Postmodernism and Social Inquiry

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.

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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.

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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

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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

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PART I POSTMODERN THEORIES OF SOCIETY CHAPTER

2. Foucault, Postmodernism, and Social Theory Steven Best

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CHAPTER

3. Postmodernism and Antifoundationalism David Ashley

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CHAPTER

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

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CHAPTER

5. Postmodernism and Feminism Sondra Farganis

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CHAPTER

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

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PART II POSTMODERN RESEARCH METHODS CHAPTER

7. Semiotics and Postmodernism M.Gottdiener

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CHAPTER

8. Postmodernism and Deconstructionism Norman K.Denzin

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CHAPTER

9. Ethnographic Trends in the Postmodern Era Andrea Fontana

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

224 255

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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“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

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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

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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

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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____. 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.

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____. 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

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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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

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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).

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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

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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).

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“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

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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,

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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

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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).

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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:

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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

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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

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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:

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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

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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