of the sign. A sign is only made up of differences and has no stable center. Since structures can only be represented by signs, for example, “society,” then they too have neither fixed presences nor center points: “The center is at the center of the totality…yet, since the center does not belong to the totality… totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not a center” (Derrida 1972, p. 248; italics in original). The center, like a structure, is merely a sign, a name for something that is not there. This carries several implications for the analysis of texts. How do writers get structures into their texts? How do they give their structures centers? How do they establish the presence, or absence, of a structure? How do they substitute one structure for another, and how do they connect authors and characters to structures and centers (in written works, films, and the like)? The problem of presence and its representation is equally complex. It is a sociological and textual given that “presence” and “lived experience” are privileged terms. Their presence must be felt in a text. They must enter a text, express the person’s point of view, and capture her experience. This is typically accomplished through particular forms of narrative, whether that be subjective sociological life histories, ethnographies, first-person voice in a novel, or a subjective camera in film (see Clough in press; Denzin 1989a). The problem of presence is not easily resolved, however, for as Derrida (1972) argues, nothing is ever just present. Presence is given only through difference, through the traces that connect this experience and that person to another experience and another subject, and so on.8 At issue, then, is how a text gives the illusion of capturing presence and lived experience and connects these phenomena to recurring structures (society, culture), which presumably shape those experiences.

192


The Morning After takes up these problems in the following ways. Alex is a decentered character. She is an alcoholic who is outside marriage and work. Her life has become a series of one-night stands with strangers encountered at bars and parties. Her drinking, the memory of her films (which occasionally play on late-night television), Jackie, who bails her out of trouble, Charlie, her bartender friend, and Frankie, the drag queen, hold her together. Alex is constituted in these relationships, which are located in a variety of places throughout the city of Los Angeles, from seedy bars to art deco apartments, the quonset hut where Turner lives, and to Jackie’s fashionable beauty salon. Alex is in all these places and relationships, yet she is not in them. Here presences and absences in the text serve to define who she is and who she is not. She is everywhere but nowhere, present only in the gaps and disjunctures that take her from place to place. She has no center. Yet her recurring presence on the screen, from scene to scene, serves to remind the viewer that this is her film, even if we do not know who she is or where she is going. Centering his star in the fractured, desolate, lonely, L.A. landscape (his structure), shot “in exact pastiche of the Edward Hopper manner” (Milne 1987, p. 181), in real time (9:00 A.M., Thursday, November 28, 1986), director Stanley Lumet goes to great lengths to tell a story about a world with empty streets devoid of human activity and meaning “where the powerless prey on each other, and…[everybody] is a victim” (Edelstein 1986, p. 74). The real star of the film is Los Angeles, which is made up of “great flat planes of cold pastels and threatening sunlit open spaces” (Ebert 1986, p. 35), where empty lives are lived, and true darkness and real nightmares occur in the daytime. Situated within this frame, the lives of Alex, Turner, and Jackie can now be read as decentered productions whose meanings lie in the differences that connect each to the other. There is no essential structure to the film, no center, no totality, only a sequence of fractured images that build on one another and together create, in the end, a simple romantic thriller, a love story, about two recovering alcoholics (see Canby 1986). The Patriarchal Bias

The four primary logoi, or logics, of presence, intentionality, reason, and causality structure the basic contours of The Morning After and make it intuitively understandable to the viewer. Yet, alongside these four logics rests another set of biases. They operate at the surface and deep levels and represent values and meanings that are encoded into the text and then decoded by readers (Hall 1980). They articulate values that circulate within the popular culture. I call these variants on the patriarchal bias (see


193

de Lauretis 1984, 1987), for they point to the text’s treatment of the social identities attached to the circumstances and situations of age, gender, class, race, and ethnicity. The textual presentation of these identity markers creates universes of appearance (Stone 1970, p. 237) that immediately ascribe to any individual a self that is read through the biased lens of a white, middleclass patriarchal perspective. These identities and their meanings are embedded in the story and enacted in the performances of the various fictional characters who populate the text. This bias often relegates women’s perspectives to the margins of the text, giving primary attention to the perspective of white, middle-class males. When a woman’s perspective is presented, it is often filtered through dominant male eyes. These representations reproduce gender stratification systems within postmodern society. When race and ethnicity are added to the picture, similar biases are repeated. Minorities and members of the underclass are relegated to marginal places in the story, as are the very young and the elderly. A feminist reading deconstructs the patriarchal biases that run throughout a text.9 This again involves an application of the four deconsructive strategies outlined above (the critiques of presence, intentionality, rationality, and causality) to the social identities ascribed to a text’s main and marginal characters. Such a reading moves through three steps. It identifies the preferred or hegemonic, the negotiated, and the oppositional readings that can be brought to bear on each character and level of the text (Hall 1980). Paraphrasing Gledhill (1985, p. 827), these steps and strategies may be described as follows: the hegemonic reading takes the reading preferred by the dominant cultural ideology; the negotiated reading attempts to maintain the preferred reading in tandem with understandings drawn from a class or gender position; and the oppositional reading transforms the readings offered by the dominant ideology into what they mean for an oppositional discourse. Phrased another way, the hegemonic and negotiated readings refer to “realist” readings that can be brought to a text. The oppositional reading is a subversive interpretation that challenges the dominant cultural perspective and its meanings in the text (see Hall 1980; Denzin 1989d, p. 51).

BACK TO THE TEXT The Morning After cries out for an oppositional, feminist deconstruction. Consider the following dialogue, which takes place five minutes into the

194


film. Alex has just met Turner at the L.A. airport. They are in his car. Alex immediately sizes Turner up as a redneck bigot: TURNER: (Driving, looking over his shoulder): A spade in a caddy ran into somebody. ALEX: Spade in a caddy. Is that anything like Jack in the Box? TURNER: I wish I had the caddy dealership in Watts. Spades, ah, they spend disproportionately on their transportation, also in dressing their young. ALEX: What are you, the Klan anthropologist? TURNER: You can learn a lot about a person by the car they drive.10 In this dialogue, the text criticizes Turner’s racism through the two phrases “Jack in the Box,” and “Klan anthropologist,” thereby neutralizing the unpresentable through an appropriate moral stance. But the effacement of blacks stands. Alex is caught between two men. Turner, a hick from Bakersfield with a streetwise encyclopedic collection of racist facts, is starkly contrasted to suave, debonair Jackie, a man with a sexually ambiguous name, a cultural outsider, a villain, and a victim. Turner has a heart of gold, “the raw material of Americanness” (Williamson 1987, p. 23), but he is a racist and her savior at the same time. Alex has two other friends, the aging Frankie, (“Honey, I’m a drag queen, not a transvestite!”) and Charlie, the fat, jovial bartender who gives her money and does not criticize her drinking. These two characters are situated on the fringes of her world. The audience is asked to play Frankie’s open gayness off against Jackie’s imputed (by the police and Turner) homosexuality. Thus subtext becomes a device for the film’s reproduction of cultural stereotypes about homosexuality (in the closet and out of the closet, queens versus transvestites). At the same time, it allows the text to side against the homosexual in favor of the straight man (Turner over Jackie) and to favor the white racist male over the Hispanic gay. By folding both of the negative cultural characteristics into the same character (Jackie), the text negates Turner’s racism in favor of his downhome good will toward Alex. This move is justified later by the fact that Jackie is discovered to be the one who framed Alex. Now let’s consider the figure of woman. Alex is a departure from the classic film noire icon of the flawed woman who is both good and evil but primarily evil (Williamson 1987). Alex is not an evil woman. Rather, she is a flawed figure because of her alcoholism. By making her an alcoholic, the film is able to further erode the meanings brought to


195

women. Alex is surrounded with all the negative signifiers that American culture has traditionally identified with the female alcoholic: low selfesteem, divorce, loss of work and family, loose sexuality, sexual degradation, hitting a sexual bottom, blackouts, and violence. Alex is faced with the ambiguous choice of two flawed men. The film resolves this conflict by having her fall in love with Turner, the one who is not only helping her get sober but who also saved her life. This is what this film is all about: the choices women have in the late 1980s. The paths are not clearly marked, as this text demonstrates, but they are still framed from within a patriarchal structure that has men making the choices for women. At the surface level, Lumet’s film is a melodrama, a story of love and hope, of two human beings fearful of committing to one another. In this telling, at this level, Lumet is suggesting that American society can accept a female alcoholic as the heroine in a murder-mystery love story. He has transformed Alex from stigmatized alcoholic woman into woman-asalcoholic who has stopped drinking and fallen in love with a man who has done the same. By inverting the signifiers of alcoholic and woman, Lumet turns Alex into a prototype of the single, modern woman who has lost and now found her way in a hostile, empty world, which tends, in the main, to make victims of all of us, but women more so. This is the surface, hegemonic reading of the story. There also exists an equally hegemonic antigay, racist subtext, which is justified in terms of the happy ending. In allowing these hegemonic readings to stand, the viewer (and the critic) become willing accomplices in support of a conservative feminism that pleads (yet hides) its ideological biases in the name of a story which locates a woman in the company of a “good” man who has flaws. A feminist deconstruction of these themes reveals that this text’s meanings depend on the sexual and racial differences that are enunciated by Turner, differences that create the marginalized spaces Alex occupies. Their presence suggests that women, in order to find their place, have to go to the margins of society, where gays and drag queens will give them comfort, warmth, friendship and support. But these relationships are not enough, hence Alex’s decision to remain with Turner and the film’s return to its comfortable, hegemonic position which asserts that gays and “spics” who, if not evil, are persons about whom jokes can be told.

DECONSTRUCTION AND CULTURAL STUDIES The above analysis reveals how the deconstructionist method may be utilized in the reading of a contemporary cultural text. The Morning After,

196


with its multiple meanings, is an apt text for postmodern deconstruction since America, like Alex Sterbergen, is in the long duree of an extended morning after. Hungover yet still intoxicated from too many images of the real and the hyperreal, the America that emerges from this reading longs for the day when things were really real, when men were men and women were women, with no ambiguity—a time when things are settled once and for all, when the unpresentable is no longer presented. In the extended nowness of this unbroken present, which constantly harks back to the past, even if by means of an irreverent nostalgia, there is the dream (“It’s morning again in America”) that the old myths and beliefs are true and still apply. In this way, The Morning After invokes nostalgia for the past as it weaves a pastiche visual structure through a conventional melodramatic narrative about a desperate woman lost and terrified in the big city. At the same time, my deconstructionist reading of the film reveals other, more controversial features of postmodern society, such as sexism, racism, homophobia, and alcohol and drug addiction. These constitute the underside of astral America, where the signifier “America” is more problematic. Conceived in this fashion, deconstructionism is also a postmodern, interpretive approach to the field of cultural studies.11 This version of cultural studies is distinctly postmodern insofar as it is antifoundational. Each cultural reading begins anew, presuming only that all texts are constituted by an interminable play of differences. The structures of texts are scrutinized for their logocentric and patricentric biases. The intent is interventionist, to expose the underlying “structural” preconceptions that organize texts and to reveal the conditions of freedom that they suppress. At the same time, deconstruction is an effort to penetrate the world of lived experience where cultural texts circulate and give meaning to everyday life. It is necessary to show the gap that separates the world of everyday meaning from the words that are inscribed about that world by various cultural authorities, including newsmakers, social scientists, novelists, and filmmakers. Also, the analyst turns to the social texts and narratives that persons tell one another, finding in these stories the textual foundations of meaning as it is lived in the current moment. The deconstructionist’s agenda is always the same. How does any given text address the problems of presence and lived experience? How does it produce the intentional meanings that are ascribed to subjects? How does it center and anchor the subject and her experiences in a narrative text? How does it represent the “real” experiences of interacting individuals?


197

Cultural studies, so conceived, becomes a discipline that cuts across the social sciences. It knows no disciplinary boundaries. Its subject matter is everywhere. Its methods are interpretive and deconstructive. It is a project informed by the politics of liberation and freedom, by a postMarxism with no guarantees (Hall 1986, p. 48; also Sartre 1976; MerleauPonty 1973), firmly rooted in the tradition of critique and renewal that has historically given meaning to the “critical” approach in the human sciences (see Adorno 1973). As students of the postmodern moment, we have only texts and the stories people tell us. Our problem is working from text to experience. This means we read texts as narratives of experience and find in them recurring meanings that speak to the person-centered bias our culture instills in each of us. We read these texts as attempts to overcome the decentered presences that persons experience on a daily basis, seeing them for what they are: ideological efforts to find a common ground in a postmodern world that has neither a fixed center nor a coherent understanding of this thing called human.

NOTES 1. Baudrillard is after “astral” or “sidereal” America, the America revealed in reflections sent from the stars. In what follows, I argue that reflections sent from the stars (read Hollywood and film) embody a version of the “real” America that impinges directly in the lived experiences of ordinary people. 2. Directed by Sidney Lumet, produced by Bruce Gilbert, screenplay by James Hicks, cinematography by Andrzej Bartkowiak; starring Jane Fonda (Alex Sternbergen), Jeff Bridges (Turner Kendall, ex-policeman, recovering alcoholic, friend of Alex), Raul Julia (Jackie, Alex’s husband), Diane Salinger (Isabel Harding, Jackie’s girlfriend), Richard Fornjoy (Sgt. Greenbaum), Geoffrey Scott (Bobby Korschak), and James Haake (Frankie, a drag queen). See Denzin (1990a) for an extended discussion of this film. The story is simple. Alex is framed by her husband (a Mexican hairdresser) and his girlfriend (whose father is a judge) for the murder of Korschack. Turner (an ex-policeman on disability who fixes broken things—cars, toasters, and people) helps Alex get back on her feet, but she keeps getting drunk. He suspects that she was framed and discovers that it was Jackie who framed her. In the climax, Jackie attempts to kill Alex. Turner saves her and is nearly killed by Jackie. Turner ends up in the hospital, Alex gets sober, and in a long good-bye scene where Turner reveals that he also used to be a drunk, they decide to stay together. 3. There is a double play on the phrase “morning after.” The colloquial phrase refers to how a person who has had too much to drink at night feels the morning after. Also, a drink taken “on the morning after” is called “a morning drink” and “in [American] culture is considered a sign of alcoholism” (Keller and McCormack, 1968, p. 139). Alex is a morning drinker. 4. A text refers to “any printed, visual, oral or auditory statement that is

198


available for reading, viewing or hearing” (Denzin 1989b, p. 131). Texts always exist within systems of discourse, or discursive formations (see Foucault 1970). 5. See Denzin (1990e) for a listing of contemporary films that perform this function. 6. Simulacrum means an image, the semblance of an image, make-believe, or that which conceals the truth (Baudrillard 1981, pp. 32–33). The present situation is defined by the power of the simulacrum, the power of images, and signs that stand for commodities, to become what they stand for. In the first order of the simulacrum, which Baudrillard locates in the Renaissance, signs began to be released from what they signified (i.e., in the fields of drama and religion). The second order was ushered in with the age of mechanical reproduction during the Industrial Revolution, where endless reproductions of the same thing could be made (i.e., photographs, mechanical objects, tools). 7. Intertextuality refers to the notion that boundaries of a text continually spill over into other texts (see Derrida 1987a). Intertextuality operates in all texts, not just in films. This manuscript has by now been anchored in a halfdozen films, a century or more of European philosophy, contemporary American social theory, my previous works, the statements of the editors of this volume, the contributions of other authors in this volume, and even this footnote. 8. This raises the problem of the “other” in the text and how a particular work evokes an “other” whose presence and absence define the meaning of any given subject. Thus, Turner’s self is defined in terms of his opposition to gays, “spics,” and “spades.” The presence of the deviant defines the essence of Turner’s character. A text will create a set of oppositions between categories of selves (gay-straights, males-females, and so on). In so doing, it effaces the subjectivity of the “strange” other. 9. A feminist reading also introduces another level of interpretation dealing with the text’s telling of the universal story of the gendered human relationships and the fear of forming and being contained within a bonded, loving, intimate relationship (see Lyman 1987; Denzin 1990a). Of course, not all texts tell this story, but few films escape its presence. Elsewhere (see Denzin 1989c, p. 23; 1990a) I have outlined eight separate approaches to cultural studies. Here I focus only on the processual, subversive approach, which seeks to deconstruct the ideological biases and preconceptions that are routinely embedded in postmodern cultural texts. 10. This kind of dialogue goes on continually between the two of them, and it expands to include “spics,” “Jews,” and “gays.” He becomes defined as a racist hick from Bakersfield, and she a sophisticated lady from L.A. “by way of the Big Apple.” The plot thickens when he learns that Jackie, her husband, is a hairdresser and an immigrant from Mexico. 11. Cultural studies views “human action as a text” (Carey 1988, p. 60) informed and shaped by the meanings persons bring to their experiences. It takes as its subject matter the cultural texts that human beings produce, including popular entertainment (songs, films, stories), social science writings, myth, religion, and art. It examines the stories persons tell one another, moving from those contained in the daily news, to those given in weekly news magazines, to those appearing in popular drama and literature, to those told in social groups, to the cultural texts of groups, and to the texts and stories about


199

society sociologists and other alleged experts tell (see Denzin 1990b). Cultural studies attempt to make sense of the meanings that are embedded in these texts (Carey 1988, p. 56), its task being one of making sense out of “the senses we make out of life” (Carey 1988, p. 44).

REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics. Translated by John Ashton. New York: Seabury Press. Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Translated by Charles Levin. St. Louois: Telos Press. ____. 1983. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e). ____. 1988a. America. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso. ____. 1988b. The Ecstasy of Communication. New York: Semiotext(e). Bernstein, Richard. 1988. “Academia’s Liberals Defend Their Carnival of Canons against Bloom’s Killer B’s.” The New York Times, 25 September, pp. 4, 26. Brown, Patricia Leigh. 1989. “A Stones Set of Steel and Magic.” The New York Times, 5 October, p. 15. Canby, Vincent. 1986. “Review of The Morning After.” The New York Times, 25 December, p. 22. Carey, James W. 1988. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Clough, Patricia Ticineto. In Press. “The Rhetoric of Sexual Difference and the Narrative Construction of Ethnographic Authority.” Studies in Symbolic Interaction. Coleman, James S. 1968. “Review Symposium of Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology.” American Sociological Review 33:122–130. Coser, Lewis A. 1975. “Two Methods in Search of a Substance.” American Sociological Review40:691–700. De Lauretis, Teresa. 1984. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ____. 1987. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Denzin, Norman K. 1986. “Postmodern Social Theory.” Sociological Theory 4:194–204. ____. 1988. “Blue Velvet: Postmodern Contradictions.” Theory, Culture, and Society 5:461–473. ____. 1989a. Interpretive Biography. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. ____. 1989b. Interpretive Interactionism. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. ____. 1989c. “Reading/Writing Culture: Interpreting the Postmodern Project.” Cultural Dynamics 11:9–27. ____. 1989d. “Reading Tender Mercies: Two Interpretations.” Sociological Quarterly 30:37– 57. ____. 1990a. Hollywood Shot by Shot: Alcoholism in American Cinema. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. ____. 1990b. “The Sociological Imagination Reconsidered.” Sociological Quarterly 31:1– 22.

200


____. 1990c. “Reading Cultural Texts: A Comment on Griswold.” American Journal of Sociology 95:1577–1580. ____. 1990d. “Doing Cultural Studies.” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 11:17–39. ____. 1990e. “Reading Wall Street: Postmodern Contradictions in the American Social Structure.” Pp. 31–44 in Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism, edited by Bryan S.Turner. London: Sage. ____. 1991. Images of Postmodernism: Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema. London: Sage. Derrida, Jacques. 1972. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Pp. 247–264 in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and The Sciences of Man, edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ____. 1973. “Speech and Phenomena” and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ____. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ____. 1978. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ____. 1981. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ____. 1983. “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils.” Diacritics. 12:3–20. ____. 1987a. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Jan McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ____. 1987b. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dickens, David. 1990. “Deconstructionism and Marxist Inquiry.” Sociological Perspectives 33:147–158. Eagleton, Terry. 1989. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Cambridge, England: Blackwell. Ebert, Roger. 1986. “Review of The Morning After.” New York Post, 26 December, p. 45. Edelstein, David. 1986. “Review of The Morning After.” Village Voice, 30 December, p. 74. Elbaz, Robert. 1987. The Changing Nature of the Self: A Critical Study in Autobiographic Discourse. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Farberman, Harvey. 1981. “The Political Economy of Fantasy in Everyday Life.” Symbolic Interaction 2:1–18. Featherstone, Mike. 1988. “In Pursuit of the Postmodern: An Introduction.” Theory, Culture, and Society 5:195–215. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage. Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall. Giddens, Anthony. 1987. “Structuralism, Post-structuralism and the Production of Culture.” Pp. 195–223 in Social Theory Today, edited by Anthony Giddens and Jonathan Turner. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gitlin, Todd. 1988. “Hip-Deep in Post-modernism.” The New York Times Book Review Section, 6 November, pp. 1, 35–36. Gledhill, Christine. 1985. “Recent Developments in Feminist Criticism,” Pp. 817–845 in Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press. ____. 1988. “Pleasurable Negotiations.” Pp. 33–49 in The Female Spectator: Looking at Film and Television, edited by Deidre Pribam. London: Verso. Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis. New York: Harper and Row.


201

Griswold, Charles L., Jr. 1989. “Letter on Deconstruction, the Nazis, and Paul de Man.” New York Review of Books, 12 October, p. 69. Grossberg, Lawrence. 1989. It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics and Culture. Sidney, Australia: Power Publications. Habermas, Jürgen. 1983. “Modernity—an Incomplete Project.” Pp. 3–15 in The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press. Hall, Stuart, ed. 1980. Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson. ____. 1986. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10:45–60. Harvey, Irene. 1985. Derrida and the Economy of Difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Huyssen, Andreas. 1984. “Mapping the Postmodern.” New German Critique 33:5–31. Jameson, Frederic. 1983. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.’ Pp. 111–125in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press. ____. 1984. “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146:53–72. ____. 1990. Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge. ____. 1991. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jencks, Charles. 1985. The Language of Postmodern Architecture. New York: Basic Books. Keller, Mark, and Mairi McCormick. 1968. A Dictionary of Words about Alcohol. New Brunswick, NJ: Publications Division, Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies. Lamont, Michele. 1987. “How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida.” American Journal of Sociology 93:584–622. Lyman, Stanford. 1987. “From Matrimony to Malaise: Men and Women in the American Film, 1930–1980.” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 1:73– 100. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Benningston and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Manning, Peter K. 1987. Semiotics and Fieldwork. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Mayne, Judith. 1990. The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1973. Adventures of the Dialectic. Translated by Joseph Bein. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Mills, C.Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Milne, Tom. 1987. “Review of The Morning After.” Monthly Film Review, June, p. 181. Morris, Meaghan. 1988. “Introduction: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism.” Pp. 1– 23 in The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism, edited by Meaghan Morris. London: Verso. Ricoeur, Paul. 1988. Time and Narrative Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1976. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Translated by Hazel Barnes. London: New Left Books. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1976. “Translator’s Preface.” Pp. ix–xc in Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Stone, Gregory P. 1970. “Sex and Age as Universes of Appearance.” Pp. 227–236in Social Psychology through Symbolic Interaction, edited by Gregory P.Stone and Harvey Farberman. Waltham, MA: Gin-Blaisdell.

202


Taylor, Mark (ed.). 1986. Deconstruction in Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1988. “The Heidegger/de Man Debates.” The Times Literary Supplement, 17–23 July, pp. 676, 684. Turner, Jonathan H. 1987. “Analytical Theorizing.” Pp. 156–194 in Social Theory Today, edited by A.Giddens and J.Turner. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ulmer, Gregory. 1985. Applied Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ____. 1989. Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video. New York: Routledge. Williamson, Judith. 1987. “Review of The Morning After.” New Statesman, 12 June, p. 23. Winkler, Karen J. 1987. “Post-Structuralism: An Often Abstruse French Import Profoundly Affects Research in the United States.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 November, pp. A6-A9.

CHAPTER 9

Ethnographic Trends in the Postmodern Era Andrea Fontana Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. —CLIFFORD GEERTZ (1973, p. 5)

Nineteenth-century ethnography held no privileged position, and the social scientist qua ethnographer was given no authoritative voice above and beyond that of other observers of native cultures, such as travelers, missionaries, and colonial administrators (see Clifford amd Marcus 1986). The legitimacy and power of the ethnographer, based both on personal experience and scientific authority, was established in the 1920s. The central figure in this ethnographic rise to the forefront was Bronislaw Malinowski. His work initiated a new era for ethnography in the social sciences that has developed throughout the twentieth century to its present position. Some seventy years after the publication of Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), new ethnographies are emerging today that question that tradition. However, the methodology laid out by Malinowski in the first chapter of his classic work remains today at the core of traditional ethnography. It is in the crepuscular light of the waning twentieth century, swept in the questioning mood of “post” that pervades the humanities and the social sciences today (see Marcus and Fischer 1986), that the achievements and travails of ethnography are being reassessed. Actually, we should say “ethnographies,” plural, for we are witnessing the unfolding of various ethnographic modes. 203

204


Postmodernism highlights a “crisis of representation” (Marcus and Fischer 1986, p. 8) in the social sciences that has led both anthropologists and sociologists to question the basic assumption of ethnography by casting doubts on the scientific nature of the enterprise, by rendering problematic the role and authority of the ethnographer, and by searching for new expressive styles to capture the insurgent new modes of ethnographic research. In this chapter, I will examine these new problematics. I will begin by tracing the development of ethnography in sociology from its early days to our time. Then I will address the concerns of ethnography today and examine the various solutions proposed and implemented by new postmodern ethnographies.

THE CONCERN WITH SCIENTIFIC METHOD Anthropologists, following Malinowski, sought to provide ethnographic works that had scientific reliability and validity as an improvement over the unsystematic and highly subjective accounts of missionaries, explorers, and others. The task was not easy; Malinowski was clearly aware of the problems of conducting and reporting ethnography. In his diary, published after his death, he wrote: Experience in writing leads to entirely different results even if the observer remains the same—let alone if there are different observers! Consequently, we cannot speak of objectively existing facts: theory creates facts. (Malinowski 1967, p. 114)

Yet, despite this private awareness of the subjective nature of ethnography, Malinowski, and others after him, proceeded to attempt to scientize ethnographic findings. The doing and reporting of ethnography became in many ways standardized. Researchers gained their scientific authority by their proximity to events, by witnessing firsthand the lives of “the natives.” They reported their findings by addressing the various parts that comprised the culture of the natives, and did so by integrating their findings with a priori theoretical orientations. Sociologists entered the world of ethnographic research through the works of the Chicago school. The applied goals of the Chicago sociologists led them to study the everyday world of their city (see Park 1916; Thomas and Znaniecki 1927). Robert Park, influenced by his former career as a journalist, set out to study the “real” subcultures of the city along with other faculty and graduate students at Chicago, by providing ecological ethnographic accounts of the subcultures they studied. The sociologists of the Chicago school intended to do

Ethnographic Trends in the Postmodern Era

205

scientifically reliable studies, in contrast to earlier quasi-ethnographic accounts that had been largely passionate, ameliorative pleas (see Faris 1967). However, apart from Thomas and Znaniecki’s methodological chapter in their The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1927), they tended to rely on anthropological ethnography for methodological guidance (Robert Redfield was Park’s son-in-law). Despite their scientific aspirations, many of the sociological ethnographers at Chicago never went beyond colorful descriptions of the subcultures they had observed (see Anderson 1923). Under the guidance of Park, Pauline Young (1932), in her study entitled Pilgrims of Russian Town, was the first to engage in what came to be called “participant observation” (Faris 1967, p. 71). The waning influence of the Chicago school and the onset of functionalism stymied the growth of ethnography in sociology. In fact, scientism became so pervasive in sociology that those (and there were not many) who continued to study the “real world” in an interactionist fashion became increasingly concerned with providing scientific validation of their work. Early sociological field-workers had been concerned with the plight of the people they studied and paid little attention to methodological concerns. But Herbert Blumer (1969) derived a field methodology from George H.Mead’s interactionist ideas, and participant observation became formalized. Scientific authority (as in Malinowski) came from “being there” and in taking the point of view of the natives. But participant observation was not conceived to be an irremediably subjective interpretation of some ever-changing interactional world. Researchers sought specific (if not always agreedupon) ways to “come closer to reality.” Thus they began to pay attention to their data-gathering and reporting procedures, both in appendices that instructed readers on the contextual and methodological problematics of the fieldwork and in “how-to” books that told would-be researchers how to gain entrée, maintain trust, and even how to file their field notes (see Lofland 1971). Approaches to scientizing interactionist fieldwork included analytic induction (Lindesmith 1947) and grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967). Detailed instructions on the “appropriate” ways to conduct research and what constituted “valid” data were included in these methods in an attempt to render sociological ethnographic methods more rigorous. The sustained attack on functionalism and positivist epistemologies in general in the 1960s ushered in a new era of interest in ethnographic approaches, such as naturalism (Matza 1969), phenomenological sociology, and existential sociology (see Douglas et al. 1980). All of these, with various nuances, focused on “being there” and presenting “the natives’ viewpoint.”

206


Some interactionist sociologists (see Cicourel 1970) came under the influence of French structuralist anthropology and linguistics. Also, the new subdiscipline of ethnomethodology (see Garkinkel 1967) introduced a postmodern dimension into fieldwork by “deconstructing” everyday interaction. Ethnomethodology did for sociology what deconstructionism has done for literary criticism: [The] ethnomethodologist replace[d] the events of social life with our accounts and interpretations of those events. (Jameson 1975–1976, pp. 205–206)

Despite its insightful approach to the study of social interaction, ethnomethodology and its spin-offs, cognitive sociology and conversational analysis, remained mired in the web of positivism. While recognizing the radically problematic and situational nature of everyday life, ethnomethodology sought to find invariant properties (interpretive procedures) that allegedly undergird and guide all human behavior (see Garfinkel and Sacks 1966).

VALIDATING ETHNOGRAPHY Scientific sociological ethnography was dominant in the 1950s and 1960s, but by the 1970s postmodern ideas begin to filter down to sociology via philosophy, literary criticism, and anthropology. Lyotard (1984), in his influencial postmodern analysis on the current status of knowledge, questioned the authority of all self-validating theoretical frameworks that are used to legitimize science. He detected a crisis of belief regarding “grand theory” and its ways of representing social reality. Lyotard argued that rather than creating a theoretical model validated by its own language and rules, researchers should examine the social world in its fragmentary state, and examine each and every fragment in and of itself. Lyotard’s criticism of established “metanarratives” encouraged those in the social sciences to seek new modes of expression and implicitly provided great impetus for the ethnographic approach, with its close scrutiny of each aspect of everyday life. Also, the skepticism concerning established theoretical metanarratives led postmodern ethnographers to question their traditional theoretical and methodological assumptions. Other French poststructuralists (Derrida 1976) and, later, American ones (see Arac, Godzich, and Martin 1983) questioned the relationship of text and author, challenging the dominance of the latter over the former. These deconstructionists have rendered extremely problematic the previously taken-for-granted aspects of authorship and textual


207

interpretation. The influence of deconstruction led to a wholesome reconsideration of the ethnographic enterprise. Anthropologists (Marcus and Fischer 1986; Clifford and Marcus 1986) and sociologists (Brown 1986) began to apply these ideas to the study of everyday life and to their ethnographic roles as authors. Clifford (1988, p. 28) has dissected the sources of ethnographic authority and noted that they derive from a privileging of “intensive participant observation,” beginning with Malinowski: “Malinowski gives us the image of the new anthopologist—squatting by the campfire; looking, listening, and questioning; recording and interpreting Trobiand life.” The authority of the researcher comes from “being there,” yet it remains an authority based primarily on interpretation: “Sociology should confine itself to the decription of acts…but in practice an act has no meaning for an observer unless he knows or infers the thoughts and emotions of the agent” (Frazer in Malinowski 1922, p. ix). Despite a keen awareness of the essentially interpretive nature of the ethnographic enterprise, Malinowski and those who followed him took painstaking care to show the “objective” nature of their data. Traditional sociological ethnographers presented their field notes as the viewpoint of the natives, with little mention of the interactions, negotiations, and generally problematic features of obtaining field data. For example, Liebow (1967), in his classic study of black street-corner men, provides an example of “objectifying” what amounts to personal interpretation since he tends to present his opinions as if they were objective facts validated by the viewpoint of the subjects: On the streetcorner, the man chooses to forget he got married because he wanted to get married…. Instead he sees himself as the “put-upon” male who got married because his girl got pregnant or because he was tricked. (Liebow 1967, p. 214)

Liebow speaks of “the man,” implying that the feelings he is reporting about are those of all “men” on the street corner. He does not address the men by name, nor does he extensively quote their statements on the subject. What he says may well be true, but he does not provide enough documentation to demonstrate that his remark reflects the opinions of every street-corner man. His remark represents instead Liebow’s own generalization about various instances he observed. The highly sensitive fact that Liebow was a white, educated man studying black, uneducated men, which would tend to raise questions about trust and reciprocal understanding, is mentioned only in passing and given very little weight in the monograph.

208


The tendency to smoothly link “being there” with “understanding the natives” glossed over the reality of how problematic the whole enteprise can be. In Malinowski’s diaries, published by his wife after his death in 1967, we learn that he did not actually live with the natives but engaged in what has been facetiously called “gin and veranda research.” Malinowski lived with British administrators or colonists, and, when the fancy struck him, he went to see the natives and interviewed them, at times paying them (with tobacco) for sharing their native viewpoint. Malinowski’s diary notes show how problematic “being there” is: How close should I be? For how long should I be there? With how many natives should I interact? The problems raised by the diary undermine the traditional assumption of ethnographic validity based on authority by presence. Malinowski through his diary unwittingly became the examplar for a new genre of ethnography that appeared in the mid-1960s (see Marcus and Fischer 1986). Van Maanen (1989) refers to this new ethnographic mode as “confessional.” Here the problematics of fieldwork were no longer incidental events to be glossed over or ignored in an effort to present a more “objective” study; instead, they became topics of research in themselves. Generally found in lengthy appendices written in the first person, these “confessional” accounts were intended to instruct the reader about the many problems encountered in the field, from the effects of drinking saki while interacting with the natives (Wax 1971) to the emotional upheaval of witnessing a highly distressing juvenile court case: I presented the appearance of a formally rational [expletive deleted] social scientist beating his [deleted] fist against a tree. Shortly after that, I doubled over and puked my guts out. (Johnson 1975, p. 159)

Confessional narration added a dimension of reflexivity to ethnography by including observations about the researchers’ interactions with their subjects. Many ethnographers, however, came to be so preoccupied with the problematics of doing field research that they became engrossed in an “orgy” of confession, revealing little about the native culture they had intended to study. This emphasis on the interpretive nature of ethnography culminated in a seminal essay by Geertz, in which he pointed out that “what we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to” (Geertz, 1973, p. 9). Geertz’s essay opened a period of critical selfevaluation in the ethnographic social sciences that produced a variety of modes of doing fieldwork. I will examine these modes later; next I turn my attention to the reporting of ethnography.


209

REPORTING ETHNOGRAPHY For a long time it was assumed that the ethnographic researcher was a neutral scientist employing the best available techniques to collect data in the field. The ethnographer allegedly reported as objectively as possible about what he or she had observed in the field. The “participant” part of the participant-observation method was to be as negligable as possible to minimize interference. Ethnographers, like positivists before them, assumed that there was a proper vocabulary to describe human beings in their everyday life, a language that would more closely fit reality. The language of ethnography tended to mimic the sparse language of the natural sciences, as if to add legitimacy to a scientifically suspect enterprise. Geertz eloquently noted this point while disagreeing with it: The strange idea that reality has an idiom in which it prefers to be described, that its very nature demands we talk about it without fuss—a spade is a spade, a rose is a rose—on pain of illusion, trumpery, and selfbewitchment, leads on to the strange idea that, if literalism is lost, so is fact. (1988, p. 140)

Postmodern commentators questioned the basic assumptions underlying the reporting of ethnography, noting that (1) reporting ethnography is a separate task from doing ethnography, but is just as important (Clifford and Marcus 1986); (2) there is no single language or style that will divulge the truth of the universe, for there are a multiplicity of reporting modes, all quite effective in different ways (Rorty 1982); and (3) ethnography should not be based on the researcher’s “understanding” (which places him or her in a privileged interpretive position) but on a “dialogue” between the researcher and the natives, in which both participants in the dialogue are an integral part of the study (Marcus and Fischer 1986). Several other problematic features of ethnographic reporting have been questioned by the critical stance of postmodernist commentators. What makes the reporting valid and credible: The amount of data presented? The length of stay in the field? The number of natives interviewed? And for whom is the reporting done: Scientific readers? The general public? Also, should ethnographers remain as close as possible to the data gathered, quoting verbatim from their subjects? Or should they employ the art of writing and the use of metaphor toward the end of presenting as vivid a picture as possible? The answers to the above questions are varied but are basically divided into two camps. On the one side, postmodern researchers

210


such as Clifford, Marcus, Fischer, Crapanzano, Tyler, and others (see Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986) became painfully aware of the multiple layers of interpretive procedures that cloud the validity of ethnographic reporting. They criticized ethnographers such as Geertz (see Crapanzano 1986), who, they felt, had tampered unduly with the process of reporting, but they also focused on finding remedial ways to alleviate, if not eradicate, the problematics of interpretation by the ethnographer. On the other side, Geertz summarily dismissed the concerns of these scholars as being motivated by “pervasive nervousness about the whole business of claiming to explain enigmatical others on the ground that you have gone about with them in their native habitat” (1988, pp. 130–131). Geertz dismissed commonly held guidelines for validitating reporting, such as those based on the quantity of the data presented as well as those convincing the reader that one has indeed “been there” and “actually penetrated…another form of life” (1988, p. 4). The validity of reporting stems, for Geertz, from the ethnographers’ ability to convince the readers through their writing skills that the account given is indeed valid. Geertz selectively analyzed the works of Lévi-Strauss, Malinowski, EvansPritchard, and Benedict to demonstrate the different writing techniques that make an ethnography “come to life.” In sociology, the work of Van Maanen (1988) echoes that of Geertz, but without the polemical edge. Pragmatically, Van Maanen analyzes the “ideal” ways in which sociological ethnography is commonly reported by paying close attention to the narrative mode and rhetorical conventions used by the writer. Ethnography is a “means of representation” (1988, p. 6), Van Maanen tells us. Usually, he continues, we tell either realist, confessional, or impressionistic tales. Yet all three categories are often utilized within the same work. Both Geertz and Van Maanen place tremendous stock in the authorial voice, thus acknowledging such elements as metaphor, subjective descriptive techniques, and using one’s understanding “as if” it were the natives’ viewpoint. Postmodernists take exception to this approach. Crapanzano (1986, p. 76) states that “all too often, the ethnographer forgets the native.” We need no metaphors or highly subjective flights of the imagination and the pen, says Crapanzano, for “realism demands stylistic sobriety” (1986, p. 58). Thus, for the postmodernists, obtaining validity in reporting depends on minimizing the authorial voice and remaining faithful to the phenomena reported.


211

THE ROLE OF THE ETHNOGRAPHER The conflict over validating and reporting ethnography can be broadly seen as, on the one side, the postmodernists advocating the death of paradigms (Lyotard 1984), the deconstruction of texts (Derrida 1976), the removal of the author, and sobriety in style (Marcus and Fischer 1986), and on the other side, traditionalists such as Geertz (1988), with his staunch and self-assured claim for the irremediable presence of the authorial voice. This conflict calls into question the role of the ethnographer in the field. Geertz (1988) states that, whether one is purporting to be doing science or art, the author is irremediably there and cannot be hidden behind methods, deconstructions, or anything else. Geertz claims, as I have already noted, that the legitimacy of ethnography depends on the researcher’s ability to write ethnographic accounts. This argument stands in marked contrast to that of the postmodernists, who are self-consciously trying to eliminate the influence of the eth-nographer/author. Whichever claim one is inclined to believe, what emerges is a great discrepancy in ethnography concerning the role of the ethnographer, a discrepancy that has become more evident in light of the self-critical awareness of the postmodernist commentators. Traditional ethnographers sought (and continue to seek) to explain a slice of culture by “understanding” the members of that culture. Returning again to Liebow, we are told that “the present study is an attempt for recording and interpreting lower-class life of ordinary people” and that data were collected “with the aim of gaining a clear, firsthand picture of lower-class Negro men” (1967, p. 10). The ethnographer becomes a member of the group under study and reports their life “on their ground and on their terms” (1967, p. 10). The researcher claims neutrality insofar as “an attempt was made to see the man as he sees himself (1967, p. 208), yet subjects’ behavior is explained in terms of the ethnographer’s point of view and understanding. Thus, despite the researcher’s claim to be “invisible” in the report, he is dominant, for all that is reported is filtered through his eyes, his heart, and his mind. More recently, traditional ethnographers have made elaborate attempts to reduce their role in the ethnography by letting the reader know that they are “visible”—in other words, by admitting that, to some degree, they have influenced the study. But, having made this claim, the ethnographers usually go on to state that their aim is to empathically understand the native culture, as if “understanding” is a more “neutral” enterprise than “explaining” (see Matza 1969; Schutz 1971). Yet, this “understanding” is still conveyed by the

212


ethnographer, who seleclively picks and chooses quotes, vignettes, and events to make his or her point, as the following quotes from Espeland (1984) illustrate: “The following conversation took place…” (p. 142); “One employee explained…” (p: 145); “as Jill’s case illustrates…” (p. 147); “one donor told me…” (p. 151), and so on. Thus the ethnographer still dominates the study, albeit more self-consciously and reluctantly. Postmodern ethnographers seek to deconstruct or to eradicate the dominant position of the ethnographer. This is done not by making the ethnographer “disappear” but by making him or her “public.” Given that the ethnographer is a part of the study, to speak of “understanding” based on empathy with the natives gives the researcher a privileged position and misses the point. As Marcus and Fischer (1986, p. 31) put it, “Empathy can be a useful aid, but communication depends upon exchange.” Thus “dialogue” replaces “text” since we are dealing with a “two-way and two-dimensional exchange” (1986, p. 30). Crapanzano (1980) focuses on the dialogue between himself and his subject—he becomes part of the data. The focus here is not only on the Moroccan’s life but also on that of the researcher, as one learns about himself by learning about the other (see Crapanzano 1980, p. 139). The ethnographer claims that we can know the experience of another only by what he says (as though a text can be understood without the assumption of intersubjectivity), and at the same time I have made a plea for more immediate intersubjectivity understanding, which I take to be necessary in any social encounter. (Crapanzano 1980, p. 152)

Thus, the ethnographer becomes a visible partner in dialogue, a datum himself or herself. This visibility is aimed at reducing the ethnographer’s authorial influence on the data. Crapanzano refers to Heidegger’s discussion of “equipment” in regard to Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes (see Crapanzano 1985, p. 148), where the spotlight on the shoes and the peasant, although visible, is inconspicuous since “the peasant ‘simply wears them’” (1985, p. 148). Similarly, postmodern ethnographers would like to reach a point where they are inconspicuous equipment since they, like the peasant, are only wearing the shoes or, in their case, reporting the data. But this is impossible since the ethnographers, like the peasant, still control where the shoes go. When all is said and done, what we learn about the subject, Tuhami, is still a product of Crapanzano’s understanding, interpretations, and selection of his data.


213

NEW TRENDS We have seen that Geertz detects a nervousness and excessive selfconsciousness in postmodern ethnographers. Manning (1989) echoes Geertz by characterizing postmodern ethnographers as unable to shake their self-awareness concerning the problems of ethnography and becoming frozen in their tracks, unable to go out and do fieldwork.The danger of this “heightened awareness,” as seen by Geertz and Manning, was depicted beautifully in regard to literature by Ernest Hemingway, who was speaking about his friend Francis Scott Fitzgerald: His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless. (Hemingway 1964, p. 147)

This new reflexivity has not, however, prohibited the production of new ethnographies. Instead, it has dramatically altered traditional ethnography. There is no longer a dominant paradigm or mode of ethnography. Instead, a wide variety of old and new ethnographies coexist while the entire enterprise continues under scutiny in the form of metatheoretical inquiries that problematize elements such as correspondence, cooperation, negotiation, and intersubjective understanding. In the following section I will indicate some of the directions recently taken by postmodern ethnography. As Manning (1989) points out, many ethnographers have not read the French philosophers (or the Germans, for that matter), so traditional ethnography continues to be a prominent mode of field research, both in anthropology and sociology. But there are also new postmodern approaches. Although each of these approaches possesses its own nuances, there are basically three groups of postmodern ethnography. The first, postmodern fieldwork, emphasizes the problematic status of the ethnographer as the subjective author of ethnographic accounts. This type of fieldwork relies on a heightened awareness of problems in the field but still bases its observations on everyday data gathered from the “natives.” The second, multitextual ethnographies, make the object of traditional accounts problematic by broadening the concept of “everyday life” to encompass films, television, fiction, dreams, and other types of data not commonly included by

214


traditional ethnographers as part of their field of inquiry. The third, feminist ethnographies, focus on the elimination of paternalistic biases in ethnography and sociology. Postmodern Fieldwork

Interpretive, experimental, polyphonic, epiphanic, and minimalist are different labels to identify, both in anthropology (Marcus and Fischer 1986) and sociology (Denzin 1989), modes of doing postmodern ethnographies. Here the ethnographer engages in a cross-cultural or subcultural dialogue with the “natives”; an exchange of information takes place between the researcher and the subject, although this is not always easily accomplished, as Crapanzano describes in his early meetings with Tuhami: At first Tuhami and I spoke mutually unintelligible languages. I was primarily interested in information, Tuhami in evocation. We did listen to each other, though, and soon our discourses began to vacillate between the informative and the evocative. (1980, p. 14)

These ethnographers still rely on their understanding of the situation, but they attempt to minimize their authorial bias by letting the natives speak for themselves as much as possible. The aim is to produce a “polyphony” of voices rather than a single voice, in order to reduce bias and distortion. Crapanzano attempts to draw the reader into the interpretive process by asking rather than answering questions: He [Tuhami] resisted personalization. He, too, showed reticence. Was it for my sake? Or his own? Indeed, was his fear nothing but my (analytic) presumption? (1980, p. 114)

Sociologists are just beginning to produce postmodern ethnographies. Some are finding a forum at interactionist gatherings (such as the Gregory Stone Symposium and the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction meetings). Other studies are beginning to appear in interactionist publications, such as Studies in Symbolic Interaction. Denzin (1989) has mapped a new postmodern approach to sociological ethnographies along the lines of the new anthropological models, with an additional emphasis on what he calls “the epiphanic experiences” of the researcher. Olesen suggests a rereading of two recent postmodern ethnographies (Krieger 1983; Light and Kleiber 1981), seeing both (but Krieger’s especially), as “highly polyphonic, highly impressionistic; [where] the interpretation [is] a brief postscript” (Olesen 1989, p. 12).


215

Despite their different nuances, the key to these postmodern ethnographies is that the author is seen as problematic. Postmodern ethnographers attempt to remedy what they consider to be a fallacy of traditional fieldwork, the ethnographer’s authoritative influence over the interpretion and reporting of the data. This kind of postmodern fieldwork relies instead on “narrative dialogue” to minimize authorial bias and influence and to emphasize natives’ perspectives. For example, Krieger (1983) studied a women’s community by participant-observation and intensive interviews with seventy-eight women. In order to portray the community as much as possible through the members’ eyes, Krieger tells us: [The book] describes and explains its community’s dilemmas exclusively through the voices of community members…. It is composed of an interplay of voices that echo, again and again. Speaking in the colloquial style of the community, these voices provide their own narration. (1983, pp. xvi–xvii)

As for the authors’ position, Krieger limits her influence to the first chapter (1983, p. xvii): “There is no authorial voice in the body of the work, except in the first chapter, which is designed to set the scene.” Multitextual Ethnographies

The second group of postmodern ethnographies extends the notion of polyphony to the modes and varieties of data used in ethnographic accounts. Since everyday life is a text to be analyzed like other texts (Brown 1986), the object of ethnographic inquiry may be expanded to encompass a multiplicity of texts (Clough 1990). In anthropology, this approach has led to attempts to use poems, films, and fiction (see Marcus and Fischer 1986). In sociology, the shift to new ethnographic modes has been stimulated by postmodern cultural criticism (see Barthes 1972; Baudrillard 1983). Baudrillard (1983) notes that, in contemporary consumer societies, the traditional one-to-one relation between objects and their symbolic representations (or between signifieds and signifiers) no longer applies since representations of objects have themselves become “objectified” and stand apart from that which they were intended to signify. For Baudrillard, this commodified, mass-mediated nature of contemporary societies yields a new form of reality, or “hyperreality,” exemplified in the Disneyland world of America: America is neither dream nor reality. It is hyperreality. It is a hyperreality because it is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though

216


it were already achieved. Everything here is real and pragmatic, and yet it is all the stuff of dreams too…. The Americans, for their part, have no sense of simulation. They are themselves simulations. (Baudrillard 1988, p. 28)

In postmodern society the hyperreal becomes an integral part of everyday life, and thus a central topic for multitextual ethnographies. This conception transforms the object of ethnography inquiry well beyond the world in which we eat, sleep, and interact to encompass mass media, dreams, poetry, and other representations. At its extreme (see Baudrillard 1988), postmodern ethnography becomes an ironic, streamofconsciousness account of random symbols of America, with no attempt to conventionally systematize the data, resulting in a pastiche of metaphors that comprises the very soul (or lack of it) of America. Goldman (1987) and Denzin (1987) analyze the world of commodification and its effects on our everyday lives. Both examine bottles (perfume for Goldman, whiskey for Denzin) as cultural and political signifiers in today’s commodified culture. Glassner (1990) focuses on the commodification of the “postmodern” body by analyzing fitness in our society in terms of postmodern pastiche. Fontana and Preston (1990) examine the postmodern architecture of neon signs in Las Vegas and its relation to viewers. They note that neon signs, like whiskey and perfume bottles, are commodified cultural icons in Las Vegas, the city of “the dream world of gambling, fun, entertainment, and time-out experiences” (1990, p. 9). Denzin exemplifies this ethnographic approach in his “Blue Velvet: Postmodern Contradictions” (1988). This analysis of small-town America is far from traditional ethnography, and yet accurately describes the lives and values of the town folks. Blue Velvet is not the sequel to National Velvet, but rather a film noire in which one finds “rotting, cut-off ears, sexual violence, brutality, insanity, the degradation of women, sadomasochistic rituals, drug and alcohol abuse” (Denzin 1988, p. 462). By analyzing the characters of the film from a variety of perspectives, Denzin ties together small-town values with the fearful cultural and political texts of the late twentieth century. This experimental genre of ethnographies, as Marcus and Fischer point out, “perhaps indicates a lack of confidence in the capacity of the traditional genre to be developed any further” (1986, p. 73), while calling into question “the status of ethnography as scientific or factual description” (1986, p. 76). Postmodern Feminist Ethnography

A group that not only takes the ethnographer to task but the whole traditional ethnographic enterprise is feminist sociologists. In the


217

paterlistic power structure that dominates American sociology (Clough 1992b) it is not only the voices of the natives that go unheeded, but those of women as well, whatever their role in the ethnographic enterprise. Postmodern feminist critique of ethnography has taken different forms. Oral historians, in their concern to reproduce the voice of the subjects (Gluck and Patai 1991), have realized the need to go beyond the traditional perspective in ethnography: A woman’s discussion of her life may combine two separate, often conflicting perspectives; one framed in concepts and values that reflect man’s dominant position in the culture, and one informed by the more immediate realities of a woman’s personal experience…. To hear women’s perspectives accurately we have to listen in stereo, receiving both the dominant and muted channels clearly and tuning them in carefully to understand the relationship between them. (Anderson and Jack 1991, p. 11)

Self-reflexivity, probing, patience, understanding and a restructuring of the researcher/subject relation are invoked by oral historians as ways to uncover women’s perspectives. Laurel Richardson shifts from the collecting of data to the reporting of them and radically changes the reporting mode by compressing thirtysix pages of interview transcripts of “Louisa May” into a three page poem. She does so since she feels that lived experience is lived in a body and poetic representation can touch us where we live, in our bodies. Thus, poetry gives us a greater chance of vicariously experiencing the self-reflexive and transformational process of self-creation. (Richardson 1992, p. 26)

Richardson’s poetic interpretive framework offers a radically novel way to show how sociology produces cultural meanings. Patricia Clough is another feminist sociologist who is deeply troubled by the limitations of ethnography: The distinction between ethnographer and the subjects of study have collapsed. Ethnography has become impossible. Ethnography seemed to exclude an analysis of writing; it seemed to exclude me as a writing woman. I felt depressed. My question was no longer: Can you write it? Now, my question was: For a woman, what is the relationship between writing and being a woman, between writing and sexual identity? (1990, p. 36)

Clough questions the narrative production of authority from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, and sees ethnographic narrative as driven by unconscious oedipal desire (Lacan 1977; Clough 1992b). The remedy for

218


Clough, as for Richardson, is to change the traditional models of ethnography, but rather than offering new interpretive modes, Clough suggests a broadening critical stance: Extend the criticism of ethnography to a more general criticism of sociological discourse. (1992a, p. xi)

As Richardson points out, there are many other feminist ethnographers, most of whom are usually ignored by the paternalistic system (1991, p. 32). The common concerns of these ethnographers, by and large, are those already discussed: (1) to give a voice to previously forgotten women and other oppressed groups, (2) to seek new modes of reporting that overcome gender and other biases; and (3) to reread the sociological enterprise in a critical light that provides a new view of reality that no longer privileges certain groups. Postmodern Ethnography Revisited

Although it is too early to forecast how postmodern ethnographic modes will affect more traditional ethnographers, it is clear that they are generating enthusiasm among a new group of practitioners. Nothing would be further from the truth than to suggest that ethnography is degenerating into an irremediably subjective enterprise that has no relevance to sociology or anthropology. The work of ethnographers goes on, despite a heightened self-critical awareness of the enterprise. As Geertz, himself a vocal critic of postmodern approaches (see Geertz 1988), once remarked, I have never been impressed by the argument that, as complete objectivity is impossible in these [ethnographic] matters (as, of course, it is), one might as well let one’s sentiments run loose. As Robert Solow has remarked, that is like saying that as a perfect aseptic environment is impossible, one might as well conduct surgery in a sewer. (Geertz 1973, p. 30)

It would also be mistaken to overemphasize the novelty of postmodern ethnographic approaches. Since the early days of Malinowski, field researchers have been aware of the limits and problems inherent in their methods. Postmodern ethnography is more of an expansion of these concerns than a wholly new departure from traditional ethnography. Three general issues in particular define the new elements in postmodern field research. The first centers around the concept of “understanding.” Following the ethnographic dictum of “letting the


219

natives speak for themselves,” researchers traditionally have sought to maintain the strict integrity of the phenomena as naturally as possible. These mundane accounts were, of course, always affected by the ethnographer’s “understanding” of the natives and their interactions. Postmodern ethnographers, while unable to eliminate the problems of seeing data through the privileged verstehen of the ethnographer, are reducing them by emphasizing the dialogue between the researcher and informants (see Marcus and Fischer 1986). Ultimately the data are irremediably filtered through the ethnographer, but much of the fieldwork produced today attempts to present as many voices as possible, letting the natives, if not entirely speak for themselves, say much more than ever before about themselves (see Favret-Saada 1980; Dwyer 1982; Dumont 1978). The second issue concerns the heightened emphasis on reporting ethnographies. There is no consensus about the many ways of reporting fieldwork, but the importance of reporting styles and procedures is now much clearer. Crapanzano (1986, p. 52) likens the ethnographer to a modern-day Hermes, who “must render the foreign familiar and preserve its very foreignness at one and the same time.” Postmodern ethnographers are becoming increasingly aware that their task is to tell as much of the truth as possible, though they can never hope to tell the whole truth: “When Hermes took the post of messenger of the gods, he promised Zeus not to lie. He did not promise to tell the whole truth. Zeus understood” (Crapanzano 1986, p. 53). The third issue refers to the increased modalities of ethnographic research. For a long time ethnographers have understood that there is no subculture too trivial to study. We can learn as much about society and social actors by observing tarot card readers as we can by researching juvenile delinquents. Postmodern ethnography has similarly expanded the phenomena of interest in field research—there are no data too esoteric to inform us about society. Thus, Crapanzano (1980) includes Tuhami’s dreams and lies as data, for they are part of Tuhami’s conception of the world. Others realize that, in a media-saturated societies in which signifiers have come to be detached from the signifieds they once stood for, mass media and its presentations become relevant texts for study. Thus Goldman and Papson (see Chapter Ten, this volume) examine postmodern society through a Reebook advertisement, Denzin (1988) accentuates the fragmentation of today’s society by analyzing a film noire, and Jameson (1988) makes a case for the lack of referents in postmodernity by analyzing a downtown Los Angeles hotel. Finally, it is worth noting that postmodern ethnographic approaches are a part of a broader reconsideration of ethnography, which in sociology has been based primarily on symbolic interactionism. Based on

220


a critique of Blumer’s (1969) somewhat narrow interpretation of Mead, Joas (1985), Rochberg-Halton (1986), and others are encouraging a reexamination of the epistemological and political dimensions of Mead’s work as well as those of other pragmatist thinkers. Thus, postmodern ethnographers, in questioning their own fieldwork and reporting practices, are contributing to a broader inquiry concerning the theoretical metasystem that has guided and shaped field research since the beginning. In concluding, I can say that postmodern ethnographies have expanded traditional ethnography. What makes these ethnographies postmodern is often a matter of degree and interpretation: How much must the natives say to move from traditional reporting to narrative dialogue? How much self-reflexivity is needed to be postmodern? Yet, when all is said and done, postmodern ethnographies represent a step forward in questioning their own procedures by rendering problematic the authorial subject and in broadening the objective field of inquiry. Seen in this way, what makes ethnographies postmodern is their questioning of traditional ethnographic modes that have been mired in paradigmatic stagnation. Postmodern ethnographers do not advocate any one new way of doing and reporting ethnography; instead, they favor a multiplicity of approaches. Many continue in the mode of traditional ethnography but increase their attentiveness to natives’ own accounts and narrative dialogue. Others expand the enterprise by including nontraditional realms of inquiry such as movies, advertising, and television in ethnographic accounts or by attempting new reporting procedures such as plays, deconstruction of texts, impressionistic reports, and ironic tales. Thus, postmodernism broadens the field of ethnography by accentuating awareness of research practices, problematizing the role of the ethnographer as author, and drawing attention to ethnographic reporting procedures. Yet, many ethnographers are uneasy with postmodern ethnographies (see Geertz 1988), fearing renewed charges of solipsism and lack of scientificity. Others feel that expanding ethnography beyond its conventional boundaries does more than problematize traditional areas of concern; they also raise the policy question, “knowledge for what”? For some, like Baudrillard, this issue is of little consequence since the problem lies in the nature of the ethnographic enterprise itself: Analysis is part of the immense process of the glaciation of meaning. Competition between theories is quite secondary by comparison with their joint commitment to the operation of dissection and transparency. Whatever you analyze and however you do it, you are helping to give primacy to desert forms, indifferent forms. (1990, p. 10)


221

If postmodern ethnographic inquiry has given up all pretense to social amelioration, however, as Baudrillard implies, then its practitioners must find a new way to justify their enterprise.

REFERENCES Anderson, Kathryn, and Dana C.Jack. 1991. “Learning to Listen: Interview Techniques and Analyses.” Pp. 11–26 in Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, edited by Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai. London: Routledge Anderson, Nels. 1923. The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arac, Jonathan, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin. 1983. The Yale Critics: Deconstructionism in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e). ____. 1988. America. Translated by Chris Turner. New York: Verso. Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Brown, Richard H. 1986. Society as Text: Essays on Rhetoric, Reason and Reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cicourel, Aaron. 1970. “The Acquisition of Social Structure: Toward a Developmental Sociology of Language and Meaning.” Pp.136–168 in Understanding Everyday Life: Toward the Reconstruction of Social Knowledge, edited by Jack Douglas. Chicago: Aldine. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James, and George E.Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clough, Patricia Ticineto. 1990. “The Deconstruction of Ethnographic Subjectivity and the Construction of Deliberate Belief.” Pp. 35–44 in Studies in Symbolic Interaction, vol.11, edited by Norman K.Denzin. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. ____. 1992a. “The Rhetoric of Sexual Difference and the Narrative Construction of Ethnographic Authority. Pp. 3–17, in Studies in Symbolic Interaction, vol. 13, edited by Norman K.Denzin. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. ____. 1992b. The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1980. Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ____. 1986. “Hermes’ Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description.” Pp. 51–76, in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press. Denzin, Norman. 1987. “On Semiotics and Symbolic Interactionism.” Symbolic Interactionism 1:1–19. ____. 1988. “Blue Velvet: Postmodern Contradictions.” Theory, Culture, and Society 5:461–473. ____. 1989. Interpretive Interactionism. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

222


Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated with an introduction by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Douglas, Jack, Patricia Adler, Peter Adler, Andrea Fontana, C.Robert Freeman, and Joseph Kotarba. 1980. Introduction to the Sociologies of Everyday Life. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Dumont, Louis. 1978. The Headman and I. Austin: University of Texas Press. Dwyer, Kevin. 1982. Moroccan Dialogues: Anthropology in Question. Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press. Espeland, Wendy. 1984. “Blood and Money: Exploiting the Embodied Self.” Pp. 131–155 in The Existential Self in Society, edited by Joseph Kotarba and Andrea Fontana. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Faris, Robert E.L. 1967. Chicago Sociology: 1920–1932. San Francisco: Chandler. Favret-Saada, J. 1980. Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Translated by Catherine Cullen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fontana, Andrea, and Frederick Preston. 1990. “Postmodern Architecture: From Signs to Icons.” Studies in Symbolic Interactionism 11:3–24. Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewoods Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall. Garfinkel, Harold, and Harvey Sacks. 1966. “On Formal Structures of Practical Actions.” Pp. 337–366, in Theoretical Sociology, edited by John McKinney and Edward Tiryakian. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Thick Descriptions: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” Pp. 1–32 in The Interpretation of Cultures, edited by Clifford Geertz. New York: Basic Books. ____. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as an Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Glaser, Barney, and Anselm Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Chicago: Aldine. Glassner, Barry. 1990. “Fit for Postmodern Selfhood.” Pp. 215–243 in Symbolic Interaction and Cultural Studies, edited by Howard Becker and Michael McCall. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gluck, Sherna Berger, and Daphne Patai, eds. 1991. Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History. London: Routledge. Goldman, Robert. 1987. “Marketing Fragrance: Advertising and the Production of Commodity Signs.” Theory, Culture, and Society 4:691–725. Hemingway, Ernest. 1964. A Movable Feast. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Jameson, Fredric. 1975–1976. “The Ideology of the Text.” Salmagundi 31–32:204–246. Joas, Hans. 1985. G.H.Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought. Translated by Raymond Meyer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Johnson, John M. 1975. Doing Field Research. New York: Free Press. Krieger, Susan. 1983. The Mirror Dance: Identity in a Women’s Community. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Ecrits. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton. Liebow, Elliot. 1967. Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men. Boston: Little, Brown. Light, Linda, and Nancy Kleiber. 1981. “Interactive Research in a Feminist Setting: The Vancouver Women’s Health Collective.” Pp. 167–182 in Anthropologists at Home in North America: Methods and Issues in the Study of One’s Own Society, edited by Donald Messerschmidt. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Lindesmith, Alfred. 1947. Opiate Addiction. Bloomington, IN: Principia Press. Lofland, John. 1971. Analyzing Social Settings. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.


223

Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: Dutton. ____. 1967. A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Manning, Peter. 1989. “Strands in the Postmodernist Rope: Oxymorons in the Desert.” Paper presented at the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction Meetings, San Francisco, 21–24 August. Marcus, George E., and Michael M.J.Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Matza, David. 1969. Becoming Deviant. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Olesen, Virginia. 1989. “Re-Thinking Ethnography: Re-Writing Ourselves.” Paper presented at the Pacific Sociological Association Meetings, Reno, NV, 14–17 April. Park, Robert E. 1916. “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment.” American Journal of Sociology 20:577–612. Richardson, Laurel. 1991. “Speakers Whose Voices Matter: Toward a Feminist Postmodernist Sociological Praxis.” Pp. 29–38 in Studies in Symbolic Interaction, vol. 12, edited by Norman K.Denzin. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. ____. 1992. “The Poetic Representation of Lives: Writing a Postmodernist Sociology.” Pp. 19–28, in Studies in Symbolic Interaction, vol. 13, edited by Norman K.Denzin. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Rochberg-Halton, Eugene. 1986. Meaning and Modernity: Social Theory in the Pragmatic Attitude. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rorty, Richard. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schutz, Alfred. 1971. Collected Papers, vol.1. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Thomas, W.I., and Florian Znaniecki. 1927. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 2 vols. New York: Knopf. Van Maanen, John. 1988. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wax, Rosalie. 1971. Doing Fieldwork. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Young, Pauline. 1932. Pilgrims of Russian Town. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 10

The Postmodernism That Failed Robert Goldman Steven Papson

Postmodernism is everywhere. It has become the hip, the in, the trendy catchword of the late 1980s. There is even a “Postmodern Hour” on MTV. Despite its ever-shifting boundaries and elusive meaning, postmodernism in daily life seems to be about images, or rather about a world of images that supplant what they refer to, or represent. “Simulations” confront us at nearly every turn, until most social spaces we encounter appear similar—we live now in a world of materialized déjà vu. There is also a shallow consensus that the postmodern encompasses a loss of unified meaning, a loss of certainty—the price of too much individuation, too much social construction of reality, and too much commodity hyperbole. In this conception of the postmodern sensibility, the loss of faith in the possibility of meaningful certainty elicits a cynical, jaded blank, and blasé attitude. Television registers as the heart and soul of postmodernism because of its relentless scrambling of signifiers and signifieds. Its cultural product is a pastiche made from copying, scavenging, recycling, and recombining surfaces and fragments of cultural texts regardless of context. After years of being routinely bombarded by signifiers and signifieds detached from referent systems, spectators have eventually reacted by assuming stances of ironic detachment. Blank, but knowing, indifference thus came to be adopted as a defensive posture visà-vis processes of media manipulation. 224

The Postmodernism That Failed

225

In contrast to those who see in postmodernism the advent of a postcapitalist era that has moved beyond production (see Baudrillard 1975), we see postmodernism as the latest product of commodity culture. One source of postmodernism lies in the history of modern advertising. Dedicated to generating brand images, what Baudrillard (1981) calls “sign-values,” advertising today is routinely grounded in a language disorder that entails the continuous rerouting of signifiers and signifieds. The result is a postmodern schizophrenia (Jameson 1984) that undoes the ties that bind signifiers with signifieds so that signifiers can enter into the exchange process necessary for assembling commodity signs. When abstracted to their logical extremes, contemporary advertising’s rudimentary processes of engineering meaning—juxtaposition and superimposition—become the hallmarks of postmodern signification practices. We have chosen to probe postmodernism via a Reebok sneaker commercial that was part of a failed advertising campaign. This ad features a postmodern aesthetic that serves as a reference point for interpreting the new shift in commodity culture. This postmodern aesthetic is characterized by pastiche; blankness; a sense of exhaustion; a mixture of levels, forms, styles; a relish for copies and repetition; a knowingness that dissolves commitment into irony; acute self-consciousness about the formal, constructed nature of the work; pleasure in the play of surfaces; [and] a rejection of history. (Gitlin 1989, p. 100)

The Reebok campaign brought postmodernism to television by packaging it as an aesthetic style, hitching postmodern aesthetic codes to the commodity form in the context of a commodity sign war (where Reebok sought market share by differentiating its brand image from competing brand images). We conceptualize advertising as a political economy of commodity sign-values, and the Reebok commercial constitutes a text for exploring the intersection of postmodernism with the logic of capital and with a consumerist social philosophy that uses commodity signs as tools for self-identification. The Reebok ad particularly interests us because its appropriation of a postmodern cultural field also seems to create another dimension of interpretive space for viewers, thereby intimating the possibility of liberation and autonomy. The truth of postmodernism, as we see it, is that production has been pushed to the inner recesses of our consciousness, while consumption and desire have become overwhelming presences in our lives. But, unfortunately, like the positivist paradigm it claims to expose,

226


postmodernism grasps only its own moment of truth; it knows only the surface. Postmodern methods and social theories gloss over the framework or context in which production and consumption of a text occur (Kaplan 1988); they tend to offer ungrounded readings that omit production and class relations.1 In this way, postmodern theory and methods replicate the pastiche that is the object of their discourse and conflate interpretive heterogeniety with political pluralism. Flitting from one cultural text to another, theoretical postmodernism abstracts from capitalist relations of production, political economy, and class relations. By locating the Reebok campaign as a specific discursive practice articulated within a postmodern corporate political economy of sign value, we aim to contextualize the referent system of postmodernism in a way that semiotics and deconstructionism do not. In the next two sections of this chapter we describe the structural dilemma confronted by contemporary advertisers, and then theorize the historical crisis in advertising by viewing it in the context of an increasing rate of circulation of signs (sign values) which results in a declining rate, and duration, of commodity sign-values. This, we argue, pushes advertisers to relentlessly search for stylistically differentiated signs to valorize their commodities, although every new sign further destabilizes the currency of signs and accelerates the sign crisis. Following a detailed scene-by-scene mapping of the the Reebok commercial text in the fourth section, the fifth section critically analyzes the Reebok advertisement with a focus on how the ad names and (re)positions the spectator in relation to the text’s visual representations. We read the ad in terms of a postmodern aesthetic that highlights the death of affect, the burnout of desire, linguistic schizophrenia, and the plundering of cultural texts for meaning and value. In the sixth section, we read the Reebok ad as a narrative about interrelated crises of subjectivity, desire and representation. This postmodern commercial is a “meta-ad” that turns cultural contradiction into a commodity signifier of “the end of desire.” In the seventh section, we criticize postmodernist equations of heterogeneity with pluralism. We argue that interpretive openness and polysemy do not necessarily negate hegemonic processes. Indeed, though postmodernism blurs the boundaries between high and mass culture, we reject as romanticism the claim that such blurring challenges either capitalist or commodity hegemony. Postmodern aesthetics constitute the latest stage of commodity culture, in which hegemonic contests are displaced to metacommunicative forms. We conclude with a reminder that apparently free-floating image texts such as the Reebok ad, can readily obscure a chain of production and consumption relations still rooted in a material world of inequality and domination.


227

THE IMMEDIATE CONTEXT: THE FIELD OF TELEVISION CONSUMER-GOODS ADVERTISING Television commercials in the 1980s required more capital, more artistic labor, and more creative energy than most regular programming because the competitive structure of commodity culture pressured advertisers to continually position their brand images against those of their competitors. Indeed, the value of a product today is its position; its value is its visual sign. Advertising culture in the 1980s was further conditioned by more cynical viewers and a remote-control technology that let viewers “drive” through the channels and “zap” away ads. Advertisers thus searched for innovative aesthetic structures and salient images and sounds that would capture viewers’ attention and hold their interest. Technology changed the look of television ads in the 1960s as slicker color and graphics pushed commodity aesthetics in pursuit of “perfection.” By the 1980s, the conventions of commodity perfectibility were exhausted as a means of generating product differentiation, and the sheer surfeit and banality of images began to stimulate consumer indifference. New advertising styles were introduced in the mid-1980s to combat this viewer skepticism. Levi’s 501 Blues commercials pioneered a realist trend that discarded jingles and replaced the perfection of fashion models with nonprofessional, mistake prone, self-reflexive, ordinary people. Realism of character and setting, supported by the authenticity of blues music, provided space for viewers to celebrate their own individuality without suffering the anxiety of comparing themselves with the unattainable perfection of the fashion model. Despite this interpretive space, Levi’s steered viewers toward the proposition that individuality might best be expressed while wearing “personalized shrink-to-fit” 501 buttonfly jeans. Individuality and the commodity were now linked at a deeper level. Viewers could position themselves against conformity by buying a mass-produced but personally appellated commodity. Despite the semiotic twists and turns, the preferred interpretation still rested on pseudoindividuality and commodified selves (see Goldman and Papson 1991). After the Levi’s campaign, the advertising landscape became cluttered with realist images and styles. Imitators used every realist coding device: black-and-white photography, grainy images, noncontinuous editing, jerky camera movements, back regions, and hypersignified closeups. Against this realist clutter, Reebok released the “Reeboks Let UBU”2 campaign in June 1988. The campaign lasted only into the fall, with its passing officially announced in February 1989. Designed by Chiat/Day, the $20 million campaign broke with realism and claimed to relocate individuality by introducing postmodern aesthetic codes. The television

228


commercials appeared during prime-time and late-night programming, and coordinated print ads were also placed in fashion, entertainment, and life-style magazines. Reebok’s campaign was motivated by market research that showed Reebok to be less a “badge brand” indicating status (in the manner of BMW) than a marker of individual preference and use. Consumers across the demographic board, from youth to ethnic markets to grandparents, reported wearing Reebok shoes. Reebok’s advertising strategy played on the personal uniqueness aspect and the diversity of ways the shoes could be used. They positioned their shoes as life-style products targeted at “style-conscious adults” between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. Their ad campaign was positioned against Nike’s performance-oriented “Just Do It” campaign featuring Michael Jordan and other athletes.3 The Reebok campaign initially drew critical acclaim. Trade journals called it “something that didn’t look like advertising,” “on the cutting edge,” “the new school of advertising for the media-savvy consumer,” “clever fashion advertising that involves marketing’s most cherished brand-image stratagems, all the while cauterizing our nerve endings like a hot knife through clutter.” The “Reeboks Let UBU” ads moved consumer-goods advertising from the realist look that dominated the mid1980s toward an aesthetic that relied on obvious abstraction, nonlinear editing, and layered execution to invite multiple viewings. It presumed media-literate viewers familiar and comfortable with the avant-garde styles found on MTV: It’s stark and conceptual. It’s self-conscious. It’s inspired by video art, photography and the theater, rather than film. It’s not linear and it doesn’t use rock ‘n’ roll. It’s advertising’s new abstraction. (Davidson 1988, p. 1)

However, sporting goods retailers deemed the campaign too fashionoriented for their performance-oriented customers. Reebok’s subsequent campaign, “The Physics behind the Physiques,” returned to performance-oriented, stylized bodies before giving way to the hightech performance campaign “Pump It Up.”4

THE WIDER CONTEXT: CONTRADICTIONS OF A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SIGN-VALUES A more focused analysis of the postmodern cultural implications of recent ads such as “Reeboks Let UBU” is possible if we understand advertising in terms of a political economy of commodity sign-values that plays a crucial role in contemporary capitalist societies (see Baudrillard 1981).


229

The space where commodity form and advertising form converge is the sphere of commodity signs. A single commodity sign represents the union of a named product (e.g., Reebok athletic shoes) as signifier with a meaningful image (e.g., nonconformist self-expression) as signified. But no sooner is this union accomplished than signifier and signified trade places (see Goldman 1987). The development of a regime of sign-values can be traced to multiple historical forces in the early twentieth century, including crises of overproduction and underconsumption (Ewen 1976), a temporary saturation of investment capital in primary goods production that led to increased investment in leisure and consumer goods industries (Sklar 1969), the bourgeoisie’s struggle to maintain hegemony over a public sphere of discourse (Brenkman 1979), the transformation of bourgeois norms of deferred gratification into obstacles to expanding consumer goods markets, and barriers in the velocity of commodity circulation between production and consumption (Haug 1986; O’Connor 1987). These forces together prompted an institutionalized political economy of sign-value, but once the circuit of marketing and advertising gained some history, the political economy of sign-value assumed its own internal dynamic. Advertisers faced the never-ending imperative of enhancing the value of products by linking those products to a symbolic value while differentiating their signs and products from others. Over time, success in this endeavor intensified the subsequent competition to come up with more effective commodity sign-values. Just as a political economy of sign-value emerged historically in response to contradictions in the commodity form, we theorize that a political economy of commodity signs is subject to its own historically developing internal contradictions. Corporate advertising initially developed (1900–1925) as a means of expanding markets and reducing circulation time between production and the realization of a commodity sale. But solving the problems of circulation time and realization of commodity-value has generated alienated readers and viewers, contributing to a new crisis of valuation. Thus it is the unrelenting reduction in circulation time in the late twentieth century that has bred contradictions in the system of reproducing sign-values. Intensified commodity circulation also stimulates “fragmentation and destabilization of the categories of needing” and prompts “a growing indifference to the qualities of needs or wants” (Leiss 1976). Because marketers face constant pressures to revolutionize needs and the means to their satisfaction, there follows a destabilizing of categories of needing. When there are so many needs constantly being divided, subdivided, and redefined, consumers become less able to fully attend

230


to the satisfaction of any given need: “The individual must become increasingly indifferent to the fine shadings and nuances of both wants and the objects which s/he pursues in search of satisfaction” (Leiss 1976, p. 88). The proliferation of commodity brand names has prompted a corresponding proliferation of commodity signs. Competition within the sphere of commodity sign production and consumption results in a tendency for the rate of circulation of sign-values to accelerate. Intensified commodity sign circulation has led, in turn, to an erosion of credibility linked to a crisis of representation along with a selfconscious relativizing of value. Competition for market share accelerates the circulation of commodity signs until the swirl of unhinged signifiers and signifieds becomes dizzying and viewers are no longer able to differentiate signifiers from signifieds. Thus fixity of meaning vaporizes.5 Advertisements create “a currency on the level of signs” (Williamson 1978) by steering the transfer and exchange of meanings. This process necessarily converts signifieds into signifiers in order to reproduce a commodity sign currency, but the repeated transfer and exchange undermine the reproduction of the commodity sign currency system as signifier and signified become fused. Driven by the motor of exchange-value, a crisis of realist representation can be traced to this continual process of remixing signifiers and signifieds detached from referent systems. Advertisers face the task of establishing and maintaining a differentiated position in the sign field of mass culture, while the growth of corporate markets demands a continual expansion of the commercial sign field. In practical marketing terms, product and sign recall become problematic when too many finely differentiated signs compete within the same space. Neither desire nor meaning is exhaustible per se, but just because both are potentially infinite does not mean that their continuous appropriation for the purpose of expanding the field of exchange-values is without social and psychological consequences. Incessant competition within the field of commodity sign-values leads to a diminishing half-life of sign-values, advertising campaigns, and attention spans. Routinized glamour reinforces this tendency for the rate of sign-value to decline (if a currency is saturated, it gets devalued). Of no less consequence, in a mature political economy of sign-value, the constant symbolic construction and reconstruction of value draws attention to the very category of value; values become relativized, and the authority of the value production process becomes transparent. Whereas the ideological justification of nineteenth-century capitalism rested on premises of equivalence exchange and the universal absolute of exchange-value as a category, today’s consumer world is a contest


231

in which advertisers and marketers seek to undermine the signexchange-value of their competitors while enhancing (via differentiation) the value of their own signs. Under these circumstances, the category of value has exhausted its truth claims. Commercials such as “Reebok Lets UBU” acknowledge that sign-value is based on artifice and superficiality. Finally, an accelerated rate of sign circulation alienates viewers. As vehicles for reproducing commodity sign-values, advertisements spark the social construction of alienated interpretive labor by structuring meanings so that they become a means of producing commodity signvalue. To produce sign-values, advertisers attempt to colonize the sphere of cultural life in a search for meanings that will add value to their product or service. The competition to extract and revalorize those meaning systems eventually exhausts the referent world of everyday life. Then advertising begins to cannibalize itself, by recycling and recombining previous advertising styles and signs in the quest for new twists on old meanings. Hence, it becomes increasingly self-referential or intertextual (see Lefebvre 1971). Viewers are able to interpret most ads because they know the rules that govern the movement and connection of meanings in ads. Commercials ideologically reproduce the logic of commodity relations, not necessarily because of their specific content, but because of their structure or form and the interpretive rules the structure carries. The ideological force of commercials is expressed through their format rules, which viewers must performatively execute in order to interpret them. Viewers’ interpretive participation is absolutely necessary to the completion of commodity signs (Williamson 1978) because consumers produce value: they do not just consume it. To more efficiently compete within a political economy of signvalues, advertisers have continually rationalized their production methods by means of innovations in market research, life-style categories such as Values and Life-Style Study (VALS), focus groups, and product positioning. Because of their sales agenda, ads tend to be systematically overstructured to elicit preferred meanings. Efficiently overstructured encoding practices and formats turn popular cultural meanings into the raw materials for producing new commodityvalues. This not only requires abstracting that which is meaningfully valuable from the real social relations of daily life, it also entails positioning the viewer or reader vis-à-vis a mode of address (Williamson 1978). Over time, viewers and readers have developed patterns of resistance to ads, particularly to the process of being positioned by ads to complete the exchange of meanings. Recognizing viewer resistance in the 1980s, advertisers attempted to incorporate

232


images of resistance into new campaigns of advertising. Saturation and clutter combined with viewer skepticism have inaugurated the socalled postmodern era in advertising. Postmodern ads portray viewers as being too savvy to be taken in by commercials. This new stage of advertising incorporates criticism of advertising into the ads themselves by adopting postures of reflexive self-awareness about the project of advertising itself. These developments in advertising paralleled changes in the marketplace, namely, the splintering of the mass market into niche and specialty markets. Market fragmentation, the proliferation of commodity brands, and the displacement of a mass national viewing audience by cable television were forcing changes on the advertising industry.6

THE COMMERCIAL TEXT Reebok’s first television commercial in this campaign was a thirtysecond spot that got the most play during the campaign. Because the color coding is unusual and the images are framed off-center, the ad’s photography connotes on absurd and surreal aura. Scenes were shot from below to distort the sense of vertical space and perspective. The soundtrack consists of oddly detached, carefully phrased sayings in the style of a 1940s radio voiceover. The musical score, composed by Oingo-Boingo and Todd Rundgren, has been described as both gypsy music and intentional kitsch. The sayings accompanying the ad were taken from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “On Self-Reliance,” written in 1841, but they are not identified as such. Between each adage is a meaningful pause. • • • • • •

“Who so would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” “To be great is to be misunderstood.” “There is a time in everyman’s education when he arrives at the conclusion that envy is ignorance.” “Insist on yourself, never imitate.” “To believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.”

We now map the commercial frame by frame:

Scene 1: Two elderly male and female couples dressed in red-andwhite squaredancing garb stand on a stage set in a living room with


233

an artificial potted tree on the right and a picture on the wall above it. On the left is a sign, with the letters UBU. The couples wear red sneakers. They step forward and bow as if they have completed a performance; two hold trophies under their arms. This is sequenced to the narrator voiceover, “Who so would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” Scene 2: A hypermagnified closeup of the typed letter U is white on black and off-center on the screen. The typeface is so magnified that its edges appear as pockmarked and irregular surfaces. Scene 3: A second U appears, this one black on white. Scene 4: Keyed to “Consistency is…,” a middle-aged man mechanically hits a paddleball; mind and body appear disassociated. His white shirt and black tie suggest a professional civil servant or a bureaucrat. Shown in profile from the waist up, he occupies the right side of the screen, set against a “True Stories” blue sky. Like the ensuing scene of American punk-gothic, he is framed off-center horizontally as well as vertically. A disproportionate amount of background above the subjects, and not enough ground, throughout the ad creates an absence of perspective; the images are flat, and hence there are no reference points to spatially locate the subjects. Scene 5: A black B appears that is cut off at the bottom of the screen. Scence 6: A white B appears and is enlarged even more and cut off at both top and bottom. Scenes 5 and 6 correspond to the phrase “is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Scene 7: The “hobglobin of little minds” phrase flows over into an image of two punks (one male and one female) carrying a bucket of sloshing milk between them. A cow in the background matches a cow’s image on the female’s t-shirt. She wears black-checked pants, and the male wears a leather jacket, tacky plaid-checked pants, and a spiked mohawk haircut. Shot from a low angle, their bodies extend beyond the sides of the frame. At the scene’s end, the voiceover continues “To be great….” Scene 8: Two elderly women wearing identical red hats, white Miss Marple suits, and red hightop sneakers with white socks pose in front of a modernist architectural monument—the stylized diner of the 1950s. The women step forward, smile, and in unison do a two-step dance. This is matched to the phrase “…is to be misunderstood.” Scene 9: The scene cuts to the women’s legs and red sneakers. The Reebok name is barely visible on the shoes and socks (on first viewing, few viewers could identify or read this). Only later do we realize that their red-shoed expressions of personality are Reeboks. Scene 10: A black U.B.U appears at the center of the screen. Note that the period is absent from the last U.

234


Scene 11: Behind a line of trees on the horizon (against a tintedblue sky), human figures are running in silhouette. Copied from Woody Allen’s film Love and Death, this scene connotes an absurdist cinematic aesthetic. Allen adapted the scene from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal which foregrounded the black-and-white silhouette of Death with his scythe. Death is suppressed in Reebok’s version, to be replaced by a vividly colored hide-and-seek romp. Scene 12: A black woman wears a blue-and-white paisley dress and white sneakers. She smiles, turns toward the camera, and curls a barbell with her right arm, revealing a muscular biceps. She appears to stand straight while the grassy ground and trees about her slope. Behind her, a tree trunk divides and then is cut off by the frame. This creates an imbalance in the frame, keyed to the narration, “There is a time in everyman’s education….” There is an obvious gender mismatch here between the visual image and the spoken words. Scenes 13, 14, and 15: Three consecutive shots begin with a large white U on black and a large white B in black (cut off at the bottom) followed by a black U on white (cut off on the bottom and the left). These images flash by, and the narration presses on “…when he arrives at the (con-…).” Scene 16: An androgynous youth wearing a ballerina outfit and white sneakers vacuums a pink oriental rug on a suburban front lawn while she practices a plié. Shot from below with a wide angle lens, this scene is dominated by a blue sky in the background. The narration continues “…clusion that envy is ignorance.” Scenes 17 and 18: The phrase U.B.U., white on black, appears, and then the same phrase is reversed to dark on white. Scene 19: Three boys dressed in white shorts and Hawaiian print shirts all look alike as they swing on white tires past a rose bush. They swing through a bright streak of light and turn their heads toward the camera in mechanical unison. Their lack of expressivity makes them seem programmed, but the narration contradicts this: “Insist on yourself….” Scenes 20, 21, and 22: Three shots appear in rapid succession: an enlarged white on black U. (the period extends outside the frame on the right), followed by a large black on white B, and then another large black on white U. The voiceover continues “…never imitate.” Scene 23: A bride in white walks toward us and stops to pose (red shoes show beneath her gown). A groom in a gray tuxedo pops into place next to her; then a minister in clerical attire pops into the picture; then a beekeeper wearing a mask and protective suit carrying a smoker pops in; finally, the middle-aged man in long shorts hitting a paddleball wanders in. All wear sneakers. They stand in front of a white rural


235

church building, posing for an unmanned camera on a tripod. The naturelike setting is given an artificial twist when four mechanical geese waddle through and exit the frame. Jump cuts make the subjects appear as if by magic, popping into the scene out of the eerie, luminescent light. The accompanying narration is “To believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men [pause]….” Scene 24: A black screen is shown, then the words “Reeboks Let U.B.U.”

appear, as the voiceover concludes, “…That is genius.”

DECONSTRUCTING SURFACES Non-Adness

The Reeboks campaign built upon how advertisers normally position the viewer. The Reebock ad represents a strategy to disguise the fact that the ad is an ad. “Not-ad” ads encode a self-reflexive awareness of their own “ad-ness,” similar to the “meta-ad” that contains within itself a tacit commentary on the conventional structure of ads and how they position viewers (see Goldman and Wilson, 1983; Williamson, 1978). An Advertising Age review commented on the disguised nature of the Reebok ad: Still, a lot of people don’t get it. They look at director David Bailey’s execution of art director Martin Weiss’ vision and feel they are being MTVed to no purpose. They say the message doesn’t register. They complain that they had to pay close attention to the commercials before they ever realized Reebok was the sponsor! Um, doesn’t that make these, ipso facto, extraordinarily effective commercials? I kind of thought it was a rare achievement to get TV viewers scrutinizing anything without multiple cubic yards of cleavage. (Garfield 1988, p. 70)

Designed to deny its commercial nature, the Rebook ad keeps viewers dangling in terms of its agenda. Music, narration, calligraphy, miseenscène, and editing overlay the commercial agenda with an innovative aesthetic structure that encourages viewers to see an artistic text. The U.B.U calligraphy appears in an obtuse form: off-centered fragments of oversized typed letters give each calligraphic element an aesthetic as well as a discursive function. Likewise, the color, angle of shot, framing, and content of each image violates realist coding practices. The product being advertised appears in some shots, but the only direct shot of Reebok

236


sneakers appears in scene #9, when the two elderly matrons do a twostep dance. Only when the tag line “Reeboks Let U.B.U” appears in the final shot can the puzzle “What was this an ad for?” be solved. This last shot is underscored by the narration “that is genius,” connoting both that Reebok ingeniously creates possibilities for individual style and that the viewer is a genius if he or she figured out that he or she was watching a Reebok commercial. Ambiguity: Rupturing the Conventional

Since “everything is now fake,” the postmodern text celebrates itself as a fictional artifact. It does not attempt to hide its constructed nature but luxuriates in its arbitrariness. The postmodern text flaunts its own contrived arbitrariness by exaggerating its eccentric combinations of juxtaposition, interpolation, superimposition, and misattribution. As a postmodernist text, the Reebok ad cultivates the appearance of a “heterotopia,” packing each frame with incongruous linkages, cultural contradictions, nonconventional images and film code violations. Each frame draws on contradictory signifiers: punks on a farm with a pail of milk, for example, or an androgynous ballerina vacuuming on the front lawn of a suburban home. The ordinary is transformed into the improbable or the bizarre. Color is either oversaturated or inappropriate. Heavy-handed color tinting calls attention to the constructed nature of each image while raising ontological questions such as “Whose world is this?” Unbalanced frames violate realist coding conventions; characters are either weighted too much to one side or are not centered vertically (e.g., with too much head room). The contrast with conventional framing rules produces the style that Chiat/ Day’s Bill Hamilton calls “American Gothic on its ear.” Driven by the imperative of brand differentiation, many commercials now use nonnarrative, kaleidoscopic montages of images to target different life-styles, but they maintain continuity by relying on realist conventions, music, and voiceover narration. But in the Reebok ad codes governing the relationships among images, music, narrative, and titles are disjointed and self-contradictory. Presented with twenty-four scenes in a thirty-second commercial, viewers are not given adequate time to make sense of every shot. The diegetic structure is disrupted by presenting the characters as extraneous to one another; moreover, the worlds they inhabit appear unrelated and outside historical time and space. Each character exists in her own or his own universe, sequenced in apparent ontological pluralism. Furthermore, the music and narration offer no help


237

to viewers who attempt to find the meaning of the text. Why the radio announcer’s voice? Why Hungarian folk music? Why Emerson quotes? Instead of supplying answers to a puzzling visual text, these aural elements add more layers of disparity. The ad deliberately mismatches signifiers and signifieds, defying our expectation that voiceovers (like captions in print ads) will name and explain visuals. Smart viewers soon recognize that each spoken concept is either the reverse of the visual signified to which it is keyed or a clever conceptual play on it. Narrative and image are mismatched to evoke a sense of contradiction. The narrator states “there is a time in everyman’s education” just when we see a black female weightlifter, and says “insist on yourself just when we see identical triplets in identical clothes with identical blank stares. Reebok’s ambiguity represents difference; its meaning is defined by what sets it apart from other meanings. This is not, however, the radical ambiguity that Derrida and other postmodernists celebrate, but instead an ambiguity generated by intentional discontinuity and suspension of conventional reading rules. Though Reebok’s ambiguity masquerades as interpretive openness, it actually has been turned into a mere secondorder signifier of difference (see Barthes 1972). Put another way, in the Reebok ad, ambiguity is overdetermined, a function of market imperatives to seek commodity difference. The Death of Affect

Conventional commercials attempt to enhance brand recognition by associating a positive feeling with recognition. Devices such as character identification, music, voice intonation, humor, and emotional appeals aim at heightening affect and correlating it with the product. The Reebok ad, in contrast, celebrates antiaffect by addressing viewers who are assumed to be stone-faced, disinterested, and disengaged. The narrator’s voice is radio-flattened as it delivers third-person quotes. The inappropriateness of the kitsch music is dissociative rather than associative, and the characters in the ad display masks of blank indifference. “Freakish” characters, mechanical gestures, and disruption by titles celebrate antiaffective fascination. Everything conspires to depict desire gone numb. The message is “Who you are has nothing to do with how you feel.” The commodity sign simply functions to separate you from other sign users. Wearing blankness as a sign metacommunicates that the wearer sees through the sham of commodity culture.

238


Ads customarily position viewers to occupy what Berger calls the surveyed-surveyor relationship, in which one thinks of oneself as “an object of vision: a sight,” mentally trying on this or that look. “The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product…to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others.” (1972, pp. 46–47, 134). Reebok takes an ambivalent stance regarding this relationship between the spectator and the object of desire. The ad still locates personal identity as a function of the freedom of visual appearance, but its blank subjects seem to mutely abstain from participation in the normalizing conventions of commoditysign surveillance, while the voiceover disparages the envydesire dialectic as “ignorance.” No characters in the ad seem concerned about how they are surveyed by others. Strategies for Interpretation

Williamson’s (1978) discussion of hermeneutics shows how ads demand that spectators produce meaning. Devices such as absence of the product, puns and puzzles, calligraphy, and contradictory language are used to create “space” and a feeling of interpretative freedom. Williamson shows, however, that these devices direct spectators to a preferred answer that is already in the ad. The “freedom of interpretation” that the text promises is an illusion. In parallel fashion, postmodernism as a style celebrates the participatory role of the spectator in deconstruction. Instead of a single authoritative interpretation of a text, a multiplicity of interpretations lead to an alleged cultural pluralism. Indeterminacy and ambiguity in postmodern texts elicit participation because ambiguity impels viewers to fill in interpretive gaps. How does the Reebok ad extend the participatory role of the spectator? It mimics the hermeneutic structure outlined by Williamson, creating a puzzle by the virtual absence of the product, disconnected imagery, and fragmented calligraphy. Unconventional, eccentric, and obtuse encoding practices further complicate the puzzle. As a string of signifiers, the ad demands self-conscious interrogation because it does not fit together. And yet, Reebok provides a solution to its puzzle in the tag line. Viewers may respond in one of four ways.7 First, traditional viewers socialized to expect realist conventions simply refuse to play the interpretative game. The imagery and structure are too far outside their coding boundaries and require too much work for the satisfaction that interpretation might provide. Second, a modernist viewer demands a clear meaning. Reebok has created a puzzlelike structure where the


239

pleasure comes from piecing it together and finding the “correct” or “sensible” solution. Subsequent viewings may be used to find and verify meanings, posit relationships between images, attach signifieds to the signifiers. But there is no solution here, for the Reebok ad is a postmodern text in the sense that its meaning does not lie within the text. Although it entices the viewer with a puzzlelike structure, the pieces do not fit. To escape the conundrum, a third strategy must be used. Instead of asking “What does this mean?,” one must ask, “Where does this come from?” Instead of finding a signified, one recognizes similarly stylized arrangements of signifiers. Here, signifiers take on a life of their own; their importance eclipses that of their signifieds. Although intertextual allusion does not locate meaning within the text itself, it creates a sense of interpretive potency based on media literacy. The fourth strategy makes no attempt to find meaning. The viewer simply enjoys the “weird” or fantastic nature of the imagery. Fleeting fascination replaces a quest for meaning as the viewer accepts the surface and its contradictions without experiencing a need for coherency. This relationship to the text is conditioned by having experienced a continual flow of disjointed, fragmented imagery, as found in watching MTV: What characterizes the postmodern video is its refusal to take a clear position vis-a-vis its images, its habit of hedging…a clear signified…. Each element of a text is undercut by others: narrative is undercut by pastiche; signifying is undercut by images that do not line up in a coherent chain; the text is flattened out, creating…the refusal of a clear position for the spectator…. This leaves him/her decentered, perhaps confused, perhaps fixated on one particular image or image-series, but most likely unsatisfied. (Kaplan 1987, p. 63)8

Pastiche and Schizophrenia

The Reebok ad is pure pastiche, a recombinant cultural form made up of decontextualized and fetishized signifiers drawn from prior texts. This cultural form is conditioned by a language disorder, a breakdown of the relationship between signifiers and signifieds that Jacques Lacan conceptualizes as schizophrenia: “The schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up in a coherent sequence” (Jameson 1983, p. 119). Without the context of narrative and without a guiding syntax, time implodes into a perpetual present. Without time, there is no identity, “no persistence of the ‘I’ and the ‘me.’” Television presents just such a perpetual present in its technical capacity for stringing together images as signifiers in any order regardless of the meaningful context of any

240


given sign. Commercials sequence images to achieve the goal of transferring their meanings and values to a named commodity. All images thus become instrumentalized, their importance reduced to their capacity to signify a meaning that is transferable. One consequence is a heightened awareness of each isolated signifier and “a change in the mode of narration.” Stories that unfold sequentially become rarer “because we are too aware of what is continually traversing the storyline laterally” (Berger 1974, p. 40). Simultaneity and extension push aside sequence in the mode of narration; we now live in the epoch of the segue. Reebok’s pastiche is even more convoluted since it raises ostensibly self-reflexive questions about the agenda of the ad message (see Herskovitz 1979). Pastiche is simultaneously turned into a metaphor for individuality even as it metacommunicates indifference to stylized looks (the currency of personal appearances in a consumer society). Most television consumer-goods ads position viewers to complete a relationship between floating signifiers and signifieds. These ads instrumentally splinter signifieds and signifiers into a universe of pastiche, and Reebok’s use of pastiche as a textual strategy to deny this positioning is, itself, cynical. Reebok tries to establish itself as the totem of the bricoleur (see Hebdige 1979).9 Its use of pastiche constitutes a recognition that commercial forms of representation have turned the human body and its surrounding landscapes into visual zones of consumption that may be filled by any sign system that can be reduced to a visual seme. As an apparently random and arbitrary approach to the presentation of signifiers, pastiche registers as a denial of the power of style-makers and designers. But this reassertion of amateurism reconfirms the fetishism of the discrete image and its power over us. When the self is presented as an eclectic amalgam of random signifiers, each body part offers an axis on which to visually differentiate the self. The number of combinations and permutations of signifiers becomes immense. Jameson claims that “the disappearance of the individual subject, along with its formal consequences, the increasing unavailability of personal style, engender[s]…pastiche” (1984, p. 83), but paradoxically, the extreme fetishism of this cut-up style may, in fact, set the stage for a rampant pluralism of commodity personalities. We do not take solace from this form of pluralism because it actually contributes to a more insidious kind of commodity hegemony that privileges privatized, fractured discourses over shared public discourse. It demands neither specific nor in-depth knowledge of texts or genres but draws instead from the surface of other texts, “celebrat[ing] the accretion of texts and meanings” (Hebdige 1989, p. 191).10


241

THE CRISIS OF INDIVIDUALITY AND THE CORPORATE OVERSOUL Postmodernists reject the notion of a stable, coherent self and corresponding theories of depth psychology, insisting that the self consists of nothing more than superficial, disjointed fragments. Nietzsche’s warning that the subject is a fiction has been inflated into postmodern “protest[s] at the coercive unification implied by the notion of a self-conscious, self-identical subject” (Dews 1986, p. 31). The autonomous ego was the bourgeois corollary to the ethic of possessive individualism during the heyday of modernity. This was the seductively idealized ego that stared back at subjects from the advertising mirror for decades. But today the mirror has transformed this self from one anchored in depth to one floating in appearances. In a society where the transcendental signified has withered away and signifiers erratically bounce across time and space, the “schizophrenic fragmentation of experience and loss of identity” becomes a central social modality. If “death of God” declarations heralded the rise of modernism and the decline of gemeinschaft relations, then does the “death of the subject” signal the postmodern era? Capitalist society has already encountered the “death of the social,” Baudrillard (1983b) claims, and the Reebok ad seems to echo his message. Unconventional in design and mode of signification, the Reebok ad aims to convince viewers that Reebok endorses an antistyle position. But the ad’s structure allows Reebok to define itself as the field in which questions of individual style and appearance are played out. Reebok is positioned as a nonconformist life style addressed to “wannabe” nonconformists. Violations of realist aesthetic codes are intended to represent individuality: just as the ad violates realist aesthetic codes, so viewers are positioned to consider whether wearing the sign of Reebok might allow parallel violations of bourgeois dress codes that enable unique self construction. Reebok’s press releases stressed individuality and diversity in their target audiences: • • •

“Reebok does not represent one lifestyle, but many lifestyles.” “Reebok is not a ‘badge brand’ like Rolex or BMW.” “Reebok has become a phenomenon because people use the brand in many ways, allowing each to express their [sic] own individuality” (Reebok 1988).

Reebok’s campaign invited viewers to draw an analogy between Reebok’s disregard for advertising conventions and the viewer’s own

242


disregard for the opinions of others. Reebok presented itself as antitotemic by celebrating freakish antirationalist selves who supposedly articulate a dimension of individuality outside the social. Unlike conventional commercials that associate commodities with signs of individuality, Reebok disassociated its commodity sign from status, sexuality, esteem, acceptance, or desirability. These traits necessitate affect, concern, and a sense that the social exists. The commodity soul that Reebok offers is flat; cold and distant images provide no avenues for identification, empathy, or any emotional connection between the viewer and the ad’s characters. Instead, individuality is signified as an ensemble of eclectic signifiers in which signifier disparity equals nonconformity. Reebok’s revision of the bourgeois self, flattened of affect and depth, is still defined as a function of sign consumption. Individuality is measured by the appropriation of contradictory signifiers worn as part of an ambiguous ensemble. An idealist, romantic construction that floats outside the material reality of social production, the authentic self here unfolds solipsistically. Self-expression apparently takes place in a world without reference points—no nature, no time, no history, no society. Indeed, if narcissism is the “tendency to measure the world as a mirror of self” (Sennett 1977, p. 177), then Reebok’s scenic backgrounds may be read as signs indicating the idiosyncratic personalities of the foregrounded subjects. The flattened background maps the blankness of their subjectivity. Reebok’s use of quotes from Emerson further conflates the selfcontained soul and the outside world. A transcendentalist essayist and poet dedicated to the “divine sufficiency of the individual,” Emerson’s works have been a bulwark of the U.S. mythological system celebrating the self-sufficient and uncompromising integrity of the autonomous individual. But in the nineteenth century when Emerson wrote, there was still enough social, economic, and political space for white males, at least, to carve out this grandiose victory of self over society. The transcendentalists rejected the authoritative god of Protestantism as well as a need for others: “By thus transcending society itself, they abstracted man into a set of principles which they ultimately presented as moral absolutes” (Williams 1966, p. 42). Often invoked to justify laissez-faire philosophies, this romantic and antirationalist vision could not be reconciled with the new realities of an ever-expanding market economy. Yet there is a similarity between Reebok’s message about metastyle and Emerson’s notion of the Over-Soul. Emerson claimed that each person shared in the Over-Soul, or God, “whose influence in this world was rather less than even the Hidden Hand that guided the system of Adam Smith” (Williams 1966, p. 242). Reebok has phrased it otherwise, but they latently present themselves as our corporate “oversole.” The ad


243

endorses unusual expressions of individuality but ends by suggesting that Reebok is the hidden hand, or foot, that permits the articulation of uniquely individuated meaningful styles. Reebok presents a romantic view of the individual unencumbered by the social, but still reasserts itself as the commodity through which a self can realize its essential being. Reebok names the viewer but waits until the last moment to do so. The commercial pseudoindividuality denied by the narrator is the solution to the rebus. The hegemonic construction of self central to the logic of advertising is not escaped by stylistic unconventionality and appeals to nonidentity. Unlike the Lacanian mirror image, the viewer’s relationship to the Reebok mirror is never straightforward. Instead of addressing the viewer at the start of the ad, the viewer is hailed at the conclusion when the “U.B.U” appears on screen as a complete thought. At the end, the hypermagnified letters function as a disguised commodity appellation structure: “Reeboks Let U.B.U”

“Reeboks” is the commodity sign. “Let” designates the logic of reification. The first “U” appellates the viewer. The “B” designates self-identity, and the second “U” completes the circuit of desire/commodity self à la Williamson’s (1978) discussion of “alreadyness.” Desire Eclipses Self

On Reebok’s feet, postmodernism no more avoids being reabsorbed by the commodity form than any other moment of cultural protest or deviance. The postmodern problematic identifies a crisis of representation, which we have reconceptualized as a crisis of privatized subjectivity (individualism) in relation to a political economy of sign-value. What happens when individuals are repeatedly directed toward commodities in their search for authenticity? In the model of the commodity self, the negation of authenticity takes place as the named commodity (the means of selfsatisfaction) displaces or pushes aside the ego; it decenters the self. The fetishized self is composed of many subdivided objects. Once upon a time the ideal bourgeois character structure was the self-made man, but today’s experienced consumer cannot help but recognize that the ideal consumer self makes itself not just once but repeatedly; the ideal ego is not sturdy or fixed, but plastic. To deny that they colonize the self, advertisers now appropriate the surface of postmodernist critiques and convert them into an aesthetic

244


style. Postmodernism offers a critique of decentered subjects or, in more extreme formulations, the death of the subject and the demise of the social. This critique recognizes that the subject has been eclipsed by commodities and commodity signs. The question then arises, How authentic is the self when defined by a collection of commodity signs (the critique of plastic man)? The Chiat/Day advertising agency appropriated this critique of the collapse of subjectivity and fused it to a critique of the representational form driven by the logic of commodity signs. Their Reebok ads use blankness and lack of engagement to deny any formal equivalency of the self and the commodity sign. Viewers are asked to appreciate this lack of equivalency as decentered on screen, decentered in relation to themselves. We interpret this as a metanarrative about the commodification of desire, where blank affect is a posture that masks the centrality of desire. Contemporary advertising aims at reproducing the commodity form by colonizing the domain of desire. Advertisers have appealed to the universal human desire for recognition, to be recognized and acknowledged by others. But, unlike early critical theorists, we perceive this desire for self-constitution and identity to be a contested terrain. Cynicism and blank indifference are defenses prompted by the endless circuit of sign-value production in advertising; these defenses become disruptive of the sign-valorization process. At the same time, the death of affect and blank indifference are turned into signs directed at stemming a broader crisis of sign completion. The distance between early modernists and contemporary consumers is encapsulated in the semiotic opposition between enthusiasm and indifference. The early middle-class desire to express a self was cast in terms of taste and style. Aesthetic preferences were taken as signs of character, providing a measure of personal identity. A century later, this worldview evolved into a self-contradictory knot for the Victorian bourgeoisie, who behaved as if every choice of objects could be read as a “personality omen” revealing an inner self. Joined with their residual Puritan ideology of personal shame and ascetic self-denial, the result was “a contradictory, tense attempt to read others for signs of their private lives while at the same time one attempted to shield oneself from being read by anyone” (Sennett 1977, pp. 174–175). Today, the Reebok ad may be read as both an extension and a sublation of this cultural dialectic, now driven by the pursuit of pleasure. The logic of commodity consumption directs us to identify ourselves by the signs we accumulate and display; we read one another as sign constellations as we “engage in market transactions of selfrevelation. …The semiotics of twentieth-century personality are only the consequences of nineteenth-century terms, taken to an extreme”


245

(Sennett 1977, p. 183). The Reebok ad is yet another promotion for selfrevelation of one’s personality as an ensemble of signs, but it is also about shielding oneself from being read behind a veil of dispassionate blankness, a calculated denial that the surface has anything to do with a deep self. We therefore contend that contemporary crises of subjectivity and representation are, at one and the same time, a crisis of the commodity form. Or, to be more historically specific, they are intertwined with a crisis in the political economy of commodity signvalues.

POSTMODERNISM AND HEGEMONY A central postmodernist contention is that, since meaning is inherently ambiguous, social theorists have no grounds on which to argue that social texts have preferred ideological meanings. Theories of hegemony are criticized for presuming that viewers decode texts in a single way—an objectivist fallacy implying that there is a single, correct interpretation of cultural texts. However, as ad campaigns such as Reebok’s demonstrate, hegemony does not require a single, uniform ideological reading from viewers. Rather, in these ads the motor of hegemonic ideology lies in their fundamentally ambiguous structure, where interpretation is open except for the closed circuit between the named commodity (Reebok shoes) and the overall interpretive sign of the text (itself also open, for example, as signifying “unconventionality”). In claiming that hegemony necessitates closed texts inscribed with unitary interpretations, postmodernists confuse “the plural” with “pluralism.” Hegemonic relations in contemporary capitalist society no longer rest on a monolithic normative formation. Campaigns such as Reeb ok’s b etoken that today, relatively little shared moral grounding exists for securing consent and legitimacy while the semiotic logic of commodity culture chops and dices meaning systems into pastiched signifying chains that have briefer and briefer half-lives before they fade out of sight. Baudrillard maintains that into this “gigantic black hole…bourgeois myths are swallowed up and made truly meaningless” (cited in Frith and Home 1987, p. 11; also see Baudrillard 1983a). Baudrillard is both right and wrong. Commodity sign production devours bourgeois myths as easily as any other sign system, and it reduces them to signs so that hegemonic signifieds are turned into decontextualized commodity signifiers. The unified coherence of bourgeois ideology, its transcendental signified, is negated by this process of sign production and is replaced by overdetermined ambiguity. In this

246


way, the internal logic of a political economy of commodity signs undermines the reproduction of bourgeois hegemony. But this does not mean the end of capitalist hegemony. Rather than being founded on a singularity of interpretation, hegemony now rests on atomized, subjectivized interpretations, which block the formation of shared public discourse. The Reebok commercial illustrates how the dialectical relations of hegemony—resistance and consent—can play out on the electronic screen. This TV ad presents an exemplar of corporate counter-bricolage (see Goldman and Papson 1991) where advertisers have institutionalized the act of appropriating bricolage as a means of turning resistance into new positioning devices. If bricolage—the consumer’s version of pastiche—had any critical function, it is negated when Reebok shoes are touted as turning the abstract consumer into a bricoleur who composes postmodern combinations. To position themselves outside the mainstream media clutter, Reebok’s advertiser chose to put on the pose of the bricoleur as a means of identifying themselves with the bricoleur’s expression of authentic individuality. The bricoleur’s playfulness is instrumentalized to create a new surface for commodification, while at the same time this dialectic of commodification appears to be on the verge of proliferating new ideological fractures and new vectors of meaning. Constant exposure to advertising has eroded the credibility of the idea of achieving authenticity through consumption. Since their public no longer bought into the hegemonic practice of perpetually pursuing an ideal of commodified perfection, Reebok offered the appearance of the nonimitative in commodity form. In the “U.B.U” ad Reebok shoes signify wearers who are able to transcend social roles defined by alienating institutional structures and constrained by cultural practices governing race, gender, and class. As an alternative to this artificial world of consumer conformity, Reeb ok heralds a new superindividuated subject who wears artifice as a sign indicating personal freedom. The exposure of artifice becomes ironically a celebration of artifice as personal style. Artifice worn with blank affect offers a mask that insulates the individual wearer from the standardization of culture. Reebok rejected “jingles” in favor of “nonreferential” music, while its photography and editing denied narrative. The intent was to signify difference from decades of ads built around overdetermined signifying processes. Reebok offered alienated viewers a field of ambiguous pastiche to decipher and built on self-conscious reflexivity about the relationship between viewer and advertisement. Reflexivity here becomes a stance calculated to pique the interest of alienated, bored


247

decoders and consumers—a method of enticing viewers to participate in (rather than withdraw from) the decoding process. Paradoxically, Reebok encouraged viewers to participate in the reproduction of both the commodity-form and commodity-sign form by identifying with images of nonparticipation. Flashy in its photographic juxtapositioning, Reebok embraced poor taste as a sign for antistyle that might beckon skeptical viewers to enter the space of the ad. The open structure of the text provided space for interpretation, minimally guaranteeing freedom of choice. While a previous generation of television ads closed interpretive space in order to guarantee the completion of commodity signs, Reebok widened the space because they recognize that today closure disrupts the circuit of commodity sign production and reproduction.

CONCLUSION: THE CONTINUING SALIENCE OF PRODUCTION Despite its imaginative grasp of the texture and feel of the contemporary culture of appearances, postmodernist discourse weakly grasps the historical significance of those appearances because it dispenses with the study of negations and glosses over the relations of capitalist production (see Debord 1977; Kellner 1988). The culture industry today generates a heterogeneity of meaningful styles that is more apparent than real, structured institutionally on a narrow axis of social action—the practices of commodification. Postmodernism concerns itself with what Baudrillard terms “the triumph of signifying culture.” Postmodern cultural analysis celebrates the text, treating shopping malls, hotels, wrestling matches, even America itself as inscribed texts that can be deconstructed as a “hyperspace” of signs and simulacra. But whereas postmodern theory and methods locate the social centrality of sign production and a new phenomenology of “simulacra,” they fail to go beyond cultural texts into the world of production and class relations that condition and inscribe them. Mesmerized by the glossy surface of the simulacrum, Baudrillard instead announces the “end of political-economy.” Kellner (1987, p. 131) summarizes Baudrillard’s view: Modernity is the era of the bourgeoisie, of the primacy of industrial production, where…the imperatives of production determined social life. With the technological revolution, however, reproduction replaces production as the centre of social life, and then models, codes, simulacra, spectacles, and the “hyperrealism of simulation” replace the use-values of commodities, the imperatives of production, class struggles or differences.11

248


Baudrillard’s postmodernist claim is spurious. Outside every text there continues to be a real world of production relations, however remote geographically. Labor and resources must still be brought together and exploited to create products. These commodities are then transported, distributed, marketed, advertised, sold, used, and discarded. Commodity chains weave through and across national, cultural, class, and gender boundaries. These chains of relations are structured not by signs but by relations of producing and enforcing commodity-values. By the time the “UBU” ad entered the commodity chain, the production origins of the commodity it promotes had disappeared from view. Reebok sought a competitive market advantage in the 1980s recreational shoe industry by changing the ways they produced and distributed products: A worldwide product sourcing effort begun in 1986 has been highly successful. Since then, suppliers in several new countries have demonstrated the ability to meet Reebok’s stringent quality specifications. Those suppliers have accommodated the Company’s growth needs and now account for a substantial percentage of production, thereby diversifying our sourcing and reducing our exposure to swings in various international currency values. (Reebok 1989b, p. 13)

Diversified product sourcing means that Reebok shoes are produced by independent manufacturers outside the United States. All manufacturing is performed in accordance with detailed specifications furnished by the operating unit, subject to strict quality control standards, with a right to reject products that do not meet specifications (see Reebok 1989a): In 1988, the Company continued efforts to increase the diversity of its production sources. Currently the Company sources its footwear primarily in South Korea and Taiwan, with these two countries accounting in 1988 for 61% and 20%, respectively, of the Company’s total footwear production. A whollyowned subsidiary of Pentland Industries plc (a principal shareholder of the Company) provides assistance to Reebok…in their production efforts in Korea, Taiwan, and certain other countries in the Far East, inspecting finished goods prior to shipment by the manufacturer, facilitating the shipment of goods from foreign ports, and arranging for the issuance of letters of credit, which are the means used to pay manufacturers for finished products. (Salomon Brothers 1989, pp. 8–9)

Reebok’s relationship to the manufacturing process is typical of the footwear and fashion industries. The production process is farmed out, and raw materials are brought together for third world production while an intermediary buffers Reebok from producers. In this story of deindustrialization, Reebok continues to seek cheaper, more docile, labor


249

in Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, postmodern analysts show no more interest in discussing this side of commodity production than does Reebok. Speaking of commodities and the relations that link them, at mall retail stores Reebok running shoes, basketball shoes, and cross-trainers ranged in price from $54.95 to $99.95 in 1988. Who purchases these exchangeand sign-values, and what kind of labor do they perform to get the money? A major consumer group are teenagers, who work primarily in service and retail industries (e.g., fast-food restaurants) at unskilled, lowincome jobs with irregular hours and no benefits. Greenberger and Steinberg found much of this labor motivated by a desire to purchase consumer goods and their sign-value: As more teenagers developed expensive tastes and a hunger for luxury goods, they found it necessary to go to work; and as more youngsters entered the labor force and began earning money that they could spend as they wished, more money was spent on developing and expanding the youth market. (1986, p. 30)

At minimum wage, a pair of Reeboks is equivalent to twenty to thirty hours of expended labor. Extensive teenage employment for purposes of luxury consumer spending subverts educational achievement, contributes to stress and increased substance abuse, and “the coup de grace,” teenage employment, instead of fostering respect for work, often leads to increased cynicism about the pleasures of productive labor” (Greenberger and Steinberg 1986, p. 6). A political economy of signvalues has thus become linked with part-time youth employment in a cycle of reproduction that undermines the motivating ideal of the modernist era: unalienated productive labor as a means toward selfrealization. Postmodernism both celebrates and laments a world that has become superficial and flat when seen through the frame of the television screen. Image culture is, indeed, all surface, yet postmodernist critiques are as flat and one-sided as the world of simulations they seek to grasp. In a postmodern world of free-floating signifiers, the critiques become as freefloating as the celebration. Hence, when postmodernism makes its way into mass culture, it becomes little more than a fetishized fascination of the image, of the edit, of the jump cut. Cynical fascination replaces critique, and self-reflexive consciousness emerges as a new form of consumer fetishism. Postmodernism fails not because of its readings of cultural texts, but because of its refusal to go beyond the text into the world of production. Even in the contemporary shopping malls that some theorists identify as

250


sites of “postmodern hyperspace,” the society of the spectacle is subsidized by paying substandard wages to an urban service proletariat. Postmodern theories and methods so intently foreground the simulations, the general aesthetic look and style, that they miss the exploitation and inequality that make possible a public space devoted to glorifying, and reproducing, commodity sign-values.

NOTES 1. See Davis’s (1988) critique of Jameson on the relationship between multinational capitalism and architecture, where Jameson neatly elided every relationship that went into the making of his text, the St. Bonaventure Hotel. Davis materializes the relationship between postmodern architectural styles and the corporate political economy of late capitalism. 2. The inconsistent punctuation of UBU signifies Reebok’s effort to disrupt the signifying structure of modernity. 3. In head-to-head combat, Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign was the clear winner. The brand-name phenomenon of the 1980s, Reebok had total sales of $1.79 billion, as compared with $1.20 billion for Nike in 1987. In athletic footwear alone, Reebok had 26.7% of the market, and Nike had 23.3%. But in 1988 Reebok posted a 20% earnings decline, and Nike edged ahead in the footwear market while also surging ahead in the wider sports apparel markets (McGill, 1989, C. 1). 4. The “Physics of the Physiques” campaign combined glamour and realism in the name of performance. Glamour realism reverted to rapid-fire editing of fetishized body signifiers along with a narrative based on standardized appellation formulas. The ideology that mastery over your young body equals performance and is a means to gaining style, appearance, and identity inverts the Protestant ethic: discipline and performance in nonwork activity yields desire and muscular pleasure in self. 5. “The devaluation of meaning in postmodern signification is simultaneously the de-differentiation of signifier and signified” (Lash 1988, p. 391). 6. Though total advertising spending rose from $43.3 billion in 1978 to $118.1 billion in 1988, growth rates dropped from 15.7 to 7.7%, and profits slipped from 20 to 10%, industrywide (Rothenberg 1989, pp. 1, 23). To compete with foreign producers on price, U.S. manufacturers invested in high technology and sought cheaper labor forces abroad. This led to producing more goods and flooding the market with wares, many of them barely distinguishable. Whereas new products fueled the growth of the advertising industry during the 1960s and 1970s, brand proliferation now imperils advertising’s ability to differentiate brand images (signvalues). 7. The first three possible responses correspond to Gitlin’s (1989) distinction among premodernist (realist), modernist, and postmodernist texts. The premodernist text “aspires to unity of vision and cherishes continuity.” The modernist work also seeks unity, but continuity is disrupted. Postmodernist texts abandon the quest for unity. 8. Ironically, the indeterminacy and contradiction of postmodern ads elicit greater participation when encountered by a modernist reader, who seeks coherence and completion.


251

9. The concepts of “bricoleur” and “bricolage,” as used here, draw on the ways in which Dick Hebdige and John Clarke have applied these terms to the study of subcultures. Hebdige’s (1979) account offers the best summary. Their theorization of the concept of bricolage was adapted from the work of Claude Levi-Strauss to stress how the conventional meanings associated with objects and their usage can be disrupted by mixing and combining objects in ways that depart from, and may even violate, prevailing codes—putting together meanings that ordinarily do not go together. The bricoleur has usually been socially and culturally situated on the margins—from Levi-Strauss’s discussion of “primitives” to Hebdige’s analysis of punks. 10. Readers familiar with McLuhan’s 1967 book, The Medium Is the Message, will recognize how much of Reebok’s pastiche is lifted from that text, including the “American Gothic” image next to a discussion of the “shock of recognition,” the Dance of Death imagery from Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, and the play with magnified print. Reebok’s plundering of high culture also is extended to Alfred Jarry’s absurdist play UBU Roi, which satirizes the repressive orderliness of bourgeois culture, as well as Diane Arbus’s photographic fascination with “freaks” and Richard Hamilton’s 1950s photographs of suburban weightlifters. 11. Jameson (1983, p. 15) struck a nerve when he hypothesized that “postmodernism expresses the inner truth of that newly emergent social order of late capitalism.” Jameson speculated that the “cultural logic of postmodernism” corresponds to the “mode of production” of multinational corporate capitalism, but he did not specify this relationship beyond recognizing “that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally” (1984, p. 56). In short, Jameson substituted a base/superstructure correspondence theory along with an ungrounded general aesthetic critique for an analysis of production relations and class relations.

REFERENCES Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang. Baudrillard, Jean. 1975. The Mirror of Production. Translated by Mark Poster. St. Louis: Telos Press. ____. 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Translated by Andrew Levin. St. Louis: Telos Press. ____. 1983a. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e). ____. 1983b. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities…Or the End of the Social. New York: Semiotext(e). Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin. ____. 1974. The Look of Things. New York: Viking. Brenkman, John. 1979. “Mass Media: From Collective Experience to the Culture of Privatization.” Social Text 1:94–109. Carton, Barbara. 1988. “Reebok Opens $20 million drive.” Boston Globe, 17 June. Davidson, Carol. 1988. “Reebok et al.: Ad-stract Art!” Adweek, 20 June, pp. 1, 4. Davis, Mike. 1988. “Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of Postmodernism.” Pp. 79– 87 in Postmodernism and Its Discontents, edited by E.A.Kaplan. London: Verso. Debord, Guy. 1977. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Red and Black.

252


Dews, Peter. 1986. “Adorno, Post-Structuralism and the Critique of Identity.” New Left Review 157:28–44. Dougherty, Philip. 1988. “Spots Put Free Spirits into Reeboks.” The New York Times, 17 June, p. D13. Ewen, Stuart. 1976. Captains of Consciousness. New York: McGraw-Hill. Foster, Hal. 1986. “Signs Taken for Wonder.” Art in America. June, p. 86. Frith, Simon., and Howard Horne. 1987. Art into Pop. London: Methuen. Garfield, Bob. 1988. “‘U.B.U.’ Takes Shots at Non-Conformity.” Advertising Age, 3 October, p. 70. Gitlin, Todd. 1989. “Postmodernism: Roots and Politics.” Dissent 36:100–108. Goldman, Robert. 1987. “Marketing Fragrances: Advertising and the Production of Commodity Signs.” Theory, Culture, and Society 4:691–725. Goldman, Robert., and Steven Papson. 1991. “Levi’s and the Knowing Wink,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 11:69–95. Goldman, Robert., and John Wilson. 1983. “Appearance and Essence: The Commodity Form Revealed in Perfume Advertisements.” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 4:119–142. Greenberger, Ellen., and Lawrence Steinberg. 1986. When Teenagers Work: The Psychological and Social Costs of Adolescent Employment. New York: Basic Books. Hall, S. 1980. “Encoding/Decoding.” Pp.128–138 inCulture, Language, Media, edited by S.Hall. London: Hutchison. Haug, Wolfgan Fritz. 1986. Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society. Translated by Robert Bock. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. ____. 1989. Hiding in the Light. London: Routledge. Herskovitz, Richard. 1979. “The Shell Answer Man and the Spectator.” Social Text 1:182–186. Jameson, Frederic. 1983. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Pp. 111–125in The Anti-Aesthetic, edited by H.Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press. ____. 1984. “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146:53–92. Kaplan, E.Ann. 1987. Rocking around the Clock: MTV, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture. London: Methuen. ____. 1988. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–9 in Postmodernism and Its Discontents, edited by E.A.Kaplan. London: Verso. Kellner, Douglas. 1987. “Baudrillard, Semiurgy and Death.” Theory, Culture, and Society 4:125–146. ____. 1988. “Postmodernism as Social Theory: Some Challenges andProblems.” Theory, Culture, and Society 5:239–270. Lears, T.Jackson. 1983. “From Salvation to Self-Realization.” Pp. 3–38 in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, edited by R.Fox and T.J.Lears. New York: Pantheon. Lefebvre, Henri. 1971. Everyday Life in the Modern World. Translated by Sacha Rabinowitz. New York: Harper and Row. Leiss, William. 1976. The Limits of Satisfaction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Marchand, Roland. 1985. Advertising and the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley: Universitiy of California Press. Marx, Karl. 1967. Capital, vols. 1 and 2. New York: International. McGill, D. 1989. “Nike Is Bounding Past Reebok.” The New York Times, 11 July, pp. C1, 3.


253

McLuhan, Marshall. 1967. The Medium is the Message, New York: Bantam. Mills, C.Wright. 1951. White Collar. New York: Oxford University Press. O’Connor, James. 1987. The Meaning of Crisis. New York: Basil Blackwell. Reebok. 1988. Press Release Package, 1988. ____. 1989a. Form 10-K. Filed by Reebok with Security and Exchange Commission, Washington, DC, for fiscal year ending December 31, 1988. Commission file number 1–9340. ___. 1989b. 1988 Annual Report. Canton, MA: Reebok International LTD. Rothenberg, Randall. 1989. “Change in Consumer Markets Hurting Advertising Industry.” The New York Times, 17 June, pp. A1, D23. Salomon Brothers. 1989. “Reebok International LTD.—From Athletics to Fashion and Back Again” (Stock Research), 19 May. Sennett, Richard. 1977. “Destructive Gemeinschaft.” Pp. 121–197 in Beyond the Crisis, edited by N.Birnbaum. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, William Appleman. 1966. The Contours of American History. Chicago: Quadrangle. Williamson, Judith. 1978. Decoding Advertisements. New York: Marion Boyars.

Index n indicates that entry will be found in a footnote Actantial grammar, 164 Advertising, 18, 85, 95, 117, 173, 178– 179, 225–251 artifice in, 246 interpretation of, 231 Levi’s campaign, 227 Reebok campaign, 18, 225, 227, 231, 232–251 resistance to, 231–232 Affect, waning of, 92–93, 188, 237, 244 Agency, theory of, 46, 48 Alienation, 91, 92 Alterity, 66–67, 71 American Graffiti, 90–91 Anthropology; see Ethnography Antidiscrimination legislation, 103 Archaeology, 30–35 Architecture, 94 Art, 68, 77, 82, 140 and modernism, 82–83 popular, 88, 91 postmodern, 84 Auschwitz, 56, 66 Axiological isotopies, 165 Behavioral modification/control, 41; see also Socialization Bio-power, 5, 37–38, 49n Blue Velvet, 184, 216 Body Heat, 91 Bonaventure Hotel (Los Angeles), 94, 250n Bricolage, 240, 246, 251n Buried narratives, 87 Capitalism, 4, 5, 13, 47, 57, 144 and cognitive instrumentalism, 67 and democracy, 147 and desires, 60, 178 disintegration of, 87–88 Marxist

view of, 57–59 multinational, 5, 13, 95, 96, 98, 184 and Protestant ethic, 83 third stage of, 95 Chinatown, 91 Class hegemony, 70, 229 Cognitive mapping, 13, 96, 97–98 Colonization, 57, 94, 140, 243, 244 Coming of Post-Industrial Society, The, 79, 80, 81 Commodification, 4, 11 47, 87, 216, 226, 247 in advertising, 18 of desire, 244 of experience, 188 of sexuality, 184 Commodity production/exchange, 58–59 Commodity signs, 230, 242–243, 244–247, 250 Communication, 136–137, 159, 160, 161 and meaning, 166, 167 Communism; see Marxism Confessional narration, 208 Connotation, 163, 164, 171 Consumerism, 4, 8, 11, 129, 143, 184; see also Advertising as instant gratification, 84 as political defiance, 60 Consumption codes, 173, 175–176, 178 Counterculture, 1960s, 84, 85, 98 Countersciences, 5, 33, 45 Credit, 83 Critical theory, 56, 127, 138, 141, 146–147, 197 global, 15, 152 Cultural codes, 162, 165, 171–176, 178 Cultural studies, 196–197, 198n Culture, 78–79, 87–98, 134; see also Art academic, 88–89

255

256

Index

Culture (continued) bourgeois, 244, 245 and commodity production, 95 material, 173 modern, 82–84, 88, 93, 94 normative ideals in, 147 pastiche in, 90 popular, 88 postmodern, 84– 85, 88–98, 129, 145–146, 171, 249 Death, 33–34, 56, 81, 241, 244 Death/disappearance of man, 5, 33–34 Deconstructionism, 8, 16, 138, 171, 179, 185–186, 196 in academic disciplines, 16 criticisms of, 186 feminist, 195, 198n and knowledge, 168 and meaning, 161, 167, 169 strategies of, 185 and text analysis, 182, 183–184, 188–197 Demography, 38, 111 Denotation, 163, 164, 171 Depthlessness, 89 Deviance, analysis of, 42 Differend, 66–67, 68–69, 70 Disciplinary technique, 37, 139; see also Power, disciplinary Discourse, 28–29, 30, 31, 35, 36 authoritative, 65 and feminist theory, 113, 114 vs. figural representation, 63 globalizing, 36 patriarchal, 8 sex as, 110 Disengagement, political, 60 Disneyland, 16, 170, 173, 174–175 Dissimulation, 54 Domination, 39, 40, 42, 46, 47, 56, 139 in feminist theory, 102, 103, 112 and historical progress, 28 technologies of, 27, 28, 47 totalitarian, 141 Economic imperatives, 37 Education, higher, 80, 81 Elements of Semiology, 163 Emancipatory movements, 140, 142, 146–147 End of Ideology, The, 79, 80 End-of-ideology theorists, 79 Enlightenment, 3, 27–28 40, 48, 150n dialectic, 140, 145 and feminist theory, 109, 113 and reason, 28–29, 40, 109, 128 rejection of, 12, 39, 67, 109, 118, 120, 128, 138

and social theory, 133 Environmental destruction, 47, 146 Equality, 78 gender, 103–104 and suppression of difference, 113, 120 Ethics, 27, 40, 47, 64 Ethnography, 8, 15, 16–17, 203–221 criticism of, 206–207, 209, 210, 211 and deconstruction, 206–207, 212 feminist, 9, 17, 216 fieldwork, reporting on, 207–210, 219 moral issues in, 17 postmodern, 213–221 and sociology, 204–206 traditional, 211 Ethnomethodology, 25, 206 Exchange value, 58, 60, 172, 178, 179, 230–231 Fascism, 87, 88, 140 Feminist theory, 8–9, 14, 15, 101, 102–103, 193 distrust of reason in, 109, 113, 115 and ethnography, 216–218 and language, 107, 113–114 and Marxist theory, 105 and postmodernism, 107, 108, 109–123 and social constructionist tradition, 14, 110, 120 Fragmentation, 91, 129–130, 137–138, 179 linguistic, 90, 139 Functionalist theory, 135, 205 Gender, 103, 107, 116, 193; see also Feminist theory as continuum, 107 emphasis on differences in, 105–106, 116, 119 and enlightenment values, 109, 113 Genealogy, 34–40, 43–44, 45, 147 Geomancy, 61 Global theory, 15, 29, 46, 47 Grammatology, 185 Gynocentric feminism, 105, 106–107 Hermeneutic analysis vs. structural analysis, 31 Hegemony, 17–18, 245–246; see also Class hegemony

Index

Historical writing, 35, 66 History defined by Foucault, 30 end of, 53, 122, 129, 144 and feminist theory, 122 power forms in, 37 shared, 142 and social theory, 147 weakening of, 90, 91, 92 of writing, 186 Homo significant, 129 Humanist feminism, 105 Hyperconformity, 60, 69–70 Hyperreality, 4, 54–55, 56, 69, 139, 156, 171, 177 cars as, 179 and consumption, 60 Disneyland as, 170 in ethnology, 216 of images, 168 vs. reality, 169, 188 Hyperspace, 94, 139, 247, 249 Hysterical sublime, 93 Icon, 161 Images, 163–164, 168, 171 in advertising, 178–179 Imperialism, 87, 164 cultural, 120 Index, 161 Individuality, 136, 137, 240, 242 Information technology, 4, 143, 144 Instrumentalism, colonization by, 67, 140 Intellectual, specific vs. universal, 43 Intellectual technology, 81 Justice, 63–64, 66 Knowledge, 26, 27, 133, 166, 188 archaeology of, 30–31 codification of, 80 and domination, 27, 29, 34, 42, 43, 44–45 empirical, 33, 80 local, 36 Man as subject and object of, 31–32 and philosophy, 32 and representation, 31, 156, 168 scientific, 65, 72n systematic, 28 and thought, 52 Language, 6–8, 109, 113–114, 120, 157, 162, 189 and classical thought, 31 and culture, 157, 158, 162 and gender, 107, 113– 114 private, 90, 139 and representation, 62, 128 as signs,

257

156–157 structure vs. speech, 6, 157, 189 of technique, 114 and truth, 159 Language games, 65–66, 68, 70, 141 scientific, 72n Legitimacy, 78, 135, 144 Liberalism, 77, 119, 143 and feminist theory, 103–104, 107, 111, 119 Linguistic signification; see Language, Semiotics Logocentrism, 166, 189, 190 Logotechniques, 167, 177 Los Angeles, 170, 175, 176, 184, 192 Magical narratives, 87 Magical worldview, 61 Marxian criticism, 87 Marxism, 37, 62, 71, 79, 128, 132–133, 135–136, 145 and capitalism, 47– 48, 57–58, 137–138 and class fragmentation, 135 and hegemony, 17 and production, 58, 70 and sociology, 121 and subjectivity, 149n as totalizing theory, 29, 36, 53 Mathematics, 43 Meaning, 162, 167, 168–169, 171, 177–179, 188 constraints on, 169, 177 and infinite regression, 161, 171 and language, 189 Media, 95, 129, 142, 184, 188; see also Television cultural elites in, 5, 13 and images, 11, 168, 171, 179 and power, 70 Metaphysics of presence, 166, 181 Modernity, 3–4, 30, 49n, 68, 111, 130, 247 and culture, 82–84, 88, 93, 94 dialectical character of, 47 end of, 34, 84, 127, 128 eras in, 28 and humanism, 5, 41, 82 and individualism, 241 private interest in, 137 and sociology, 25, 129, 136– 138 totalizing tendencies in, 62 Morning After, 16, 182–183, 184, 190– 192, 193–196, 197n Multinational corporations, 60 Myth, 163–164, 168, 169 Mythologies, 163, 164

258

Index

Normality, enforcement of, 41, 42, 43, 135, 139 Nostalgia, 53, 54, 55, 186, 187, 196 Nostalgia films, postmodern, 90, 91 Novel, 87

Prague Spring, 142 Pregnancy, 119 Production codes, 173, 174–175, 178 Protestant ethic, 83, 84, 250n Psychiatry, 47

Objectivity, 110, 112, 113, 118, 134 Occupational changes, 80 Oppositions, 165, 176 Order of Things, The, 31, 33, 49n

Racism, 47, 194, 195 Radical chic, 85 Rationality, 41, 42, 45, 68, 135; see also Enlightenment, and reason aesthetic, 68 communicative, 67, 68, 71 and domination, 47 in technoeconomic order, 78 Western, 40, 61, 134 Rationalization, 39, 61 and domination, 28–29, 67 Reality Principle, 54, 69 Reebok production, 248–249; see also Advertising, Reebok campaign Religion, 83 and culture, 79 exclusionary nature of, 98 return to, 9, 13, 85, 98 Representation, 31–32, 53–54, 62, 156, 167, 177 classical, 31, 41 collective, 162, 163 and commodity sign, 245 ethnography as, 210 figural, 62–63 of presence, 191 and signs, 160 unconscious, 33 Repression, 54, 55 Reproductive issues, 104, 106, 107 Revolution, 61, 135

Paganism, 63–64 Parody, 90 Pastiche, 90, 224, 225, 239–240, 246 in film, 90–91, 196 Patriarchy, 9, 47, 101, 193, 195 Philosophy, 32, 33, 64, 65, 167 Phonocentrism, 189 Pluralism, 17, 134, 143, 240 Politics, 63, 64, 69 feminist, 116, 120 Polysemy, 166–169, 172, 173, 176 Pornotopia, 84, 85 Positive unconscious, 30 Positivism, 132, 133, 205, 206 Postmodern critique, 14–15, 70, 71, 176, 177 Postmodern texts, 186–187, 236–237 Postmodernism, 55–56, 69, 109, 112, 123, 147–148, 224 aesthetic origins of, 1–2 definitions of, 2, 95, 184 evaluation of, 9–10 and feminism, 8, 14, 107, 108, 109–123 and modernism, 3–4, 5, 25, 146 and Nietzschean theory, 6–7, 16, 140 and transitory conditions, 144 values in, 29 “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” 88, 89 Poststructuralist theory, 2, 7–8, 71, 89– 90, 155, 177 Power, 35–39, 177 disciplinary, 9–10, 34, 35, 37 “diseases” of, 29 end of, 69 Foucault’s theory of, 42 and knowledge, 26, 27, 29, 34, 39, 44–45, 112, 141, 169 and mass media, 70 matrices of, 35, 38 political, 60, 78 postmodern interpretations of, 36, 39, 169 resistance to, 10, 34, 43, 69

Schizophrenia, 91–92, 93, 239 Self authentic, 243–244 and feminist theory, 107 fragmented, 179 social, 136, 149n technologies of, 27, 47 Self-fulfillment, 79, 83 Self-reflexivity, 39, 217, 220, 249 Semiotics, 6, 15–16, 19, 128, 155–180; see also Language; Sign systems and counterculture, 85 origins of, 156–162 systems of, 157–162 Service economy, 80, 143, 144 Sexuality, 36, 38 commodification of, 184

Index

Shining, The, 91 Sign systems, 54, 120, 156–180, 191; see also Semiotics axes, 158, 172 constraints on, 169 Derrida’s critique of, 166 forms of, 161 in industrial era, 59–60 and political economy, 58–59 in postmodern era, 139, 156–157 and representation, 160, 161 in traditional societies, 59, 156 Sign values, 179, 226, 229, 243, 244 brand names as, 230 Simulation, 54, 129, 139, 141, 179, 224; see also Hyperreality Disneyland as, 170, 175 Social coherence, 133–134, 135 Social identities, 11, 116 and Women’s Movement, 107 Social theory, 56–57, 69–72, 122, 145 classical, 130, 131–138, 148 and feminism; see Feminist theory; Sociology, feminist global, 146, 149n postmodern, 187–188 Socialism, economic, 77, 144 Socialization, 42, 46, 49n, 135, 136 Society, 40–41, 145–146, 187 decision making in, 81 postindustrial, 80–82 realms of, 78–79 Sociology, 2, 25–26, 41, 121–122, 141, 187, 205 and ethnology, 204–206 feminist, 118–122 historical, 42 phenomenology of, 121, 205 postmodern, 19, 40, 41, 121 Sociosemiotics, 16, 165, 170–179 Structuralism, 30–31, 86 and semiotics, 162, 166, 167 Structured roles, 78, 130

259

Subjectivity, 33, 34, 40, 42, 130, 135, 136 bourgeois, 87 fragmentation of, 91–92 vs. objectivity, 33, 118, 131 and subjectification, 47 Sublime, concept of, 63, 93 Symbol, 161, 162, 172 Syntax, 158 Systematizing schemes, 28, 96, 145 Technoeconomic order, 78 Technological growth, control of, 80–81 Television, 70, 94, 183, 184, 224, 239 cable, 232 commercials; see Advertising MTV, 228, 235, 239 Terrorism, 187 Theme parks, 174–176, 177; see also Disneyland; Walt Disney World Third world, 5, 95 Thought, 136 classical vs. modern, 31 postmodern, 34 and unthought, 32 Totalizing theory, 29, 36, 47, 62, 96, 143, 147 Truth, 64, 115, 117, 123, 132, 145 Truth-claims, 155, 159–160, 165, 167, 168 Universities, 47, 111–112 Use value, 58, 169, 171, 178, 179 Utopia, 80, 81, 165 Value consensus, 135 Voting, 60 Walt Disney World, 34, 173, 175 War on Drugs, 54 Welfare state, 144 Women, 116–117, 195; see also Feminist theory; Gender Women’s Movement, 103–108, 117, 122–123 Work ethic, 37

Postmodernism and Social Inquiry

Designing Social Inquiry

Redesigning Social Inquiry: Fuzzy Sets and Beyond

Redesigning social inquiry: fuzzy sets and beyond

Postmodernism

Postmodernism

Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies)

Marxism, Postmodernism and Education

Nietzsche and Postmodernism

Inquiry

Postmodernism and Popular Culture

Postmodernism, Reason and Religion

Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism

Consumer culture and postmodernism

Autobiography and Postmodernism

Postmodernism and Social Theory: The Debate over General Theory

Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism

Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism

The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry

Postmodernism and social theory: the debate over general theory

Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards

Negotiating Postmodernism

Introducing Postmodernism

Introducing Postmodernism

Bioethics and Social Reality (Value Inquiry Book Series, 165)

Appreciative Inquiry and Knowledge Management: A Social Constructionist Perspective

Understanding Experience: Psychotherapy and Postmodernism

Introducing Postmodernism

A humanist science: values and ideals in social inquiry

Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond

Postmodernism and Social Inquiry

Designing Social Inquiry

Redesigning Social Inquiry: Fuzzy Sets and Beyond

Redesigning social inquiry: fuzzy sets and beyond

Postmodernism

Postmodernism

Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies)

Marxism, Postmodernism and Education

Nietzsche and Postmodernism

Inquiry

Postmodernism and Popular Culture

Postmodernism, Reason and Religion

Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism

Consumer culture and postmodernism

Autobiography and Postmodernism

Postmodernism and Social Theory: The Debate over General Theory

Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism

Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism

The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry

Postmodernism and social theory: the debate over general theory

Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards

Negotiating Postmodernism

Introducing Postmodernism

Introducing Postmodernism

Bioethics and Social Reality (Value Inquiry Book Series, 165)

Appreciative Inquiry and Knowledge Management: A Social Constructionist Perspective

Understanding Experience: Psychotherapy and Postmodernism

Introducing Postmodernism

A humanist science: values and ideals in social inquiry

Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond

Recommend Documents