Sociology of Postmodernism

Dr Scott Lash

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138171732
• eBook ISBN: 9781317858522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This authoritative and revealing book provides the first sociological examination of postmodernism. Lash examines the differences between modernism and postmodernism, providing a clear explanation of why postmodernism is important.

Chapter One Postmodernism: Towards A Sociological Account

DOI: 10.4324/9781315832326-1

‘Postmodernism’ has become a household word. Major newspapers in more than one country have run series of articles on it. There have been countless TV shows addressing the problems it poses. Hair stylists and employees in boutiques where young people buy clothes or records from Los Angeles to Berlin will have heard of postmodernism and may well have an opinion of it. Better-spoken taxi drivers in the world's major metropolises will be able to drive the visitor to their city's district where the new postmodern architecture is to be found.

In becoming a household word, it has at the same time become something of a resounding cliché. Just about all the topical academic periodicals with any sort of connection to things cultural have published a special issue on postmodernism. New series of books coming out of various publishing houses have featured, embarrassingly, the word postmodernism, sometimes in a majority of their titles. One American publisher is bringing out an entire series entitled ‘Women and Postmodernism’. The word has come indeed to make a number of serious academics and intellectuals of a left political persuasion cringe. Periodical editors proclaim proudly that we've never had an issue on postmodernity. At an historic gathering in Frankfurt in December 1987 of German Socialist intellectuals brought together by SPD political-culture guru Peter Glotz, the utterance ‘postmodern’ figured frequently, but solely as a term of derision when not of abuse.

Yet, at the time of writing in summer 1989, some half decade after the term has left the ghetto of debates on architecture to pervade the mainstream of intellectual and public life, especially younger intellectuals are still highly attracted to postmodernism. Roundtables and conferences on postmodernism will still turn up higher numbers, especially among the young, than on just about any other subject. This is partly because everybody has something to say about postmodernity. Everybody has an opinion on the subject. Everybody is already an expert on it. Even as the term ‘postmodernism’ loses entirely its cult value, and becomes almost an embarrassment for even avowed postmodernists, the questions and issues it raises shall remain centre stage for quite some time — the opponents of the new cultural paradigm, for example German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, calling as much or more attention to it than its enthusiasts. Its continuing centrality will be due, among other things, to a question of intellectual generations. To a generation whose formative years were in the late 1970s and early 1980s, postmodernism in some form is arguably as central as Marxism was to a generation which reached intellectual maturity at the end of the 1960s. Among this younger, ‘post-punk’ cohort will also be found a much greater sympathy towards Marxism than is generally found among their mainstream academic counterparts. Yet their older, ‘Sixty-eighter’ teachers can be just as intolerant towards their seemingly ‘culturalist’ ideas as the ‘end of ideology’ generation of the 1950s were intolerant to the Sixty-eighters.

Given this continued, and likely to continue, interest in the problem, if not in the term, postmodernism, what is the state of play at the current juncture? On the one hand there is uncritical and even irresponsible celebration by, for example, French social theorist and commentator, Jean Baudrillard. On the other there is dismissal by much of the Marxist left, or attacks and the moral-philosophical denunciations of, for example, Habermas. Postmodernism has been the object of, above all, aesthetic discourse, of moral discourse, of political discourse. What it hasn't often been is the object of serious systematic analysis. It in particular has not been the object of serious sociological analysis.

Such sober sociological analysis is the aim of this book. My aim is to rescue postmodernism as a social (or cultural)-scientific concept from both those whose visions are of panacea and of carnival, and those who have dismissed it or relegated it to cliché. My aim is to convince both those in the wissenschaftlich community and on the political left to take postmodernism seriously. I want to do this through first giving to postmodernism, so to speak, an ‘perationalization’. That is I shall offer a systematic and sociological description of postmodernism. Then, I shall outline a very straightforward sociological explanation of this cultural ‘paradigm’. Simplicity, claimed philosophers of science such as Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem and Jules Henri Poincaré, is a virtue in a scientific theory. Simplicity also means the necessity of constructing models or types, which greatly abstract from the complexity of concrete phenomena. But I shall draw on a great variety of concrete phenomena as illustrations in order to convince the reader of the validity of my schematic descriptive and explanatory models.

I am not a postmodernist. I am, in some significant ways, ‘populist’ and even ‘commercial’ in my tastes. I like football games and still play basketball. I have been known to tape Miami Vice to watch episodes when I get home at night. I like drinking in Irish bars in New York City. I think Steve Martin is a superb comic. Yet it seems to me axiomatic that Klee and Kandinsky are of a significance in the visual arts that Warhol and Lichtenstein and now Baselitz plainly are not. I take Marxism and the legality and ‘natural rights’ of the liberal and socialist traditions very seriously indeed. My own mode of procedure in the present study is quite rationalist indeed with no excuses made. Its modus operandi deals with, and through, eminently modernist distinctions between ‘the cultural’, on the one hand, and the economic and the social on the other. And especially between (social) scientific explanation and artistic exposition. I also think that postmodernist culture has not on balance produced a favourable terrain for the political left. Modernism has offered a much more favourable arena in which to wage the left's cultural struggles. Yet, I hope to show in the course of this book that the cultural terrain on which we now all live, work, love, and struggle is pervaded by postmodernism. And if this is true, it would be unwise for the left to ignore it.

There are a (very) few theses which structure this book. The first set of theses has to do with what postmodernism is, and the second has to do with how we can sociologically account for it. Postmodernism is, for me, not a condition, nor, as part of a fabric with post-industrialism, a type of society, in the sense that people speak of industrial society, or capitalist society, or modern society. Postmodernism is instead, I think, confined to the realm of culture. Post-industrialism is one important property of contemporary capitalist economies. But it is a strictly economic, not cultural, property. Post-industrialism thus is not part of postmodernism, as for example it seems that Jean-François Lyotard, author of the influential Postmodern Condition, believes. It stands instead in a relationship of compatibility, and in specific relations of compatibility with an importantly post-industrial capitalist economy.

Describing Postmodernism

A regime of signification

Postmodernism is then, for me, strictly cultural. It is indeed a sort of cultural ‘paradigm’. Cultural paradigms, like scientific paradigms, are spatio-temporal configurations. ‘Spatially’ they comprise a more or less flexible symbolic structure which, when bent too much out of shape, begins to constitute another distinct cultural paradigm. Temporally, they — like Kuhn's scientific paradigms, or Michel Foucault's discourses — take shape, persist for a duration, and then disintegrate. When Talcott Parsons in The Structure of Social Action characterizes religions in terms of whether their cosmology assumes the sacred to be either immanent or transcendent, he is beginning to describe cultural paradigms.¹ Or when Max Weber traces the history of the four elements — rationalism, universalism, transcendence, and ethics — of Ancient Judaism, he is more substantially delineating a cultural paradigm. These four elements are the conditions of existence of Judaism.² Other cultural paradigms which one might speak of include, for instance, modernism, realism, the baroque, and the Gothic.

More specifically, postmodernism and other cultural paradigms are what I want to call ‘regimes of signification’. The idea for this comes from the political economists of the ‘Regulation School’ and their notion of ‘regime of accumulation’.³ Regime of accumulation is a particularly attractive concept because, unlike the notion of, say, ‘mode of production’, it clearly connotes a temporal dimension. Further, unlike mode of production, regimes of accumulation are as importantly determined by how people consume as by how they produce. Regimes of accumulation thus attribute as much importance to the market as they do to the point of production. In ‘regimes of signification’, however, only cultural objects are produced. All regimes of signification comprise two main components. The first is a specific ‘cultural economy’. A given cultural economy will include (1) specific relations of production of cultural objects, (2) specific conditions of reception, (3) a particular institutional framework that mediates between production and reception, and (4) a particular way in which cultural objects circulate. The second component of any regime of signification is its specific mode of signification, by which I mean that its cultural objects depend on a particular relationship between signifier, signified, and referent. Here the signifier is a sound, image, word, or statement; the signified is a concept or meaning; and the referent is an object in the real world to which signifier and signified connect. The notion of mode of signification is explicated below in Chapter 7 and is wholly straightforward. Those with little or no knowledge of linguistics or semiotics will have no difficulty in grasping the discussion.

Modernization and differentiation

Postmodernism is a very idiosyncratic regime of signification. It is a regime of signification whose fundamental structuring trait is ‘de-differentiation’. What I mean by de-differentiation has a certain amount in common with Baudrillard's concept of ‘implosion’.⁴ My starting point, however, is not Baudrillard, but conventional sociology. It is the standard structural-functionalist idea of social modernization by means of differentiation. But, following Weber's famous methodological essays on the sociology of religion⁵ and Habermas in The Theory of Communicative Action,⁶ I want to confine this differentiation and modernization to the realm of culture alone. What I want to claim is that if modernization is a process of cultural differentiation, or what German analysts call Ausdifferenzierung, then ‘postmodernization’ is a process of de-differentiation, or Entidifferenzierung.

On these lines it is convenient to conceive modernization as roughly consisting of three phases: the ‘primitive’, the ‘religio-metaphysical’, and the ‘modern’. This periodization stems from Piaget, and parallels his developmental psychology. An initial major and systematic treatment of cultural modernization in terms of a differentiation model is Hegel's mature writing on aesthetics.⁷ Please accept the following paragraphs, not as evidence of the validity of this model, but as illustrations which clarify the model's parameters.

In broadest outline here, in primitive societies, culture and the social are as yet undifferentiated. Indeed religion and its rituals are part and parcel of the social. The sacred is immanent in the profane. Further, nature and the spiritual remain undifferentiated in animism and totemism. The magician's role underscores the ambiguity of distinction between this-worldly and other-worldly, and the priests' functions have not yet become separate and specialized.

In the second, ‘religio-metaphysical phase’, modernization brings about the differentiation of the cultural from the social, the sacred from the profane, in the world religions. Here the modernization process seems to be at work in the more radical differentiation of the spiritual from the social in Christianity than in Eastern religions, in Protestantism than in Catholicism. Further modernization takes place, in this trajectory, in the Renaissance autonomization of secular culture from religious culture, and in the eighteenth-century tripartite and Kantian differentiation of theoretical, ethical, and aesthetic realms. This differentiation and autonomization opens up the possibility for the development of ‘realism’ both in art and in epistemology.

Aesthetic realism is only possible on the basis of three prior types of differentiation, as follows.

1. The cultural must constitute a separate realm from the social. Aesthetic realism is premised on the possibility of ‘representation’, in which one type of entity must represent another type of entity. ‘Symbolism’, unlike representation, does not presuppose two separate realms. Symbolism exists in primitive societies in a sense and on a scale that representation does not. Thus the anthropologists' conception of culture as undifferentiated from the social is tied to symbolism in a sense that the idea of culture dominant in today's culture and media studies is tied to notions of representation. One of the important contributions of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies has been to bring symbols, alongside representations, into the study of contemporary culture.⁸ Representations, like symbols, do signify. However, symbols signify, so to speak, immanently, while representations signify transcendentally and presuppose a pre-existing differentiation of the cultural and the social.
2. Aesthetic realism presupposes the separation of the aesthetic from the theoretical. That is, it must be clear in an important sense that representations in painting and literature are not ‘true’ in the same way that propositions or concepts in the sciences are.
3. Aesthetic realism presupposes the separation of secular from religious culture, and assumes the conventions of the former for art forms. Hence pictorial realism is rooted in the break with religious assumptions of Quattrocento perspective. Alberti's literally ‘window on the world’ conception was based on the tracing of a three-dimensional object in a two-dimensional space. So that the space intervened between the object and the eye. Its geometrical perspective and proportion assumed lines drawn from the object, through the two-dimensional space and converging on the eye. The two-dimensional space was literally to be conceived as a ‘window’, onto which reality was to be transcribed.⁹ Pictorial realism was thus conceived as a break with the religious world view of mediaeval painting, in which scientific principles displaced the latter's flattened perspective and distorted proportion, which did not on the religious world view matter, because is was symbols and not reality which was to be rendered.

‘Narrative realism’ also is dependent on the differentiation of scientific from religious world view. Narrative realism, perhaps best exemplified in the nineteenth-century novel, presumes that a narrative has beginning, middle, and end, and that events follow one another as cause and effect. It is almost always based on a sort of psychological causation, in which actions are effects whose causes are either the character traits or the goals of individuals. In narrative realism, events cannot be a matter of coincidence, as in melodrama, but they must, on Aristotle's conception, have minimal levels of plausibility and predictability in terms of preceding events.¹⁰ Neither can causation be teleological, from an outside cause, or a ‘final cause’, as in Greek myth or Christian theology. Causes must either temporally precede or be simultaneous with effects.

Epistemological realism, which assumes that concepts or ideas can give a more or less true picture of reality, is also dependent on differentiation in the modernization process.¹¹ It presupposes again the differentiation of secular culture from religious culture and hence a departure from theologically informed conceptions of reality. And it presupposes a differentiation of ideas from nature (and the social) so that the former can represent nature. Much the same is true in the area of ethics and morality. The ‘natural law’ ethical thought of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant assumes a break with theologically grounded ethics (as found in, for example, Thomist thought), and the grounding of morality in nature and/or reason. But natural law also importantly presupposes a systematic differentiation of the cultural from the social and reproduces itself in the separate realms of ‘the ought’ and ‘the is’. The sacred of ‘the ought’ in such moralities is either rendered as the realm of nature or of reason, quite distinct from the profane social realm of existing every-day life.

Modernist autonomy

Further differentiation and autonomization brings us to a fully-fledged cultural modernity. In ‘the modern’, each of the cultural spheres attains the fullest possible autonomy. Each sphere attains what Weber called Eigengesetzlichkeit. This means that each sphere becomes self-legislating. It is fashionable to say that modernist (or even more erroneously, postmodernist) cultural forms are ‘self-referential’. I find that this is misleading. The idea of self-referentiality here probably comes from the Saussurean notion of signification through difference. What many analysts take this for is that signifier-signified relations are in fact a matter of the differences among a plurality of signifiers in a langue. Saussure himself is rather inexplicit on this matter, though latter-day Saussureans have made this oversimplification. This is indeed an oversimplification because in any langue, signification depends as much on the relationship among signifieds as among signifiers and on set of rules that connect signifiers and signifieds.¹² And even if meaning were fully determined by the differences among signifiers, that would not mean that the signifiers were self-referential. It would mean that their ability to refer outside of themselves, i.e. to signifieds, was determined by the differences among themselves. The other model for the ‘self-refere...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Frontmatter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Postmodernism: Towards A Sociological Account
• Part One: Postmodernism and Social Theory
• Part Two: Postmodernist Culture
• Part Three: Modernism and Postmodernism: Social Correlates
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name_index
• Subject_index