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SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES
by
Today, I will preview a lecture on the social sources of postmodern thought which I will give grad students at TWU/UNT in Denton, Texas. In brief, there are four differing sources which have, in the past 50 years or so, converged to support a far-reaching transformation of the knowledge process in general and academic life in particular.
Some are nihilist and hold that the knowledge process is forever subverted by human interests and desire. Some are much more affirmative; they claim that while all truth claims are suspect, they are suspect by virtue of the fact they tend to support class, racist and gender privilege.
My own view is that pre-modern, modern and postmodern knowledge processes can be most helpful to the human project of praxis and planning but that each provides but part of the totality of human interest. Pre-modern knowledge processes gave us the social-psychological capacities to hope, to trust, to believe, to have faith and to sanctify nature and society. Modern science has gone from success in predicting the behavior of simple non-linear systems and grounds much of what is helpful in transport, communication, medicine, construction and agriculture.
Postmodern knowledge processes are far more problematic, filled as they are with passion, jealousy, ambition, anger and greed...filled in fact with all the seven deadly sins mentioned in pre-modern wisdom. Yet good theory and good politics are possible. Feminism has helped change the face of research in both theory and methods...all by herself, Carol Gilligan changed our understandings of moral development. Third World artists, writers, dramatists and dancers are changing Euro-centric norms of aesthetics and ethics...and thus greatly increase the human heritage. Postmodern scientists, beginning with Poincare' and centering on the work of Lorenz, Mandelbrot and Feigenbaum are transforming our philosophy of science to include transformations from order to disorder...rather than looking for and praising only that which is sure and certain.
So let's honor some of these sources.
Among the social bases for postmodern thought/critique/sensibility include:
1. The social base: Gender, Race, Class, and people in the 3rd world.
2. The Artistic base: an avant garde in art, music, poetry, architecture and dance.
3. French Intelligentsia: Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Bourdieu, Baudrillard and others.
4. The Academic base: Cultural Marxism, the Frankfurt School, and here in the USA, the great movements for Women's Studies, for Minority Programs, for Student Power, for Cultural Diversity and for Humanist [as opposed to religious fundamentalist] world views. These are castigated by white, anglo, euro-centric males as efforts on the part of women and minorities to institute 'political correctness.'
Each of these sources of postmodernity have different problematics and differing ways to speak of their dis-enchantment with modern science and its concern with absolutes, finalities, universalities and rationalities.
They have in common with pre-modern sensibility and Christian fundamentalism as well as Islam and Buddhism, a concern with that which is excluded, that which is omitted, that which is mysterious and that which is emotional and sensual.
A. The social base. In the past 200 years, women have been gathering a sustained critique of what is now called euro-centric male pre-occupation with control and domination. The critique begins as rebellion and resistance to patriarchy and the subordination of women to male hegemony in home, office, shop, factory and church. It goes on to a powerful critique of those canons of science which require human beings fit themselves into neat and tidy hierarchies of thought, human development, or agency. There are any number of good places to start to look at postmodern feminism. Bryan Turner's book, (Sage) Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity has a section on Politics, Women and Postmodernity which sets out some of the problematics and offers references to a lot more.
B. Afro-Americans, Native American Indians, Chicanos and other minorities in North America have long resisted the arrogant assumptions of White European Christians that native beliefs, native medicine, native religions and pathways to the holy, native family arrangements and native communal organizations are primitive, savage, barbaric, or inferior to 'modern,' scientific, developed ways to do social life.
Workers around the world resist and reject modernist efforts to rationalize, segment and sub-divide the work process. Taylorism is the pejorative label given to the efforts to fit workers into a machine like modality of precision, predictability and perfection [as defined by bosses, managers, owners and government officials]. The points of dissent also include division of 'surplus' profits; fringe benefits such as health care, pensions, vacation, job security and status; kind of product or service to be offered as well as the role of the worker in management of the work process itself.
C. The artistic base: I have read that the term, postmodern, first appeared in the 1950's as part of a critique of modern architecture with its straight lines, flat planes, and solid squares, spheres and pyramids. Scott Lash offers a summary critique in the Turner book mentioned. He says that modern architect does not fit human forms, human scales or human social forms. Norm Denzin has done several pieces on postmodern cinema which help one understand the politics of pre-modern, modernist cinema. In his lecture at TCU three years ago, Denzin spoke of the many films of Woody Allen; in particular, his 'Crimes and Misdeamors.' In the Allen films, it is difficult to insert oneself into the role of the protagonist [male or female] in that such roles have too many contrarieties and moral ambiguities for most of the viewers. My colleague here at TWU, Mahmoud Sadri, says that 'Pulp Fiction' is the flick of the present 20 something cohort since it catches the difficulty of discerning between that which is 'real' and that which is 'fictional.'
Postmodern dance and music do not follow the perfectly orchestrated, pre-planned, rehearsed and controlled flow of form and melody of ballet or, say, Beethoven. The mathematical rigor of Haydn, Beethoven or Mozart is lost in the loose, spontaneous and surprising variations in jazz....especially New Orleans jazz.
Postmodern poetry does not rhyme, follow a meter nor yield the same thoughts, feelings and behaviors each time it is said, sung or read. Those of you who have seen the movie, Dead Poet's Society, will remember that the teacher began the class on poetry by having the students rip out that part of the introduction which said that 'good' poetry can be scaled in cartesian phase-space. Raymond Williams and L.R. Leavis at Cambridge have been the center of the contention between modern and postmodern understandings of prose and poetry. Four years ago, at U-Mich-Flint, I had my undergrad students each bring in three poems on Valentine's Day; one a pre-modern, one a modern and one a post-modern celebration of love and couple-ness. You may want to do that Tuesday with your own celebration with your most significant other.
D. French Intelligentsia. In my review of a book by the Merleau-Ponty Circle in 'Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, [V.19;Sept, 1994], I made the point that most American readers have to move through four or five shells of meaning/speech in order to understand M-P, Bourdieu, Baudrillard et. al.; first there are the taken-for-granted assumptions of modern science which are under critique. Since these assumptions are taken for granted, few graduate students in sociology will immediately understand the grounds for critique. Aristotlean logic, euclidean geometry, newtonian dynamics, leibnizean calculus, carnapian reasoning and hegelian/husserlian phenomenology all have to be re-examined for the politics which are embedded in them.
Then there is the rich and deep tradition of speculation on knowledge and being centered in Europe which is encoded in its own special linguistics which must be understood, not to mention the special encodings of the French intellectuals. At that point, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty and other writers begin to make a great deal of sense. Fortunately, there are many bridges between these traditions among which Turner and Pauline Rosenau are the most accessible.
Why the French in particular should take the lead in a scholarly critique of modernism is of some interest but they have in common with all the rest of us the refusal to be boxed, labelled, categorized, explained, predicted, written off, ignored, discarded or understood by equations, theories, propositions, tables, charts, or smug, self satisfied managers, bosses, pundits or preachers.
One need not center one's postmodern critique on french/european terms. I have told the grad students in our seminar on postmodern social psychology that they can use any of the bases mentioned above as a point of departure for their papers in this modality.
E. Or one can use the Frankfurt School and/or critical theory. David Held has a nice overview/social history of the Frankfurt School. In brief, its members, reflecting on the failures of class theory in the 30s, 40s and 50s, began to look at the social sources of ideological hegemony; they looked at radio, art, newspapers, magazines, cinema and science itself for the roots of fascism/totalitarianism. They looked at the Dialectics of the Enlightenment and found some of the sources of fascism [in the assumption that the modern state claimed to be the repository of rationality and that modern societies rationalized the institutions of socialization, health care, punishment and production. They looked at the family structure and found the sees of authoritarianism in gender relations and in child rearing practices. They looked at art and cinema for its veneration of stratification and authority.
For those interested in the sociology of sports, I have an article in my book on 'The Drama of Social Life' which deconstructs professional sports using the ideas and approaches of critical theory. For those interested in the sociology of religion, there is an article on 'The Typifications of Christ at Christmas and Easter Time' which locates such typifications in the mass, electronic media and gauges their utility for the colonization of desire.
Those who want to look at some of my other work can use gopher on internet to gain access to the Red Feather Institute Archives, double click on:
www.tryoung.com
For those interested in Political Correctness, there is an article in the Wisconsin Sociologist [V.30, No.1, 1993] in which I set the problematics of p.c. in its larger, socio-historical context...some like it.
Until next time. T. R. Young