* Postmodernism as recent (mid-1980s) buzz-word but then extended backwards to cover developments in literature and literary criticism, philosophy, visual art, architecture etc. since 1950s + especially from 1970s on.
* Orig. ex French post-structuralist philosophy + its encounter with Anglo-American lit. crit. + cultural studies; now governing set of ideas in at least some contexts.
* Not coherent body of thought but series of ideas, combined or separated in differing ways by different authors.
* Three central ideas:
(a) "Culture" as produced and received is postmodern in form & content (postmodernist vs. modernist aesthetics);
(b) "Society" (esp. political economy) can now be seen as having moved into a "postmodern" condition (postmodernity vs. modernity);
(c) For a variety of reasons, the "metanarratives" which legitimate the knowledge of modern intellectuals can no longer be sustained (postmodernism vs. "the Enlightenment project").
* Largely irrelevant for our purposes: related to argument about "modernist aesthetics".
* Dominant version is related to a traditionalist view of "culture" as "cultural" artefacts (esp. literature, but also extended eg to film, television, advertisements, etc.); sometimes (but by no means always) taken one step further into discussion of reception of these by audience. More commonly involves projection of analysis of "text" onto assumptions about audience as "constituted" by text, rather than as using text for their own purposes (Weber: "elective affinity").
* Against this, Angela McRobbie (Postmodernism and popular culture) defends a more sociologically-informed analysis which broadens out notion of cultural production and reception as practices & attempts to recover the everyday meanings e.g. of clothes shopping.
* Arguments about production of "postmodern" culture, however, lead into discussion of "postmodernity" as historical condition; arguments about reception of "postmodern" culture - or the modes of perception revealed or created by it - lead into discussion of "postmodernism" as an attack on "modern" forms of knowledge and their assumptions & legitimations.
* This is effectively one construction placed on a series of observations about contemporary trends which have also been deployed in relation to now-discounted theories about post-industrialism, as well as in relation to arguments about disorganised capitalism (Lash & Urry), radicalised modernity (Giddens), etc.
* The argument can be presented as a series of contrasts:
(a) Against "Fordist" production methods (based on economies of scale) there is a shift to "post-Fordist" organisation of production (with increased "flexibility", subcontracting, small-batch production, etc) with an increasingly important role for knowledge (managerial skill, scientific expertise, information technology, etc.);
(b) Against an economy based on material production for arguably real needs there is a shift to the production of symbols, cultural artefacts, etc.;
(c) Against the post-WWII welfare state compromise there is a shift to a neo-conservatism based on the decline of collective bargaining and the weakening of the nation-state;
(d) Against "old social movements" of modernity (esp. class movements) there is the formation of "new social movements" which undermine the holistic claims of the workers' movement;
(e) Against the high culture / low culture division of modernist culture there is a general shift to a fragmented and pluralist "postmodern" cultural configuration;
(f) There is a shift from socialisation + determination by social relations to individualisation & interaction above all with the "spectacle";
(g) There is a shift in the social construction of time and space or in their meanings (history, place / community / identity);
- etcetera, etcetera ad nauseam. This is just one possible list, but it identifies the kind of things that are being pointed to.
* This list also points to the wider claims being made by arguments about the "postmodern condition":
(a) They can be taken to pull the carpet away from the Marxist analysis of capitalism as a mode of economic organisation; from a strategy oriented around the working class as the central agent of social transformation; and from a hope for greater "substantive rationality" through education, socialisation, science, increased rational control of the environment, etc. What is generally missed in this kind of argument is that it is a very limited kind of Marxism (very often one belonging to "postmodernist" authors themselves, in an earlier incarnation) which is being taken to stand for the whole of Marxism. In particular, a 1970s mix of Lenin, Trotsky and Althusser is being taken to represent the totality of the meanings and practices both of Marxist authors and of the workers' movement.
(b) They can be taken as relating to a further development within capitalism itself, in which case the challenge is to reformulate a form of historical materialism which is not contradicted by these developments & dispenses with the "local" analyses of Marx, Lenin, etc. for the sake of retaining the more general elements of historical materialism. This is the line taken by two of the central responses to the "postmodern challenge":
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism; David Harvey, The condition of postmodernity.
Both of these authors take the line that the "postmodernists" are pointing to something of relevance (and Jameson in particular finds the concept of "postmodernism" a useful one in cultural analysis), but do not accept that these points need to mean a retreat from Marxism;
(c) This approach, along with the "Giddens / Habermas" argument which sees contemporary society in terms e.g. of "radicalised modernity", has strong empirical support within this kind of argument. For example, "the working class" is not a homogenous whole, but something which has periodically been disintegrated by shifts within capitalism (since the 18th century) and which has periodically reconstituted itself; similarly, the "welfare state" / "neo-corporatist" compromise can be seen simply as a moment within the longer development of capitalism. Even the apparent shift in emphasis from the production of "material goods" to the production of "knowledge" has to be severely qualified. Most of the relevant arguments were made 20 years ago in Krishan Kumar's polemic against theories of "post-industrialism". To make a couple of obvious points:
(1) Industrialism as a technique has been organised around the appropriation of knowledge from the workers and its redeployment at least since Ford and Taylor in the 1920s; this is not restricted to what we think of as "industry", but has been exported to become the dominant mode of organisation both of agricultural activity and of "services";
(2) It has to be remembered that there was an agricultural / merchant modernity and an agricultural / merchant capitalism prior to the development of industrial production in the secondary sector.
In other words, the claim that "postmodernity" is a specific historical condition which displaces modernity has generally been met, in particular within sociology, by pointing out that what is singled out as "modernity" is in fact a very limited and specific part of modernity, so that what is now happening is better understood as another stage in the longer history of modernity. I'll be going into this response more closely in the next couple of lectures. For the moment, it's enough to point out that most sociologists do not accept the claim that modernity is over, while many would accept the proposition that "postmodernism" does represent a new cultural configuration linked to a a new phase in the development of modernity as a social configuration. This is most commonly presented in a Marxist form, but a Weberian version of the argument is certainly possible, and has been made both by Giddens and by Bryan Turner.
The central challenge to critical modernism, then, is neither the argument about a postmodern aesthetics (which many modernists are happy to accept) nor the argument about postmodernity as a historical condition (which is taken to be a misunderstanding of developments that can be adequately accounted for within the terms of critical modernism). It relates to the ontological claims of postmodernist philosophy.
In some ways, the claims of postmodernists to identify a specific historical condition which could be described as postmodern are incoherent in that they contradict some of the most important claims of postmodernism as a philosophy. The identification of postmodernity as a historical condition implies, firstly, a notion of a general and underlying social reality, and secondly the claim that this reality can be described in holistic terms, in other words as forming a whole bounded in time and probably in space. Postmodernist philosophy, in fact, forms a kind of anti-ontology or anti-social theory, in which both the idea of a holistic theory and the idea that this could have a rational relationship to some social totality are rejected.
In some authors this contradiction is resolved, more or less convincingly: Lyotard's account of The postmodern condition, for example, explicitly uses the idea of a shift towards information technology as a useful hypothesis whose ultimate truth-status is, apparently, irrelevant. His key argument is that these apparent shifts in social reality undermine the possibility of belief in the modernist view of the world and push us into post-modernism. The difficulty here is that if this is in fact what is happening, it does not enable us to distinguish which of these two views of the world is in fact more valid; and while Lyotard himself might claim not to find this problematic, there is quite a strong implication in postmodernist philosophy that its anti-theory is more valid than the previous, modernist theory it critiques. If this is true, however, not only does it not need legitimation by a historical account of how we have arrived at this new and more valid perspective, but that perspective itself would prevent us from offering such an account. In other words, it may well be that postmodernism is necessarily faced with a choice between treating postmodern philosophy as simply an effect of postmodernity as a historical condition and effectively ditching the historical account in favour of the philosophy; and this latter approach seems rather more promising.
* Postmodern philosophy is effectively an extension and "radicalisation" of poststructuralist thought, sharing a number of features, notably:
- The rejection of holistic theories and the idea of totality in favour of theories of multiplicity;
- The rejection of the idea of the unitary subject in favour of theories of heterogeneity, of intersecting "language games" (Lyotard), etc.
* An idea which is not unchallenged in post-structuralism but becomes an orthodoxy in post-modernism is the primacy of the "text" (however defined) over "the social". We saw last week that Foucault retains an interest in institutional analysis and the organisation of social relations; in post-modernist writing (with some exceptions, like Angela McRobbie), "texts" (which can include things like television advertisements or everyday conversations) are taken to be the sole constituent of reality, so that the assumption of a deep social reality underlying these everyday surfaces is rejected. These surfaces, in one version of things, are reality; and the idea that there is anything behind them is akin to the belief in God. This is of course only really sustainable on the basis of a rejection of determination and causality, so that the "texts" of the everyday conversations carried out at the stock exchange or of administrative regulations are treated as having no greater influence over events than the "texts" of conversations in the pub or of the latest movie.
This is in effect a version of the poststructuralist emphasis on the "signifier" as opposed to the "signified", or in other words of language rather than the subject-objects of language which are human beings talking about their relations with one another. In the Foucauldian approach, the separation between signifier and signified is effectively denied, so that administrative regulations, for example, are seen as being at one and the same time statements about reality and statements which constitute a particular reality. This approach has some strong methodological support, although it restricts us to an examination of only some aspects of social reality and is likely eventually to prevent us from making necessary distinctions such as the distinction between ideology (what is said) and practice (what is done) or from identifying patterns of determination. Other poststructuralists, along with postmodernists, tend to deny the existence of the "signified" at all; and this is the meaning of the emphasis on surface appearances and the denial of any deep realities.
These surfaces themselves are then interrogated within a particular set of assumptions - notably, their status as "texts" - which derive at a greater or lesser remove from literary criticism and literary philosophy. This dramatically "logocentric" approach, which has no place for meanings or practices other than those embodied in language, points to one of the central origins of poststructuralist and postmodernist thinking, which is, I think, to be found within a particular intellectual history. For much of the twentieth century - in particular, under the influence of Marxism, but more generally under the impact of historical and sociological thought, the knowledge of literary intellectuals has been devalued in practice. At the same time, literature has retained a high degree of status (in Max Weber's terminology); in part precisely because of its luxury status: the legitimation of "Art" as non-instrumental activity and of a literary education as the hallmark of those who could afford not only "an education", but also an education which was not immediately professional or vocational in nature.
This situation has of course been challenged by dissident literary intellectuals, such as Raymond Williams, but it has nevertheless remained dominant. Thus literary intellectuals have had a high degree of status but a declining amount of power in society as a whole - and a declining intellectual credibility in intellectual circles. In effect, their knowledge has been dramatically devalued over the past half-century by comparison with historical and sociological knowledge: much of the subtext of the arguments, not just around post-structuralism and post-modernism, but also around, for example, cultural studies or feminist writing, is about literary intellectuals attempting to revalorise their knowledge as a substitute for sociological knowledge, and sociologists attempting to keep them out. In other words, it is about what counts as valid knowledge. If the social world only consists of "texts", literary knowledge has priority. If the social world has a reality of its own, it does not.
* The most characteristic element of post-modernism, however, is what has become known as the scepticism towards "metanarratives" or "grand narratives", in other words, the accounts of reality which are claimed to underpin modernist thinking, whether it is affirmative or critical. This is often formulated as a direct or indirect polemic against Habermas' arguments about the "Enlightenment project" as something which remains to be completed, against the irrationality of the dominant structures of society, and the "two discourses of modernity", an idea he uses to contrast the dominant version of affirmative modernity with the "counter-discourse" of critical modernity.
Lyotard phrases the argument in this way: Modernist thought depends on one of two myths or meta-narratives. The "myth of truth" represents the dominant, technical-scientific approach, or, in the terms of this course, affirmative modernism. It has to do with the assumption of an unproblematic objective and external truth which can be discovered by the scientist and whose progressive discovery will enable a greater and greater control of the world and hence an improvement of living standards, etc. The "myth of liberation" is clearly related to critical modernism, or to Habermas's "counter-discourse of the Enlightenment": it has to do with the ideas of emancipation from our social condition, with the development of critical and reflexive thought, and with social movements as the agency of our self-emancipation. Both, of course, relate to some idea of the social whole; in both, this relationship is rational in form.
The attack on these "meta-narratives" then makes use of the different points I have mentioned earlier: a rejection of holism, a rejection of the subject in whose search for truth or emancipation these narratives are grounded (in terms of reflexivity and in terms of their legitimation), a rejection of the idea of hidden depths to be understood. What we are then presented with is a mixture of anti-realism, anti-rationalism, and Nietzschian relativism. I want to explain each one of these points very briefly.
Firstly, anti-realism: realism is a technical term, implying the assumption of the existence of a deeper reality than the surface reality we are immediately presented with. As we have seen, postmodernism rejects the idea, for example, of capitalism as an underlying reality which we can know either eventually or indirectly, and replaces this by an ontology of surfaces, in which what you see is what you get. Clearly, if this is accepted, sociology (if it survives at all) has to give up any claims at analysis or discovery in favour either of simple description or of formalist games.
Secondly, anti-rationalism: the attack on rationalism mixes elements of Foucault's charge that humanist ideals of reason are in fact the governing ideologies of a disciplinary society with the Frankfurt School's scepticism towards "instrumental reason" of all kinds, as well as with more general philosophical statements about the failure of reason. In effect, what is said is that logic is (a) internally inconsistent in mathematical terms and (b) cannot legitimate itself. (b) is probably true by definition: if internal legitimations are taken as circular, and external legitimations are only accepted if they are fully consistent with the system of thought under discussion, we are effectively looking for an external justification which is also an internal one, and we will get nowhere. (a) is perhaps more serious, but it is important to stress that it only applies if - and this is a very big if - we treat reason or rationality as identical with a particular set of logical and mathematical operations, in other words if we assume that rationality exists in the abstract, separate from any social grounding.
Thirdly, however, these charges are brought together in a return to Nietzche's relativism. To make a crass over-simplification, Nietzche was already arguing, at the end of the nineteenth century, that the idea of an absolute truth was a myth, and that intellectual conflict was in effect a power struggle to determine which way of viewing the world should prevail. This is relativist insofar as it rejects the idea of any priority of one way of thinking over another; it treats rationality as just one imperfect way of thinking about things among others; and it rejects the idea of an external reality to which we can appeal. Something like this is suggested in at least some postmodernist writing, and there has been something of a "return to Nietzsche" in philosophy. What is perhaps missed in the rush to use Nietzsche against critical modernism is that Weber's critical modernism was already built on this kind of scepticism about rationality. Just as post-modernism tends to squash "Marxism" (or "modernity") into boxes which leave out a lot of their real complexity, so some of the complexity of other critical modernisms gets ignored.
The last thing I want to mention is the encounter between feminism and poststructuralism / postmodernism, which is by any standards one of the key encounters in contemporary intellectual politics: the issue being whether the two form part of a common assault on the tenets of both critical and affirmative modernism, or whether it transpires that the two are incompatible and that feminism is effectively a renewal and transformation of critical modernism. There is by now a large literature on this subject; books such as Barrett and Phillips' Destabilising theory or Linda Nicholson's Feminism / postmodernism are obvious places to start, but the issue is a central one in much if not most contemporary feminist theory and cultural studies.
Initially, a large number of feminists were attracted by the project of poststructuralism / postmodernism, for a number of reasons:
(a) It legitimated the idea of a multiplicity of relations of power rather than of a single, dominant totality;
(b) This meant that issues of gender, class and ethnicity could be taken separately, rather than requiring, for example, a subordination of the women's movement to the struggle against capitalism or a subordination of black women's struggles to a single struggle against patriarchy, etc.;
[Category of "difference"]
(c) The "anti-essentialist" argument that the category "women" was a cultural construct rather than an ontological reality related to earlier arguments about the social nature of gender;
(d) The delegitimation of "reason" was simultaneously a delegitimation of a particular kind of knowledge within which women had been either excluded or subsumed into a single "universal" account;
(e) For essentially contingent reasons, women were rather more likely to possess literary-critical knowledge than sociological knowledge, although the field of literary criticism as a whole is dominated by men.
However, there has been an increasingly sharp reaction by other feminists against this development, for a number of reasons:
(a) The deconstruction of the subject and of the "essentialist" category "women" makes any feminist account, let alone one geared towards social movements, extremely difficult to sustain;
(b) Similarly, postmodernism's relativistic attitude to truth and ethics makes it difficult either to maintain that the issues raised by feminist research were more significant sociologically than other possible subjects, or that they had any greater moral legitimacy;
(c) The focus on "texts" enables certain kinds of women's experiences to come through, but excludes others, effectively placing a premium on articulacy;
(d) Most obviously, on any account the concept of "patriarchy" is a meta-narrative which underpins much if not most feminist intellectual activity, whether academic or political; postmodernism's rejection of "meta-narratives" in effect undermines not just the "Enlightenment project", but also the feminist project.
These issues are still highly debated ones, on both sides. The outcome is crucial for the survival of critical modernism as an intellectual and political project: what is at stake, of course, is the question of whether the feminist critique points towards the need for a restructuring and rethinking, or whether it points towards the need to scrap the paradigm in favour of a very murky post-modern future.
In the next two lectures I'll be looking at how authors working within a critical modernist perspective have come to terms with the challenge offered by post-structuralism and post-modernism on the one hand and feminism on the other. The argument which is offered is generally an acceptance both that there have been changes in social organisation and that sociology needs to consider new (feminist, methodological, philosophical) issues; however, it is claimed, all of this can be done without abandoning the critical modernist paradigm. So the key intellectual questions are not whether patriarchal relations have to form a central part of social theory, but whether this can be done within a critical modernist approach; not one of whether economic organisation has moved beyond Fordism, but of whether this means that we have moved out of modernity; not one of whether technological rationality is problematic, but one of whether modernist perspectives reduce down to that.
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