Postmodernism is Not What You Think

Charles C. Lemert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317253679
• Subtopic: Post-Structuralism in Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

'Charles Lemert is one of the most thoughtful and interesting of sociology's postmodernists. He recurrently finds new angles of vision and is especially helpful for overcoming the pernicious opposition of 'micro' and 'macro' perspectives.' -Craig Calhoun, New York University (on the first edition) Highly readable, the second edition of Postmodernism Is Not What You Think responds to the widespread claim that postmodernism is over. It explains the historical connections between the postmodern and globalization. Those who wish to kill the term postmodernism still must face the facts that the former nationalistic world-system has collapsed and is slowly being replaced by a more global set of structures. The book is completely revised and updated with an entirely new section on globalization. The media and popular culture, identity politics, the science wars, politics and cultural studies, structuralism and poststructuralism, and the new sociologies are also put in perspective as signs of the new social formations dawning at the end of the modern age. Lemert shows that the postmodern is less a theory than a condition of social life brought about by the trouble modernity has gotten itself into.

Part I

Disturbances

1

Beasts, Frogs, Freaks, and Other Postmodern Things

When Noah, my most wonderful son, graduated from college, he entered the world such as it was. He left that very night on his first voyage to the new world—for San Francisco where, he said, he would find work “for awhile.” Well-trained bourgeois parent that I was, I struggled with some success to suppress the obvious questions. What work? How long a while? How much will this cost me? When will you be back home? These are the questions asked today by those of a class rank formerly sufficient to assure their children safe, life-affirming, and parent-pleasing answers. But now parents of even my relatively secure social position join the thousands upon thousands of other-than-white-or-middle-class people who reasonably doubt that the world is safe or welcoming for their children.

What work can one do? For how long? To what effect? Where? If there is any truth to the rumors that the world is postmodern, these are the questions the currency and poignancy of which lend them weight. It is not just work but human worth that is at issue. Whatever postmodernism is about, it must be about one question above all others: Does the modern world still realistically offer what for so long it had promised? When posed as a point of theory, the question stirs the blood of controversy. When posed as a matter of fact, the same question dampens the spirits. However much we may retreat into controversy, as if the fire of political battle can truly rekindle moral hope, the somber realities of the modern world at the end of the current millennium are hard to get around.¹

• Personal income, worldwide, is declining nearly at the same perverse rate as economic productivity and cumulative wealth are growing.

• Continuous working employments, that is: jobs productive of personal income and benefits sufficient to support family life, are disappearing for the majority.

• Meanwhile, social and economic inequalities are growing worse, not better — most dramatically in the United States up to which the modern world had always looked as the land of opportunity.

• Food supplies are declining to their lowest levels in decades with world grain reserves dropping to just 48 days worth at current consumption levels.

• 9/11 rocked a world already caught up in an epidemic of violence against women and children the world over.

The modern world promised economic progress, social equality, freedom from want, and peace. In the lack of which, people today rightly wonder whey they face so much poverty, inequality, hunger and disease, civil strife.

Modernism—that is, roughly: the culture of the modern world — had always extended the ethical promise that if people worked hard at legitimate enterprises things would get better, for their children, if not themselves. But now people ask: Is the modern world still a place in which children can find work as a means to worth — or, even, if not by work, is it a place that assures them some other means to a decent life?

Postmodernism — that is, roughly: the culture of a purportedly postmodern world — is mostly about questions of this sort. The questions themselves are perfectly reasonable. Good women and men, whether of middling or lesser status, but especially those who are parents of recent school graduates, are right to ask them. Their worries are realistic, thus reasonable. If reasonable, then why so much fuss about the various postmodernisti theories of the failures or endings of the modern? It is hardly unreasonable for parents to worry about their kids, or to entertain the idea that the world is fundamentally different from the one they inherited. So, why then do many parents and others with an ardent interest in the state of world affairs exhibit so much hostility to postmodernism? Or, differently, it is often asked: Why are these postmodernist theories of the modern world so terribly provocative such that reasonable people asking reasonable questions are disinclined to take them seriously? Hence one of the more interesting incongruities of the day. Given that the modern world is not what it used to be (who disagrees on this?), why then the impression that theories of the after-modern world are unreasonable monsters?

During one of the several family celebrations of the graduation of my youngest son, the gathered clan of mother, father’s brother, step-mother, father, and cousin chattered nervously of the early days when Noah was still a child in fact. One topic of shared recollection was the books his mother and I had read to him and his brother (who, it turns out, was not there because he, also a recent college grad, was finding work in Alaska). One of the most eerie of those stories was one that, it seems to me now, may be an allegory, even a parable, of the feelings many have toward post-modernism’s disturbing intrusion on their troubled worlds. The story went like this:

One fine morning the residents of a small village awoke to find a very big but not unfriendly beast well settled in the center of their small town and mundane lives. Being by nature trusting and kind, the people repressed fear and welcomed the beast. In spite of its enormous height and girth, and the mass of its settled flesh, the beast posed no threats. All he did, in the most matter of fact way, was to say: “Feed me.” The villagers complied. Upon devouring what he had been fed, he simply repeated his demand, without inflection, “Feed me.” Eventually, without vote or complaint, feeding the beast came to be what the village was about.

I do not remember the ending of the story. Somehow the point of it was in the beast’s ability to get his way without ever menacing, not once. It may well have been a moralistic lesson about how children take over their worlds by their demands. (Noah’s beloved, kid sister Annie in her younger years was more than capable of controlling the waking attentions of as many as four adults from earliest light to late at night.) But, whatever the story was supposed to mean to kids, it comes to me now as apt to the situation many find themselves in today.

Every now and then, monsters of a kind, even tame ones, present themselves in the midst of a public. Such beasts, whatever their true purposes, have the capacity to become what some villages, and perhaps a few worlds, are about. For many people, postmodernism is just such a beast. Postmodernism demands to be fed, and so it is. Kind people ply it with fodder. Before long it grows to become that which preoccupies, even defines, the villages.

In any one of the villages that constitute the world of daily life illustrations of the phenomenon are generously available. Referring for the moment to members of one with which I am directly familiar, academic sociologists spend a fair percentage of their collective energy in the feeding of this postmodern beast. Though the number of professional sociologists who claim actually to be postmodernists is small in ratio to the whole, the number of occasions upon which the subject is mentioned, often oddly out of context, is great. It is not uncommon for solicited reviews of scholarly articles or books, even of tenure and promotion cases, to contain unsolicited evaluations judging the merits of a case by the degree of its perceived proximity to (bad!) or from (good!) postmodernism. I have heard a story in which an esteemed senior member of one of the field’s more respected departments is said to so hate postmodernism as to have told untenured junior colleagues they stood no chance of promotion should they be seen in its company. One would suppose this story to be apocryphal were it not that scrutiny of this; department’s roster of surviving members, when compared to departed ones, suggests otherwise. True or not, there is ample public evidence elsewhere of members of the profession, including at least one former president of its official association in America, going out of their ways to feed the beast by writing of the supposed bad effects of this thing upon the field. On more than a few occasions these feedings take place in public — at symposia entertaining the gathered at meetings of learned societies, in published reviews of books, and, even, under the guise of contributions to the field’s scholarly journals. On one occasion of which I was a participant, one of the field’s most honored scholars rose from the audience to address a panel of colleagues who had just said relatively nice things about postmodernism. Her purpose was to counter their heresies with, inter alia, the following slip of tongue: “Why is it that you people are all so egocentric when the rest of us are … well, what is the word?” She 1 altered on the oppositive that must have come uneasily to mind, “eccentric.”

Postmodernism does indeed have the ability to drive people crazy, even to distraction, as measured by the word’s utility as a viable invective. One of the field’s most eloquent and famous spokesmen, meaning to comment on the word which had hitherto served to express the worst that could possibly be said of a sociologist, observed:

A dictionary of modern culture recently gave this tongue-in-cheek definition of postmodernism: “Postmodernism: This word is meaningless. Use it often.” Much the same could be said of “positivism,” save that it has become more of an epithet than a word used in an approving way.²

Save for a very few provincial outposts, mostly in the barren Middle West of the United States, and California of course, “postmodernism” is seldom used by sociologists in an approving way. All in all, the state of collective feeling that can be supposed to motivate this feeding frenzy is well summarized by the random observations one author has made under the title “Postmortemism For Postmodernism”:

A postmodern hypothesis subject to postmodern testing is the scholarly equivalent of Godzilla meeting Frankenstein. The earth trembles, but in the end the fantasy plays out, and we leave the theatre to resume our humdrum lives.³

The frenzy is in fact a fetish arising, as it is supposed all fetishes do, from the very death-wish this author refers to in his title. The fear is vastly out of proportion to the reality of postmodernism’s effects either within a field like sociology (by contrast to the English departments wherein there is better cause for alarm), or in the wider world. Wild disproportions of feeling to fact are symptoms of what Steven Seidman has called postmodern anxiety and some others call “PoMo Phobia."⁴ Godzilla versus Frankenstein, indeed.

I have not been able to measure the exact extent to which this monster-fetish has infested precincts of the sociological village. Apparently, though, my experience of the dread is confirmed by others whose feelings about the beastly presence are different from my own. Some years ago, Todd Gitlin, a prominent sociologist of respectable standing, said:

Journals, conferences, galleries arid coffee houses are spilling over with talk about postmodernism. What is this thing, where does it come from, and what is at stake?⁵

It is well known to social scientists that anxiety with respect to “things” is code f or the more autocthonal fear that the truly human might slip back into the muck from which, before human memory, we are thought to have evolved. Gitlin signals his symptomatic use of the code by making reference to the primeval fecal ooze in the title of his essay: “Hip Deep in Postmodernism.” Frankenstein monsters … now, things arising from the muck!

Like those in the village of a child’s story, many — and not by any means just sociologists — are at risk of becoming a people who organize their wide-awake lives with respect to a subject they wish would go away.

One Saturday morning in May, 1996, readers of The New York Times awoke to a front-page story, captioned: “Postmodern Gravity Deconstructed.” The subject of the story soon became the buzz among participants in, and observers of, American university culture. Though perhaps pleased that the topic with which they are identified should make the front page, various alleged postmodernists were embarrassed to learn that a bad joke had been played on them.

A teacher of physics at New York University, Alan Sokal, had hoodwinked the editors of Social Text, a magazine widely known for its interest in subjects like cultural studies, poststructuralism, and, to be sure, postmodernism. Sokal’s ruse eventuated in the publication of a pseudo-article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” which he concocted out of quotations from what he considered the most obscure jargon current in the academic circles in which one would find readers of Social Text. By Sokal’s standards of truth even the title of his false copy of a true article was manifest nonsense. The cleverly composed pretense of academic sense was well marked as nonsense, perhaps most glaringly by the 12 pages of footnotes and the additional 10 pages of bibliography which together dwarfed the 14 pages of articular text. The joke was in the dispersion of quotations from incommensurable literatures in the humanities and the sciences to create sufficient verisimilitude as to deceive the editors of Social Text. One editor, Andrew Ross, declared, after the fact of publication, what he had believed upon accepting the false copy as though it were the real thing: “We read it as the earnest attempt of a professional scientist to seek some sort of philosophical justification for his work.”⁶ There is no prima facie reason to doubt the authenticity of the editor’s representation of his good faith in the authenticity of an unknown author’s motives than there is to question Sokal’s, which were to produce the false copy that would unmask the true falsity which, Sokal believed, lies behind the postmodern-like enterprises.

There followed a flurry of comments and responses, to say nothing of faxes and e-mails, among those delighted or offended by the hoax. Those delighted by Sokal’s hoax shared his belief that activities variously associated with the term “postmodernism” are themselves a hoax unmasked by the apparent inability of the supposedly postmodernish editors of Social Text to distinguish a seemingly real thing from a deceptively false one. For example:

The comedy of the Sokal incident is that it suggests that even the postmodernists don't really understand one another’s writing and make their way through the text by moving from one familiar name or notion to the next like a frog jumping across a murky pond by way of lily pads. Lacan … performativity … Judith Butler … scandal … ( engendering (w)holeness … Lunch!⁷

You will notice that the monsters here take the form of frogs which, like locusts and other pests, are known to have been occasionally sent by the gods to punish the wicked. Monsters … aboriginal things … now, frogs in murky waters.

The Sokal scam was beautifully orchestrated such that simultaneous with the publication of the phoney article in Social Text, counterfeiter Sokal separately published a self-exposé in which he avowed the well-meant fraud by which the evil fraud of the alleged postmodernists was supposedly revealed. (In one of the few truly verifiable statements to be found amid the claims and counterclaims, Stanley Fish remarked that Sokal had at least “successfully pretended to be himself.”⁸) Sokals true revelation of his false deed appeared in Linguairanca, a magazine devoted to high-minded muckraking among the muddy cultures of academe. Its muckraking style is at least evident in the fact that Linguairanca did not initially invite the editors of Social Text to respond even though Linguairanca’s exposé of Sokals self-exposure was printed in a section called “Research File.”⁹

In one of the more curious outcomes of the affair, it appears that at least one authentic member of the cultural (if not political) Right, Roger Kimball, who for years had been writing about the monstrosities he finds on the cultural Left (that is, postmodernism and its fellow travelers) was taken in by Sokal (a self-professed member of the political, but not the cultural, Left). In The New Criterion, a magazine of the cultural Right, Kimball wrote a serious review of the unserious copy of the seriously foolish (and presumed dangerous) postmodernist article in Social Text. In all seriousness, Kimball, thinking it the real thing, called the Sokal piece “pure drivel”! It is reported that he also referred to such writing as the piece he thought he was reading (but was not) as an “intellectual freak show.¹⁰ The preternatural beast rears its truly ugly head again. Monsters … primeval things … frogs … now, freaks.

One of the true advantages of having Sokals declaration of the good faith intentions behind the bad faith of his false copy is that a comparison of the two (that is: the true text in Linguairanca with the false one in Social Text) provides data on the basis of which one can at least determine where in the matter Sokal locates his most earnest moral principles. Being a physicist of unannounced accomplishment, it is not surprising that the idea he finds most ridiculous in the postmodernist scheme of things has to do with reality. In this respect he is exactly right, postmodernism has something to do with reality and how it is understood. In Sokals words:

In the first paragraph [of “Transgressing the Boundaries”] I deride the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in “eternal” physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the “objective” procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.¹¹

This, remember, is Sokal quoting Sokals invented text — that is: Sokal taking seriously his own simulation of a “real” postmodernist text in order to demonstrate that the reality of postmodernist cultural studies is patently unreal.

In other words, Sokal’s false text was sufficiently real in appearance to have fooled those who doubt: that reality is a self-evidently available thing; that true science is fr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition: Why Globalization Threatens Modernity
• Part I Disturbances
• 1 Beasts, Frogs, Freaks, and Other Postmodern Things
• Index
• List of Contributors