chapter iii: is there a postmodern...
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Chapter III: Is there a Postmodern Sociology?
Postmodernism’s attempt to integrate art and life by aestheticizing commodity culture
resulted in an interesting reversal where art itself became commodified. The new
culture came to be identified as the culture of excess, the culture of late capitalism,
consumer culture and so on. Culture is never a stable, immutable category; on the
contrary, it is an ongoing process of evolution. Traditionally, it has been a subject
discussed under Anthropology. Only recently, after literary criticism took a cultural
turn, did culture become a subject of study in departments of English. This
development can be attributed to the academicization of culture by British cultural
studies experts beginning with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams. It was later
followed up by theoreticians like E.P Thompson and Stuart Hall. It was without
doubt, an important turning point in the study of culture that began to look at it not as
a form of elitist high culture but as forms of material practices of everyday life.
Cultural studies emerged “from a literary critical tradition that saw popular culture as
a threat to the moral and cultural standards of modern civilization” (Turner 2).
However “the work of pioneers in cultural studies breaks with that literary tradition’s
elitist assumptions to examine the everyday and the ordinary” (2). The work of these
pioneers helped establish “the consideration of popular culture –from the mass media
to sport to dances crazes – on an academic and intellectual agenda from which it had
been excluded.” (2). This chapter will examine the development of the concept of
culture using the theoretical framework provided by Raymond Williams and others
and try to establish its relation with society. Such an analysis will provide a better
understanding of the contemporary nuances of the term. It will certainly lend useful
clues to understand the development of postmodern culture. The discussion that
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follows will also try and examine whether postmodern culture necessarily entails a
postmodern sociology.
Culture and society have always been treated as complementary categories.
However, the two are being considered as separate, autonomous categories only in
recent times. Therefore it is important to define their categorical boundaries and also
identify overlappings if any, in order to explain the relation between the two. One can
then investigate what is commonly perceived as a paradoxical relationship between
cultural postmodernism and societal post-modernity. It might then be possible to
define postmodernism in sociological terms and also inquire into the possibility of a
postmodern sociology. Etymologically, the word culture has its roots in cultivate,
grow or tend; however, its meaning has obviously undergone many transformations to
mean what it does today - aesthetic forms and everyday practices of a group of people
or community. This definition however, is a broad generalization. It is necessary to
clarify the concept of culture in order to develop a radical critique of postmodern
culture and also to review its relation with society.
Raymond Williams offers a conceptual clarification of culture in his book
Marxism and Literature (1977). He suggests that any serious analysis of culture can
be undertaken only through an understanding of the historical consciousness of
culture. He writes, “The concept at once fuses and confuses the radically different
experiences and tendencies of its formation. It is then impossible to carry through any
serious cultural analysis without reaching towards a consciousness of the concept
itself: a consciousness that must be, as we shall see, historical” (Marxism and
Literature 11). Historically, one can say that the economic, social and cultural
spheres functioned not as separate bounded categories till very recently. They only
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begin to get separate identities with the advent of modern institutions when society
came to mean “a general system of order” (11) and economics “the management of a
community” (11). Williams also suggests that, “In their modern development the
three concepts did not move in step, but each at a critical point, was affected by the
movement of the others” (11). However, he also argues that the concepts of economy
and society are limited terms referring to a rational controlling “system of production
distribution and exchange” (11) and a “formulation of experience we now summarize
as ‘bourgeois society’” (11) respectively. These areas continue to remain contentious
and problematic with many unresolved issues that surface time and again as political
issues in liberal democracies. The concept of culture though, assumes significance
with the growth of bourgeois social and economic practices. Compared to the other
two spheres, culture is a much larger and delimited area which is “less normative” and
carries greater “functional freedom” (11) with it. Nonetheless, according to Williams,
the three spheres – cultural, economic and social – must be taken together along with
their interconnections and historical evolution within the concept of civilization.
Culture, as a broad delimited category began to bear heavily on the other two
categories that were so rigidly limited. Williams suggests that till the eighteenth
century, culture was “still a noun of process: the culture of something – crops,
animals, minds. The decisive changes in society and economy had begun earlier in the
late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; much of their essential development was
complete before culture came to include its new and elusive meanings” (13). Only in
the eighteenth century, the meaning of culture came to assume a new significance by
being associated with the meaning of civilization. Civilization, however, was
understood as the product of a larger historical process that could be contrasted with a
previous state of barbarism. Linked with the rational, enlightenment thought of
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progress, it was now to be taken as “an achieved state of development, which implied
historical process and progress” (13). Although this process was “secular and
developmental and in that sense historical,” (14) “it was a history that had culminated
in an achieved state: in practice the metropolitan civilization of England and France”
(14). Williams subtly hints that the notion of civilization was always centred round
the cultural achievements of Europe. This idea of civilization faced opposition from
representatives of dogmatic religious and metaphysical systems who reacted sharply
to the concept of achieved state. They perceived a threat to their traditional ideas of
order from this new value system of “achieved and achievable progress” (14).
Therefore, the notion of civilization as developmental was gradually replaced with the
idea of civilization as cultural, so much so that “‘civilization’ and ‘culture’ (especially
in its common early form as ‘cultivation’) were in effect, in the late eighteenth
century, interchangeable terms” (14).
However, very soon the two terms became distinctly different categories
again with civilization carrying the meaning of ‘cultivated forms of politeness and
luxury,” (14) which was obviously an external property as compared to the
“alternative sense of ‘culture’ – as a process of ‘inner’ or ‘spiritual’ as distinct from
external development” (14). Such an understanding of culture had an immediate effect
on the meaning of society as the latter came to be understood as constituted of all the
external forms and practices of communities in the emergent bourgeois system of the
eighteenth century. Moreover, culture came to be associated with “religion, art, the
family and personal life, as distinct from and actually opposed to civilization or
society in its new abstract and general sense” (14). With this new development culture
gained different meanings and its relation with society became problematic. Even
though the influence of religion weakened due to several changes in the material
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practices of society, culture continued to carry meanings of “subjectivity or creative
imagination” (14) which remain even to this day as aspects of secular culture. Society
became a distinctly different category constituted of “objective, material forms and
practices,” whereas culture was a representation of “subjective and imaginative
experiences of individuals” (14).
The dissociation of the meaning of culture from that of society not only led to
a lot of confusion, but also created conflict with other existing institutional practices.
The meaning of culture changed continuously with intermittent overlapping with the
meaning of civilization .As a result, both the terms got the meaning of “an achieved
state” which, in practice, was identified “with the received glories of the past” (15).
Culture and civilization became static concepts with a historical reference to a past
and came to be seen as “received states rather than as continuing processes” (15). This
development, according to Williams, brought culture into conflict with almost all the
dominant institutional forces of modern industrial society, namely “materialism,
commercialism, democracy, socialism”(15).
When civilization acquired a new meaning of “an achieved state of
development” (16), culture underwent another important transformation to become
“‘culture’ as a social – indeed specifically anthropological and sociological –
concept”(15). With this change, culture came to play a significant role in defining the
concept of society. However, if society is understood as a stage of development in the
whole process of historical evolution of civilization, then what is its relation to
culture? This problematic has to be resolved in order to understand the complex
relationship between the two. The complexity of the meaning of culture posed several
problems ever since it began to play a double role with its “dual meanings, first as a
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“noun of ‘inner’ process, specialized to its presumed agencies in ‘intellectual’ life and
‘the arts” (Williams 17) and second as “a noun of general process, specialized to its
presumed configurations in ‘whole ways of life’” (17). This distinction in the
meanings of culture is crucial for the debate on postmodernism although it poses
some challenge for cultural analysis. Williams suggests that, “any modern theory of
culture, but perhaps especially in a Marxist theory, this complexity is a source of great
difficulty” (17).
In the 19th
century, industrial society came to include in its meaning all the
material practices that determined the relations of people. Marxism provided a new
method that emphasized the importance of the material process of history for
analyzing the nature of industrial society. However, cultural theorists like Raymond
Williams propose that Marxism had not paid enough attention to culture; instead,
culture was treated as a secondary aspect and confined to the superstructure. Recent
interpretations of the Marxist concept of the superstructure like that of Jameson
assume that culture was, from its inception, meant to be a direct reflection of the
material base of productive relations. But, Williams rightly suggests that the relation
between base and superstructure must be understood in terms of a double movement
of consciousness interpreting social reality and the latter determining consciousness.
He offers a clarification on the notion of superstructure in his book Problems
in Materialism and Culture. Williams suggests that Marx himself made some
qualifications about “the determined character of certain superstructural activities”
(Problems in Materialism and Culture 32). The notion of superstructure, according to
Williams, “had been the reflection, the imitation of the reproduction of the reality of
the base in the superstructure in a more or less direct way” (32). However, it was not
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easy to establish a direct relationship “in many real cultural activities;” the idea of
time lag and mediation was introduced to explain the distance of certain cultural
activities from “the primary economic activities” (33). In the latter half of the 20th
century, the “notion of homologous structures” was introduced which replaced the
earlier notions of reflection or reproduction between “the superstructural process and
the reality of structures” (32). With this development, the base – superstructure
dialectics was redefined in terms of a correspondence rather than mediation or
reproduction. Williams suggests that it is important to understand these qualifications
to the superstructural concept and suggests that it is even more important to
understand the base of “real relations of production” if we are to “understand the
realities of cultural process” (33).
In Marxism and Literature, Williams argues that in Marxist theory, “culture
was made dependant, secondary, and superstructural: a realm of mere ideas beliefs,
arts, customs, determined by the basic material history” (Marxism and Literature 19).
“Instead of making cultural history material,” (19) it was reduced to a superstate.
Such a reduction of culture on a structural basis apparently suggested a schism
between culture and its reproductive forms and the processes of material social life.
This demarcation between culture and society in Marxist theory unfortunately left
both the concepts inadequately developed and also allowed later theorists of culture to
develop the two as separate spheres functioning autonomously with very little
interaction between them. Williams regrets this flaw in orthodox Marxist theory when
he says that “the full possibilities of the concept of culture as a constitutive social
process, creating specific and different ways of life…could have been remarkably
deepened by the emphasis on a material social process, were for a long time missed,
and were often in practice superseded by an abstracting unilinear universalism”(19).
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The distinction between culture and society, allowed the possibility of a
further development in the concept of culture which, in the hands of those who
assumed an authority over it, “broke its necessary connections with society and
history and, in the areas of psychology, art and belief developed a powerful
alternative sense of the constitutive human process itself” (19). This alternative sense
of culture has, ever since, come to dominate debates in the human sciences, especially
in developing areas like structural anthropology, psychology and linguistics and made
significant interventions in other branches too. Such a development in the
understanding of culture has indeed had different implications for the concept of
society, especially for the one significantly developed and analyzed so thoroughly in
Marxist theory. Therefore Williams suggests that “it is then not surprising that in the
twentieth century this alternative sense has come to overlay and stifle Marxism” (20).
Culture superseded economics and politics in emerging theories of society. Williams
suggests that any debate on culture can end up making “diverse” conclusions even
though “the idea of culture describes our common enquiry” (Culture and Society
285). Therefore, he suggests that culture “in its modern meanings,” indicates “not a
conclusion” but “a process” (285). However, it is necessary to create conditions for
people to participate “in the articulation of meanings and values” (“The Idea of a
Common Culture” 36). The idea of a common culture presupposes the free
participation of people in the process of creating new meanings. Williams makes an
appeal to open up the hitherto exclusive cultural sphere for greater participation as
this “would involve … the removal of all material obstacles to such participation”
(36).
If Marxists like Raymond Williams tried to reestablish the connections
between culture, economics, and society by proposing a theory of common culture,
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neoconservatives like Daniel Bell were arguing that capitalism had given birth to an
adversary culture. The term ‘adversary culture’ was first used by Lionel Trilling in his
book Beyond Culture (1965). Around the 1960’s in America, intellectuals of various
hues began to develop a cultural critique of capitalism. As Norman Podhoretz rightly
points out in his article “The Adversary Culture and the New Class,” these cultural
critics launched an attack on American big business but the “assault” was “directed
against the spiritual and cultural power of business…against the very values which the
populists and the progressives and the labor movement shared with big business”
(Podhoretz 21). It is interesting to note that these American intellectuals like Trilling
or Bell used ideas as their weapons to criticize the “business civilization” though their
intention was not to “expose the injustices flowing from” (21) the capitalist system.
Nevertheless, their critique becomes useful because they end up critiquing
capitalism, though, in an indirect way. This cultural critique charged that the
American society, by making business “the leading species of enterprise,” had “put a
premium on selfishness while doing everything it could to dampen the altruistic
potentialities of human nature” (21). The cultural critics argued that it had resulted in
“an erosion of communal attachments and loyalties” and created “a brutal, heartless
society of isolated individuals” (21). This cultural criticism was developed by
intellectuals in the arts who attacked “individualism, materialism, and philistinism” of
“business civilization” (21). However, their belief “was rooted in Christianity,” and
the strength of their criticism derived its effectiveness from “Christian belief in the
United States” (21). Therefore, their outlook gained a lot support from
neoconservatives who saw a political opportunity in such a cultural outlook.
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Bell is one such cultural critic who undertakes the task of critiquing capitalism
while sticking to orthodox ideas of culture. He blames capitalism for the birth of
adversary culture. In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Bell begins
his argument by suggesting that society is not a unified, integrated system. On the
contrary, it has many disjunctions where “the different realms respond to different
norms, have different rhythms of change, and are regulated by different, even
contrary, axial principles” (Bell 10). Bell’s view contradicts the Marxist view that
society functions as an integrated structure with a determining base of productive
economic relations.
Bell attributes the developments in the concept of culture to developments
within modernity. He argues that modernity was responsible for promoting the idea of
an autonomous self. This emphasis on a self determining individual, who would not
only achieve freedom but also “expand frontiers in a relentless desire to reach new
goals” (16), was the modernist ideal, which, according to Bell, unfolded a twofold
development. In the economy, the bourgeois entrepreneur emerged, “freed from the
ascriptive ties of the traditional world with its fixed status and checks on acquisition,”
(16) and in the realm of culture, “we have the independent artist, released from church
and princely patron, writing and painting what pleases him rather than his sponsor; the
market will make him free”(16). Individual free will was the driving force behind the
rise of the entrepreneur in business and of the modernist artist in culture. Bell argues
that both the “impulses” of business and art emerged from the same “sociological
surge of modernity” (Bell 17). According to Bell, the bourgeoisie was primarily
responsible for institutionalizing these revolutionary impulses in the general system of
capitalism. However, a split in the bourgeois consciousness resulted in a contradiction
between the two impulses. Bell proposes that “the extraordinary paradox” of
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modernity is that each impulse then became “highly conscious of the other, feared the
other and sought to destroy it” (17). “Radical in economics, the bourgeoisie became
conservative in morals and cultural taste” (17).
Interestingly, with a reaffirmation of bourgeois conservatism, modernity was
undergoing great transformation under capitalism, and more significantly, culture was
now becoming a leisure time activity such as watching television or a baseball match.
Bourgeois culture was dissolving the high-brow culture of the 19th
century. The
conservative reaction to this development can be considered as an expression of fear;
the fear of losing a traditional bastion that they always considered their own. Culture
was an area where the conservative could give expression to his religious beliefs
through rituals, festivals, and other practices. Therefore, the conservatives begin to
resist the change in perception of culture in modernism They condemn the culture of
capitalism as “hedonistic” (Bell 18) and attempt to retrieve some of the sedimented
aspects of religion in western cultural practice. Bell argues that there is a significant
change in the attitude of people towards culture. He suggests that rationality is now
giving way to imagination and “society now accepts this role for the imagination,
rather than seeing cultures, as in the past, as setting a norm and affirming a moral
philosophic tradition against which the new could be measured and (more often than
not) censured”(33).
Bell distinguishes between culture and society by suggesting that society
broadly refers to a “techno-economic order” (36) whereas, culture is “the realm of
sensibility, of emotion and moral temper, and of the intelligence, which seeks to order
these feelings” (36). Unlike the social theories of Marx or Weber that always
conceived society and its related branches as having an integrated structure with
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rational organization, Bell’s sociology is an attempt to look at society as segregated
into different “disjunctured realms” (33), with each of the realms functioning
autonomously and expressing themselves “not in the behavioral patterns of groups,
but in the behavior of individuals” (36). According to Bell, the social realm is
governed by a systemic logic, “an economic principle defined in terms of efficiency
and functional rationality,” (37) whereas, culture is “prodigal, promiscuous,
dominated by an anti-rational, anti-intellectual temper in which the self is taken as the
touchstone of cultural judgments, and the effect on the self is the measure of the
aesthetic worth of experience” (37). In other words, society is more systematic
whereas culture is subjective and lies outside the domain of rational judgments.
However, this argument has very few takers even within the cultural right. Cultural
conservatives are careful not to back such views while guarding themselves against
the onslaught of the cultural left.
The left has traditionally held the view that culture cannot be entirely delinked
from society and economics. Moreover, the idea that the bourgeois carries “a self-
constitutive mechanism” (Robbins 28) of subject realization can lead to some
confusion about his subject identity. Further, Bell’s assumption about the disjunction
of realms drew criticism from all quarters. Robbins suggests that “his sundering of the
economic, political and cultural realms was apparently so scandalous that Bell’s
critics in the debate do not even comment on it” (29). He also argues that such
attempts to disjoin the social assemblage to allow greater relative autonomy to
different realms have been made earlier by French Post-structuralists including Louis
Althusser who gave the idea of split and multiple subjectivities to the theory debate.
In his article “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Althusser proposes that
all subjects are ideologically constituted. He argues that “there is no ideology except
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by the subject and for subjects,” (“Ideological State Apparatuses”128) and therefore
conversely, “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete
subjects” (130). This proposition allows the possibility of multiple subjectivities.
Therefore Robbins suggests that Althusser can be taken as “a forerunner of Bell’s
case for relative autonomy” (Robbins 30). However, it is necessary to move beyond
Althusserian Marxism into what is now dubbed as left conservatism to understand the
left position in the debate, though the term conservatism with reference to the left is
largely unacceptable in leftist politics.
Nevertheless, the reaction of the left to the idea of multiple subject positions
on different realms has been critical and consistent. The left argues that theoretical
debates in the humanities have a common goal that seeks to take the subject beyond
the boundaries of the academy into the realm of the social where one plays the role of
an activist. This “true pedagogical mission of the humanities,” (Robbins 30) puts
certain restrictions on the subject who as an activist, ideally embodies “a transparent
unity of thought and action, public self and private self, culture and politics. The
activist has nothing to hide, she or he can stand in the interpellating eye of God
without turning or trembling” (30). Bell’s theory of differing subjectivities is rejected
by the left with the argument that such a notion “is not Althusserian but puritan”
(Robbins 30). Robbins appropriately points out that the tradition of thought that is
expressed in most of Bell’s formulation of culture which constantly accuses the left of
various sins, including the sin of being conservative in economics, has its roots not so
much in French Post structuralism as in “the humanistic, holier than thou tradition of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Matthew Arnold and T.S Eliot” (Robbins 30). One can
conclude that cultural conservatism finds its base in humanism and not in
Althusserian Marxism.
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The left has always opposed the tradition of Anglo American humanism.
However, the politically weakened left, by joining the cultural debate beginning with
Raymond Williams’ first major intervention with his Culture and Society (1958), got
more and more muddled with its own political stand on cultural issues. As a result,
cultural Marxism got dragged deeper into the cultural politics of the liberal humanistic
right. Robbins’ critique of cultural conservatism comes as a clarification and also a
correction of the political left position on culture. The ideas of culture proposed by
Bell are not only the ideological standpoint of cultural theorists who wear the
“humanistic garb” of cultural guardians; it is also the view held by many “New York
intellectuals in general” (30). The cultural debate can now no longer proceed in an
apolitical context; on the contrary, it is deeply entrenched in cultural politics.
Cultural theorists often end up making generalizations by claiming that
everything can be culture. The precursor of such claims is nevertheless, Williams’
extraordinary generalization: “Culture is Ordinary” (1958). In this remarkable essay,
Williams suggests that “A culture has two aspects: the known meanings and
directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and meaning,
which are offered and tested” (93). In other words, culture “is always both traditional
and creative” (93). It can mean “a whole way of life – the common meanings,” and it
can also mean “the arts and learning – the special processes of discovery and creative
effort” (93). A moderate interpretation of such a generalization can perhaps “hold
simply that culture can never be properly sealed off from economics or politics”
(Robbins 32). Those who have argued against Bell believe that this could be the
reason why he could not sustain his argument about the disjunction of realms. And so,
as Robbins puts it, “When Habermas labels Bell a neo conservative, for example, it is
on the grounds that, after all, these realms are strategically connected”(32). According
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to Habermas, “Neo-conservatism shifts onto cultural modernism the uncomfortable
burdens of a more or less successful capitalist modernization of the economy and
society” (Modernity-An Incomplete Project 7). He argues that the neoconservative
does not attempt to uncover “the economic and social causes for the altered attitudes
towards work, consumption, achievement and leisure” (7). On the contrary, “the
neoconservative doctrine blurs the relationship between the welcomed process of
societal modernization on the one hand, and the lamented cultural development on the
other” (7).
One can conclude that the arguments of neoconservatives like Bell opens the
culture debate for free participation, even as they covertly protect capitalism itself
from radical critique. In fact, it is a clever political move to bring under one umbrella
as many neoconservatives as possible. Robbins suggests that “It is a move in a larger
political game, a game that encompasses all of these realms but depends on getting as
many players as possible to accept the illusion that these realms are separated”
(Robbins 32). According to him, this was the strategy adopted by the Republican
Party during the Reagan-Bush era, to bring into their side as many number of people
to speak on cultural matters like Christian family values, although many had divergent
views on capitalism and culture. They faced the dilemma of keeping two divergent
interests, that of capital and of family values under one roof. Sneering at such
paradoxes of the cultural right, Robbins remarks that “From the perspective of culture
it means that Republicans can support family values while encouraging social
conditions under which family values will be unlivable, conditions under which, as
Marx put it, everything solid melts into air” (Robbins 32).
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The culture debate now dominated by postmodernism is also sharply divided
along similar political lines of right and left. In the postmodern context, the cultural
left, reduced to a minority, has diverted its attention “from economic inequality to a
nostalgic cultural majoritarianism” (Robbins 34). This has created a unique situation
in cultural politics that extends beyond national boundaries into what Arjun
Appadurai calls “the global cultural economy”(Appadurai 324). The present situation
demands that the progressive left understands the political intentions of
neoconservatives like Bell who propose the disjunction of realms only to disjoin the
left. Such an understanding would lead to the idea that the realms of politics, culture
and economy are not only functionally non-autonomous, but “the causal relations
among them can move in more than one direction” (Robbins 35). Robbins suggests
that “even cultural phenomena that result in large parts from extremely undesirable
developments in economics, as cosmopolitanism, say, results from globalization may
be politically desirable in a number of ways” (35). Capitalism can produce several
new cultural processes that might invite criticism from both liberals and
conservatives. However, such a development may help in reiterating the radical
political position of the left. It is important to keep the focus on the material base of
productive relations even while critiquing culture because that will make possible a
political rather than a moral critique of capitalism.
By 1960’s, Western culture had undergone a series of transformations to
culminate in meaning as a form of entertainment and lifestyle produced by what
Adorno and Horkheimer referred to as “The Culture Industry.” To understand the
dynamics of cultural production in the age of media and information technology and
its implications for sociological theory, it is useful to bring into this debate the
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arguments of Fredric Jameson, Zygmunt Bauman, Jean Baudrillard and Mike
Featherstone.
In the introduction to his book Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, Jameson suggests that if modernism used fragmented images as a mode
of representation, postmodernism uses only more images. He argues that “in
modernism…some residual zones of ‘nature’ or ‘being’, of the old, the older, the
archaic, still subsist; culture can still do something to that nature and work at
transforming that ‘referent’” (Jameson ix); but with postmodernism, “the
modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good”(ix). The postmodern
world is for him “a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which
‘culture’ has become a veritable ‘second nature’” (ix). The boundary between nature
and culture has disappeared. In an organized work society, leisure time activities
broadly constitute culture. Leisure is a time for entertainment, a time when the
physically sapped soul seeks gratification in consumption. Postmodernism actively
promotes the culture of consumption; “in postmodern culture, ‘culture’ has become a
product in its own right; the market has become a substitute for itself and fully as
much a commodity as any of the items it includes within itself” (Jameson x). If the
meaning of culture is reduced to acts of consumption then, one can argue that what
was once scoffed at as commodity fetishism in Marx’s formulation is now being
celebrated as a more acceptable form of inverted Marxism. Here, the proletariat freed
from the chains of an ageing class consciousness, stands in the market with a new
identity of a consumer, a new consumer consciousness and possibly with a Neo-
Marxist slogan: consumers of the world unite. According to Jameson,
“postmodernism is the sheer commodification of consumption as a process. The Life-
style of the superstate therefore stands in relationship to Marx’s fetishism of
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commodities as the most advanced monotheisms to primitive animisms or the most
rudimentary idol worship” (Jameson x).
Any theory of postmodernism will bear some relationship to the culture
industry concept of Adorno and Horkheimer, though the systems of production and
exchange may have undergone significant transformation. According to Adorno and
Horkheimer, the “Culture Industry” is able to strike a remarkable “unity of microcosm
and macrocosm” and is able to present people with “a model of their culture” (“The
Culture Industry” 121). Mass culture is able to produce a spectacular effect on people
because the producers of this culture have made it their monopoly. Adorno proposes
that “Under monopoly, all mass culture is identical and the lines of its artificial
framework begin to show through” (121). Further, “even the technical media are
relentlessly forced into uniformity,” (121) by the functional logic of consumption.
However, the people who are interested in running the culture industry never make a
mention or even accept the fact that “the basis on which technology acquires power
over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest”
(121).
Williams also has a similar argument on the mass communication technology.
He says “communication is not only transmission; it is also reception and response”
(Culture and Society 301). He does not dispute the “evident successes” (301) of mass
communication given the methods it uses in the larger context of the socio-economic
system. However, he argues that mass communication “has failed, and will continue
to fail when its transmissions encounter, not a confused uncertainty, but a considered
and formulated experience” (301). These supportive arguments prove that the culture
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industry formulates all experience to fit into the logic of consumption without
allowing the receptive subject any room for imagination and critical thinking.
Consumption is, after all, the most fundamental logic of industry and capital.
The culture industry is able to convince the consumer about this inherent logic with its
techniques of manipulation. Therefore Adorno argues that “The man with leisure has
to accept what the culture manufacturers offer him. Kant’s formalism still expected a
contribution from the individual, who was thought to relate the varied experiences of
the senses to fundamental concepts; but industry robs the individual of his function.
Its prime service to the customer is to do his schematizing for him” (“The Culture
Industry” 124). The commodification of culture is accompanied by a parallel process
of democratization. Once culture enters the marketplace and begins to advertise itself
there, it becomes easily accessible to all. In effect, it apparently removes the earlier
distinction between high and mass culture. This is a significant development, which,
according to Fredric Jameson is a fundamental feature of all postmodernisms,
“…namely, the effacement in them of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier
between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of
new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories, and contents of that very culture
industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern, from Leavis
and the American New Criticism all the way to Adorno and the Frankfurt school”(The
Cultural Turn 2). To take a stand on postmodernism would mean that one either
denounces or accepts the effacement of the boundary. Adorno and Horkheimer
denounced the processes of mass culture production that reduce culture to a
commodity. Through their critique of the culture industry they were only trying to
trace the historical movement of bourgeois modern art. In the process, they wanted to
expose the hidden practices or artifice of bourgeois art. Unlike the apolitical
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aphorisms of Jameson on postmodern art, the theory of Adorno and the Frankfurt
school was more a political statement on the status of early 20th
century European
culture.
Therefore, the question is whether such an effacement of the boundary
between high and mass culture, actually implies a similar effacement of the boundary
of class in society and politics. Surprisingly, Jameson is silent on this. He is reluctant
to adopt a political stance on postmodernism. By focusing much on the culture of
capitalism he loses sight of the actual political processes that help run the capitalist
machine. The process of consumption, in the course of its historical evolution
becomes what the Hungarian Marxist Lukacs calls “the reified structure of
consciousness” (Lukacs 110).The object as commodity that “confronts” everyone
directly “either as producer or consumer, is distorted in its objectivity by its
commodity character” (93). Featherstone proposes that “consumer culture is premised
upon the expansion of capitalist commodity production which has given rise to a vast
accumulation of material culture in the form of consumer goods and sites for purchase
and consumption” (Featherstone 13). The abundance of goods creates a culture of
excess which in turn, creates a subculture of consumption. This culture actively
promoted “leisure and consumption activities in contemporary Western societies”
(13). The newly acquired freedom to consume is regarded by some as a new equality
of consumers in the marketplace. However, the counter argument is that the greater
acceptance of the role of the market in deciding consumption and leisure activities of
individuals, can lead to “increasing the capacity for ideological manipulation and
seductive containment of the population from some alternative set of ‘better’ social
relations”(13).
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The possibility of ideological manipulation of whole populations by the
culture industry signals a threat to the structure of society and social relations.
Consumer culture can have serious sociological implications as it is now observed in
the advanced industrial societies of the West. In consumer society, individuals try to
define their social status through the material goods they possess. Social difference in
terms of such possessions becomes a measure of social status. Featherstone suggests
that “the satisfaction derived from goods relates to their socially structured access in a
zero sum game in which satisfaction and status depend upon displaying and sustaining
differences within conditions of inflation” (Featherstone 13). This is an important
point which implies that consumer goods help build social bonds or maintain
distinctions of class, for in the final analysis, the ability to consume or possess is
determined by one’s purchasing power –capital. Hence it can be argued that
consumption or possession of goods helps maintain social class difference.
Consumer culture creates an intense emotional desire for the commodity,
encouraging dreams of possession and the satiation of those dreams through
consumption. This is the psychological aspect of consumption which, as we all know,
is worked out so thoroughly in techniques of advertisement where the dreams and
desires of the consumer “become celebrated in consumer cultural imagery and
particular sites of consumption which variously generate direct bodily excitement and
aesthetic pleasures”( 13). The over emphasis on the culture of consumption in recent
times in Western societies is a new phase in the history of capitalism where, supply of
goods is in excess of the needs of consumption. According to Featherstone, this along
with “tendencies towards cultural disorder and de-classification (which some label as
postmodernism) is therefore bringing cultural questions to the fore and has wider
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implications for our conceptualization of the relationship between culture, economy
and society” (13).
New forms of capitalist accumulation created newer forms of capitalist
modernity. The culture of consumption in late modernism signaled a transformation
of the traditional notion of culture. It removed the notion of ‘use value’ of
commodities and vested all value in exchange. Therefore, Featherstone suggests that
“the accumulation of goods has resulted in the triumph of exchange value” (14). As
Adorno suggests in the culture industry “There is nothing left for the consumer to
classify. Producers have done it for him” (“The Culture Industry” 125). Consumer
culture effectively reduced all aspects of culture which, so far, were valued in
qualitative terms into quantities of exchange. Commodities “become free to take on a
wide range of cultural associations and illusions. Advertising, in particular is able to
exploit this and attach images of romance, exotica, desire, beauty, fulfillment,
communality, scientific progress and the good life to mundane consumer goods such
as soap, washing machines, motor cars and alcoholic drinks”(Featherstone 14).
A similar stress on the logic of commodities bearing influence on social codes
that establish human relationships, can be found in the writings of the French thinker
Jean Baudrillard, who makes a significant addition to the Marxist concept of
commodity, by introducing a new theory of signs. This theory draws “on semiology to
argue that consumption entails the active manipulation of signs” (15). Under this new
system, the commodity (signifier) joins the sign in a relationship of commodity-sign
to establish a completely different code system in advanced capitalist societies. In this
system of codes, “ the autonomy of the signifier, through, for example, the
manipulation of signs in the media and advertising, means that signs are able to float
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free from objects and are available for use in a multiplicity of associative
relations”(15).
Baudrillard’s most influential writings include Simulacra and Simulations and
it merits serious consideration in the debate on consumer culture.. In the essay titled
“The System of Objects”,he argues that the capitalist system of over production has
rendered the objects free from labour so that they now appear in their pure commodity
form before the consumer. They constitute a new sign system, a new meta language
where the line between the signifier and the signified has collapsed. Therefore, he
claims that with the advent of new media, advertising “is mass society, which with the
aid of an arbitrary and systematic sign, induces receptivity, mobilizes consciousness,
and reconstitutes itself in the very process as the collective. Through advertising, mass
society and consumer society continuously ratify themselves” (“The System”13).
Consumption became the dominant feature of Western Capitalist societies, in
the post-war period, especially after the 60’s where efforts of nation-states were
directed at reviving their war torn economies through massive public spending. A
shift towards consumerism therefore produced observable change in culture, and also
had serious implications for society. Featherstone observes that “the consumer society
becomes essentially cultural as social life becomes deregulated and social
relationships become more variable and less structured by stable norms”
(Featherstone 15). While it is generally believed that with growing consumerism, the
idea of society becomes more fluid the argument against it can be equally emphatic.
Marxists are quick to argue that the shift of focus from modes of production to modes
of consumption is a ploy of the postmodernists to create new aggregates that ideally
suits the capitalist system of over production. It can be argued that postmodern culture
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effectively conceals the contradictions inherent in the processes of its own production
and distribution. The act of consumption not only includes “purchase and judgment of
taste,” but also the “knowledge of new goods and their social and cultural
importance” (19). Moreover, since consumption is also linked to the symbolic
representation of lifestyle, the system of production gears itself up to meet the
increasing demand for “symbolic goods” (19). New groups yearning to consume such
symbolic goods which would assure them a higher social status emerged eager to
learn the modes of consumption and cultivate new lifestyle. These groups were
mostly “the new middle class, the new working class and the new rich or upper class,”
(19) for whom “the consumer culture magazines, newspapers, books, television and
radio programmes which stress self-improvement, self-development, personal
transformation”(19) became most relevant.
According to Featherstone, the promotion of such bourgeois ‘cultural taste’ for
consumption was done by the consumer, who, through his own ‘self conscious’ acts
was concerned to send the appropriate signals to others around him. They formed a
new class that easily accepted consumer ideology. They are the group that “Bourdieu
refers to as (1984) ‘the new cultural intermediaries’, those in media, design, fashion
and advertising, and ‘para’ intellectual information occupations, whose jobs entail
performing services and the production, marketing and dissemination of symbolic
goods”(19). With the increase in demand for such culturally symbolic commodities,
there was also a similar demand for “cultural specialists and intermediaries who have
the capacity to ransack various traditions and cultures to produce new symbolic
goods.”(19).Their numbers grew considerably and very soon they began to identify
themselves with artists and intellectuals with their peculiarly distinctive “habitus,
dispositions and lifestyle preferences” (19). They came to encroach upon the now
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“deterritorialized and demonopolized enclaves of intellectuals and artists,” (19) even
as they carried “the apparent contradictory interests of sustaining the prestige and
cultural capital of these enclaves while at the same time popularizing and making
them more accessible to wider audiences” (19). This effort of the cultural
intermediaries to popularize the earlier forms of high art by bringing them into the
bourgeois public sphere to create a aura of aestheticization is the first step towards
postmodern culture. The cultural intermediaries then become the entrepreneurs and
ambassadors of postmodernism.
One of the earliest uses of the term consume meant to destroy, to use up, to
waste, to exhaust; in this sense, it is also paradoxical that the logic of capitalist
economics of overproduction depends on the cultural instinct of the bourgeois to
consume and waste. This is seen by conservatives like Bell as leading to cultural
disorder. However, Featherstone has a more balanced approach to the problem of “the
persistence, displacements and transformation of the notion of culture as waste,
squandering and excess” (21). He argues that the same economic principle in
capitalism that encourages the surplus production of commodities also produces
“images and sites which endorse the pleasures of excess. Those images and sites also
favour blurring of the boundary between art and everyday life” (22).
The sites of cultural production which thrive on the unending desire for
consumption are television and advertising. In an effort to make consumption more
attractive consumer culture includes in it “elements of pre-industrial carnivalesque
tradition” (22). The carnivalesque gets transformed and displaced into “media images,
design, advertising, rock videos and the cinema” (22). These tendencies of
popularizing art in consumer societies gave birth to a form of commercial art that was
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more acceptable to artists and cultural intermediaries. They had now begun to value
the bourgeois practices of production and consumption. And this move towards
aestheticization of everyday life has a dual movement that “suggests the collapse of
some of the boundaries between art and everyday life and the erosion of the special
protected status of art as an enclaved commodity” (25). The “migration of art into
industrial design, advertising, and associated symbolic and image production
industries” (25) define the features of post-industrial society of Daniel Bell. A second
development within the arts which can be seen as an “internal avant gardist
dynamic”, (Featherstone 25) is the form of postmodern art exemplified in the pop art
of the 1960’s. The best exponent of this art is undoubtedly Andy Warhol, whose
famous work “Campbell’s Soup Cans”, is “an ironic playing back of consumer culture
on itself, and an anti-museum and academy stance in performance and body art”
(Featherstone 25)
Such developments in the culture of late twentieth century were indeed a result
of significant changes in the character of industrial societies. Rapid changes in the
basic features of modern industrial societies were accompanied by significant changes
in their operational modes owing to the introduction of new information and
communication technologies. These developments encouraged sociologists to look for
new terms to designate such societies. Terms like information society, media society,
knowledge society and consumer society came into circulation. . However, there are
others that suggest an epochal shift from a preceding form of society, hinting that “a
preceding state of affairs is drawing to a close” (Giddens 2). These include post-
modernity, postmodernism, post-industrial society, and so forth. According to
Giddens, “Some of the debates about these matters concentrate mainly upon
institutional transformations, particularly those which propose that we are moving
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from a system based upon the manufacture of material goods to one concerned
centrally with information”(2).
Nevertheless, such arguments about epochal transformation ended in
controversies by focusing much on “issues of philosophy and epistemology” (2).
Giddens’s point has reference to the theoretical contribution of postmodern
philosophers like Jean Francois Lyotard. Lyotard uses a new rhetoric to label the
social theories of the enlightenment as meta-narratives. These meta-narratives as
Jameson suggests in the foreword to Lyotard’s book The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge, “are those that suggest that something beyond capitalism is
possible, something radically different, and they also ‘legitimate’ the praxis whereby
political militants seek to bring that radically different future social order into being”
(“Foreword” xix). However, this view is different from Lyotard’s own view on the
emergence of a postmodern society and the breaking up of grand narratives. Against
the thinking of some who argued that the breaking up of the earlier grand narratives
“implies the dissolution of the social bond and the disintegration of social aggregates
into a mass of individual atoms thrown into the absurdity of Brownian motion”
(Lyotard 15), Lyotard argues that “Nothing of the kind is happening: This point of
view it seems to me, is haunted by the paradisaic representation of a lost ‘organic’
society” (15). For Lyotard, the modernist concept of an organized society is as much
flawed as the search for unity in enlightenment philosophy. Giddens also suggests that
“‘society’ is of course an ambiguous notion, referring both to ‘social association’ in a
generic way and to a distinct system of social relations” (Giddens 12). The second
usage figures quite commonly in both Marxist and non-Marxist perspectives though,
some “Marxist authors may sometimes favour the term social formation over that of
‘society’” (12). However, the concept of society as a bounded system is the same in
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both perspectives. Even while there is a general agreement that the notion of society
forms the core of sociological study, there have been complications arising in recent
times, not only with the concept of society, but also with the theoretical formulations
used in the study of society.
The first major problem that Giddens points out is that “Even where they do
not explicitly say so, authors who regard sociology as the study of “societies” have in
mind the societies associated with modernity,”(13) thereby implying that the concept
of society emerged with modernity. The second problem relates to some theoretical
interpretations that are closely connected to the notion of society, as for example
provided by Talcott Parsons. “According to Parsons, the preeminent objective of
sociology is to resolve the ‘problem of order’”. The problem of order is central to the
boundedness of social systems” (Giddens 14). Giddens however, disagrees with this
proposition arguing that it is difficult to think how social systems can bind “time-
space distanciation” (14). In his view, sociological study that was obsessed with
notions of bound systems was always tied to modernist concepts of order and
centrality.
He argues that the idea of modern society that emerged under the influence of
Marx, Durkheim and Weber was inextricably bound to the instrumental rationality of
modern state institutions. In an attempt to build a rationale to show why the concept
of modernity failed, Giddens links modernity with the institutional forms that
determined Western social life in the 18th
and 19th
centuries. “Modern institutions
seem to have taken over large areas of social life and drained them of the meaningful
content they once had” (116). In his view, society became the object of study used by
sociologists to build modern institutions. He argues that sociology is and will continue
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to be bound up with the project of modernity. In other words, such sociology cannot
comprehend the changes in contemporary Western societies since it cannot accept the
idea of unbounded systems. Therefore, Giddens tries to argue that sociology must
now shed its residual thought connected with modernity since; the latter has now
come to an end. According to Featherstone, Giddens “does so to point away from the
economic reductionism that he sees as a pervasive legacy of nineteenth century
thought” (Featherstone 28). This can be understood as the first crucial turn in
sociology that attempts to reject previous methods of the discipline, in a move to
favour the inclusion of cultural theories in sociological method. A careful analysis of
the shift in methodology is necessary to see whether this turn is, in effect, a new
postmodern project of sociology.
Classical theories of sociology always maintained a distinction between
economics, politics and society. But, the postmodernists tend to collapse these
boundaries and try to bring culture to the centre stage. Modernity and modernism
were two different concepts - the former being “largely political and ideological,” and
the latter “largely cultural or aesthetic” (Kumar 101). But, the same principle does not
seem to apply to post-modernity and post-modernism. Quite often, they are used
interchangeably and therefore, it is possible that much confusion arises with the
concept of post-modernism. However, it is useful to keep the distinction between
them since the prefix “-post” has its referent in modernism. And therefore, from the
analogy with modernism, one can say that the same principle should apply to the
concept of post-modernism also.
Nineteenth century sociology analyzed society as differentiated into different
realms, but insisted upon “the interconnection of realms” (Kumar 102). Marx’s base-
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superstructure model exemplifies such an interconnection. And, as Kumar rightly
points out; through this model, Marx linked “politics, religion and culture to the
economic life of society” (102). The postmodernists further the idea of social
differentiation to an extreme where it would be possible to regard “the ‘sub-systems’
as relatively autonomous” (102). In fact, sociologists like Herbert Spencer and Talcott
Parsons believed that it was “one of the achievements of modernity so to differentiate
society that different principles might apply in the different realms” (102). They
probably never imagined that in future, this differentiation would be so extended as to
declare autonomy complete autonomy of realms.
Talcott Parsons is interested in developing a theory of sociology based on the
principle of action. He tries to give a psychological explanation for the motivational
factors behind individual actions, but suggests that only those actions that serve the
common interest of a collective can be accommodated in any theory of social system.
According to Parsons, “a social system” has “the three properties of collective goals,
shared goals and of being a single system of interaction with boundaries defined by
incumbency in the roles constituting the system” (Parsons 192). He suggests that the
development of sociological concepts and the formation of systems are made up of
human actions. The elaboration of action “occurs in three configurations” (7). The
first is the “system of personality” and the second, “the social system” which is the
result of a “process of interaction” of a “plurality of actors in a common situation” (7).
Both these systems are internally “differentiated and integrated” (7). And, the last is
the “system of culture” which has “its own forms and problems of integration” which
cannot be easily reduced to “either personality or social systems or both together” (7).
Therefore, Parsons argues that culture cannot be considered to be “in itself organized
as a system of action” (7) though it exists as “a body of artifacts and as systems of
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symbols” (7). As a system, it functions “on a different plane from personalities and
social systems” (7). Even though culture is seen embodied in “the orientation systems
of concrete actors,” it cannot be considered as a “set of theoretical principles for
ordering action as such” (41).
Parsons develops his argument carefully to preserve the distinctive boundaries
between individual personality, social system and the cultural system. Moreover, by
implicating social theory in a referential frame of action, Parsons seems to be inclined
to put an end to the old battle between theory and empiricism. This renders the old
theories of reductionism redundant. It also implies that social and cultural systems
must be kept analytically distinct, however empirically intertwined they may be.
Parsons appears to be a firm believer in the interpenetration of and mutual interaction
between the different spheres Nevertheless, he is keener on developing a methodology
for explaining the boundaries of distinction and the circumstances in which the
spheres interact. And, this presupposes that we look at social systems as open systems
though, it may be theoretically ideal to look at them as closed systems, for the sake of
convenience. However, one should not forget that the concept of open systems comes
with the condition that boundaries have to be maintained.
Therefore, in his view, the relations between the three configurations are as
paradoxical as the relations between differentiation and integration. He concludes that
there can be no “‘sociology’ which is precultural or independent of culture, whether it
be conceived as ‘applied psychology’ or as Durkheimian ‘theory of social facts’”
(Parsons 239). The corollary is also true because “culture cannot stand in isolation, as
something self-sufficient and self-developing” (239). Parsons, writing his theory in
1950’s and 60’s must have been aware of the tensions that were already beginning to
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show between disciplines of culture, economics, society and politics. Therefore, with
a full understanding of contestations of disciplinary boundaries, he suggests that the
“conception of the relations of the three system-levels” (139) has indeed become
problematic. He admits that in current discussions of these problems, “there has been
a tendency for the proponents of each of the three disciplines concerned to attempt to
close their own systems and to declare their theoretical independence of the others”
(239) and become exclusive domains.
The postmodernists do the same by claiming complete autonomy for the
cultural sphere. They invert the model of 19th
century sociology to suggest that
modern society could achieve its freedom and flexibility only because of “this
differentiation and separation of spheres” (Giddens 102). Postmodern theory not only
claims autonomy of the realms, but also insists that they function according to
different axial principles. However, as Featherstone suggests, a shift in focus towards
the cultural dynamic need not necessarily be “taken just on the level of a paradigm
shift or the victory of a superior set of methodologies, which is often how they have
been presented to academic audiences”(Featherstone 30). Therefore, one can say that
it is not necessary to reject, in toto, the earlier methodologies of sociology by linking
them with modernity. The institutional and disciplinary structures of modernity
cannot be done away with so easily.
With the circulation of theories like post-structuralism, deconstruction and
postmodernism in humanities, new agendas began to replace existing agendas and
sometimes even threatened to “render the existing agendas obsolete” (30). Thus
sociological theory came to face a methodological crisis that needed to be addressed
urgently. As Featherstone points out, “The sociological theorists who had until
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recently some sense of a firm set of central issues and debates, which in their most
ambitious form could aspire to provide a foundation for sociology to ground the other
subjects in the social sciences, now had to take a step backward” (30). The idea of
postmodern culture was promoted in a way that appeared as if it sought the
annihilation of society. The postmodernists claimed that society ended with the end of
modernity.
The continually changing feature of cultural products gives individuals the
idea that culture is “a pool of constantly moving, unconnected fragments”(Bauman
31). This view of a new postmodern cultural experience has now permeated the
general world view that the postmodern world is a “self constituting and a self
propelling process, determined by nothing but its own momentum, subject to no
overall plan” (35). Such claims about the autonomy of culture and its ability to
constitute itself through its own specific logic, gives one the impression that
postmodern culture and postmodern society are independent categories. However, one
would discover that the postmodernists claim greater autonomy for culture only to
sublimate the social in the cultural. The wide-ranging use of the term postmodernism
to encompass almost all fields in the humanities including philosophy, economics and
politics implies that “industrial societies have undergone transformation so
fundamental and wide-ranging as to deserve a new name” (Kumar 112). But, many
theorists wish to reserve the term postmodern unhyphenated to refer exclusively to
culture. Kumar tries to examine the relation between postmodern culture and post-
industrial society in his book From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society (1995). He
argues that all theorists who consider a relationship between them “see a convergence
or complementarity” (113) which suggests that the distinctive boundary between the
two is quite narrow and in some instances doesn’t exist. In fact, the postmodern
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cultural discourse becomes so vast and all encompassing that it “dissolves the social
in itself” (114).
Therefore, postmodernism poses serious challenge to sociological analysis by
erasing the categorical boundary between the cultural and the social. Kumar rightly
suggests that the content of postmodern theory is actually derived from “a particular
understanding of contemporary society,” and though culture and society are
“apparently treated separately; in reality they are collapsed into each other” (114). He
proves this point by citing the example of Lyotard and Jameson. Kumar argues that
Lyotard’s account of the “changing character of knowledge” (114) in advanced
industrial societies of the West “is explicitly premised on a view of society in which
‘knowledge has become the principle force of production’ and the ‘computerization of
society’ is taken as the underlying reality” (114). According to Kumar, knowledge
for Lyotard “is not simply a cultural extrusion of post-industrial society; it is an aspect
precisely of the knowledge society” (114). He sees a similar approach in Jameson’s
effort to associate postmodern culture with late capitalism “rather than with post-
industrialism” (115). Kumar suggests that postmodernism, for Jameson, “is not the
cultural dominant of a whole new social order,” on the other hand, “it is yet another
systematic modification of capitalism itself.” (115).
Jameson, draws a relation between late capitalism, postmodernism and media
society. In his book The Cultural Turn (1998), he argues that “commodity production
and in particular our clothing, furniture, buildings and other artifacts are now
intimately tied in with styling changes that derive from artistic experimentation”(The
Cultural Turn 19) marks the transition from modernism to postmodernism. For
Jameson, commodities produced with greater artistic appeal represent a new aesthetic.
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Commodities symbolize the new culture. He also suggests that “our advertising, for
example, is fed by modernism in all the arts” (19). In other words, the artistic appeal
of advertisements is also another aspect of postmodern art. An important aspect of
postmodernism according to Jameson is the institutionalization of high modernism.
He argues that “the classics of high modernism,” that were earlier considered to be
subversive art, “are now part of the so-called canon and are taught in schools and
universities” (19). If such changes indicate a transition into cultural postmodernism,
the same can be looked at from another angle and described “in terms of periods of
recent social life” (19). Jameson argues that both Marxists and non-Marxists now
believe that at some point of time following the World War II, Western society
underwent significant transformation to give birth to “a new kind of society” (19).
This was “variously described as post-industrial society, multinational capitalism,
consumer society, media society and so forth.” (19). For him, “New types of
consumption and planned obsolescence” (19) are some of the chief characteristics of
such a society.
Borrowing the concept of “Late Capitalism” from the Belgian born Marxist
economist Ernest Mandel, Jameson explains why he prefers to use the term to
designate the contemporary period as such. He points out in The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism (1991) that Mandel underscores “three fundamental moments”
(Jameson 35) in the development of capitalism: “These are market capitalism, the
monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own, wrongly called post-
industrial, but what might better be termed multinational capital” (35). This stage of
capitalism, according to Jameson, is the “purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a
prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas” (36). Jameson’s
logic of late capitalism is based on the premise that there has been an unbridled
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expansion of activities of MNC’s that use post-Fordist methods of flexible
accumulation. This method does not believe in locating production at home; on the
other hand, the actual sites of production are distributed wide across the globe in
different countries. This makes the scene of production invisible and inaccessible to
the consumer who begins to look at the commodity in its purest form. The commodity
appears in its alienated form; alienated from the processes of its making and also from
labour. As a result, commodity becomes the purest form of capital. Jameson’s logic
overlooks the important function that production and labour play in any stage of
capitalism. This is the major flaw in his logic.
By focusing much on the cultural aspects of late capitalist society, Jameson
fails to make a deeper study of the sociological idea of the post-industrial made
famous by Daniel Bell. He falls into the trap set by multinational capitalists who
argue that with developments in communicational technology, Western societies are
now transformed from production to consumer societies. For Jameson, postmodern
culture is commodity culture. Jameson’s equivalence of capitalism with
postmodernism suggests an equivalence between culture and economics. If one
identifies culture with economics then he makes the fatal mistake of reducing the hard
realities of capital into a form of cultural phenomena. The various forms of exchange
that determine crucial material practices in capitalism are unfortunately overlooked.
This allows the collapsing of the boundary between culture, economics and society.
Therefore, Kumar rightly points out that “Culture can now hardly be regarded as the
‘reflex and concomitant’ of society and the economic system. The boundaries have
been collapsed” (Kumar 115).
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If one collapses the superstructural into the base then he is left with neither of
them. This is the paradox of Jameson’s logic. Such logic does not suggest the failure
of Marxism; on the contrary, it indicates the failure of Marxists like Jameson. They
dilute the political character of economics by adducing it to culture. Jameson’s
suggestion in his introduction to The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism that
postmodern culture should be taken “in the sense of what cleaves almost too close to
the skin of the economic to be stripped off and inspected in its own right,”
(“Introduction” xv) stands testimony to the argument of Kumar. When culture cleaves
close to the economic then it becomes its second nature. They collaborate with each
other to produce and reproduce each other. But, Jameson includes consumption in the
cultural logic and leaves out the process of production. It reveals the hypocrisy of
Jameson who, like many new-left thinkers attempt a cultural critique of capitalism but
refuse to make a political critique of culture. Jameson strives hard to establish links
between the economic logic of late capitalism and its cultural corollary. But having
established those links he is unable to go further to develop a political critique of
postmodernism. By foregrounding culture, he shows “the same tendency towards the
inflation of culture that is so marked a characteristic of all post-modernist writing”
(Kumar 116).
The shift from modernism to postmodernism is also a philosophical shift from
discourses of centering to those of decentering. As Charles C. Lemert points out in his
essay “Post-structuralism and sociology,” the act of decentering was always a political
strategy: “post-structuralism introduced an intellectual politics based on the now
famous concept of decentering” (Lemert 265). He suggests that decentering “is less a
philosophy….than a practice,” and therefore, one should take it as a method adopted
by post-structuralism although it bears “an unsettling approach to writing” (265).
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Lemert suggests that “the postmodernist rejection of enlightenment theories of
knowledge,” can very well be associated with Derrida and Foucault’s “original attacks
on centered philosophies” (165). According to him, the act of decentering is also a
political act that broadly adopts an oppositional strategy against “all traditional and
modern social forms, philosophy included” (265). Therefore, it is the political practice
of postmodernism that sociology must understand and grapple with rather than
attempt to develop a new sociological theory to explain it.
Bauman suggest that with the advent of the postmodern world view, there was
a “widespread feeling of unease and erosion of confidence” (Intimations of
Postmodernity 39). Even before the actual nature of the so-called postmodern change
became clear, sociologists began to react against previous sociological method and
thought of a complete revision. This was an unnecessary step taken to achieve a new
liberal consensus, apparently under duress from cultural theorists to revise the
methodology of sociology. Unfortunately, in their panic response to the unexpected
questions that were raised about methodology, they forgot to ask the more serious
question of whether there was any link “between the new spirit of theoretical and
strategical restlessness and the changing social reality” (40). Moreover, the call to
revise the practice of sociology “was expressed in universalist terms,” (40) and the
“overarching demand” for a rejection of “the orthodox consensus” was a precondition
to join the “new consensus” (40). The old consensus was supposed to be rejected on
the grounds that it was “wrong from the start, a sad case of error, of self-deception, or
ideological surrender” (40).
The engagement of sociologists in such efforts to discredit the old model, in
order to replace it with a ‘new paradigm’, “led to the constitution of what one would
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best call a postmodern sociology (as distinct from the sociology of postmodernity)”
(40). Bauman further suggests that “postmodern sociology received its original boost
from Garfinkel’s techniques conceived to expose the endemic fragility and brittleness
of social reality” (40). Later it adopted the contemplative theories of social action of
Alfred Schultz and shortly afterwards “it turned to Wittgenstein and Gadamer for
philosophical inspiration and the certificate of academic respectability” (40). The idea
of language games that was so effectively put to use by Lyotard “to justify the
elimination of all ‘tougher’, extra-conversational constituents of social reality”, came
from Wittgenstein, whereas, Gadamer gave a vision “of the life-world as a
communally produced and traditionally validated assembly of meanings, and the
courage to abandon the search for universal, supra-local, objective (i.e. referring to
none of the communally confined experiences) truth”(Bauman 40). The paradox of
postmodern sociology was that, the postmodern world “lent animus and momentum to
postmodern sociology” (41) instead of postmodern sociology giving a theoretical
explanation for the divergent practices found in the postmodern world. Curiously,
postmodern sociology also denies any relationship with “a specific stage in the history
of social life,” (41) and interestingly “this sociology which took impetus from
dissatisfaction with visions born of universalistic aspiration of the western, capitalist
form of life, conceives of itself in universalistic, extemporal and exspatial terms” (41).
This happens to be the most crucial paradox of postmodern sociology.
These contradictions in postmodern sociology show that it was a failed effort
to develop a new sociology. It was a hasty reaction to the theory of postmodern
culture. This is why Bauman argues that “postmodern sociology does not have the
concept of postmodernity” (41). It cannot develop or legitimate such a concept
because that would mean a complete transformation of sociological theory itself. A
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“radical restructuration” (41) of sociological theory would not spell its own doom but
also spell doom for the society whose practical existence it tries to “analyze and
legitimate” (41). Moreover, its uncalled for preoccupation with the idea of a
postmodern culture that was thrust onto it by conservative cultural theorists makes it a
“conceptually weak paradigm” that cannot carry the burden of its own “pedagogical
principles” (41) with it. Bauman suggests: “It is precisely because it is so well adapted
to the postmodern cultural setting – that postmodern sociology (its tendency to argue
the non-universality of truth in universalistic terms notwithstanding) cannot conceive
of itself as an event in history”(41). Its response to the postmodern condition comes in
an oblique way and thoroughly coded “through the isomorphism of its own structure,
through commutation between its structure and the structure of that extra-sociological
reality of which it is part.”(41)
The postmodern strategy of destabilization was intended to remove all fixed
ideas of society in order to create new spaces for individual actors to perform their
roles suitably in specific contexts. Some postmodernists argued that society,
understood through 19th century definitions as a collective of “bonds and relations
between individuals and events,” of political, economic and moral character, had
begun to “lose its self evidence” (Rose 328). Such a society was always considered to
be a “bounded territory” governed by its own laws, and sociology was a field of
knowledge that “ratified the existence of this territory” (328). However, with the
advent of postmodernism, sociology is evidently “undergoing some kind of a crisis”
(328). The crisis is mainly due to the proliferation of ideas of ‘the end of the social’
put forward by theorists like Baudrillard who argued that the social was always an
imaginary which never existed.
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Baudrillard’s argument in his book In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities
(1983), largely draws on the idea that society conceived of as an aggregate governed
by an organized state does not exist any longer. On the other hand, in a media
suffused society, the social is produced as “the orbital, interstitial, nuclear, tissual
network of control and security, which invests us on all sides, and produces us, all of
us, as a silent majority” ( In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities 68). Baudrillard
suggests that it is a sociality that operates not according to law and state control, but
on modes of surveillance. “It is a hyperreal, imperceptible sociality” (68). According
to Baudrillard, the media have effectively neutralized the social by reproducing it in
its own image. He suggests that “all media…act in two directions: outwardly they
produce more of the social, inwardly they neutralize social relations and the social
itself” (79-80). From this perspective, the theory of “the death of the social is simple:
the social dies from an extension of use value” (90). Marx had emphasized ‘use
value’ only counter the power of exchange value in the hope of rescuing the social
from the economic. The media, however, produces a hyperreal social using an
inverted logic, an inverted dialectic. Marx had “dreamed of the economic being
reabsorbed into a (transfigured) social; what is happening to us is the social being
reabsorbed into a (banalized) political economy: administration pure and simple”
(90). As Nicholas Rose rightly suggests, Baudrillard proposes the ‘end of the social’
in the belief that “the sociality of the contract, of the relation of state to civil society,
of the dialectic of the social and the individual has been destroyed by the
fragmentations of the media, information, computer simulation and the rise of the
simulacrum” (Rose 328-329).
According to Baudrillard, simulation functions as a set of signs manipulated
by the media for consumption of the masses. And, these “well orchestrated” signs
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begin to function as if they are “entirely dedicated exclusively to their own recurrence
as signs and no longer to their “real” goal at all” (“Simulacra and Simulations” 182).
By substituting the image for the real, the simulational signs begin to act “as hyperreal
events, no longer having any particular contents or aims;” on the contrary, they are
“indefinitely refracted by each other” (182). He argues that simulation is able to create
a new space where power eventually breaks apart; it creates “a weightless nebula no
longer obeying the law of gravitation of the real” (182). Therefore, it becomes
imperative for power to develop its own strategies to reestablish the relations between
the image and reality. It needs to show that the image, after all, is only a
representation of social reality, although it conceals to a great extent, the processes of
production of that reality. And therefore, according to him, power is obliged to
“reinject realness and referentiality everywhere, in order to convince us of the reality
of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production” (182).
Baudrillard suggests that society engages itself in an endless process of “production
and overproduction,” in an effort to restore “the real which escapes it” (183).
Baudrillard’s argument appears like a damning condemnation of the capitalist
process of production; however, his attack is aimed at the structures of power that
centres all values in exchange value. He argues that the system of exchange has given
birth to a new affluent society where consumption is the governing principle. In
consumer society, social integration becomes rather impossible since it functions with
the logic of satisfying individual desires and needs. Nevertheless, consumption can
still be a “powerful element in social control,” (“Consumer Society” 56) that atomizes
“individual consumers’ (56). According to Baudrillard, in consumer society there is
“the unlimited promotion of individual consumption” but simultaneously there is also
a “desperate call to collective responsibility and social morality” (56). This is the
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basic contradiction in the system of overproduction. Baudrillard argues that one
cannot expect the capitalist system to assist the formation of social aggregates; the
system can only promote consumer interests. In his view, consumers are individuals
who represent nothing, in fact, they cannot represent anything in particular because
every consumer “stands alone next to millions of solitary individuals, he is at the
mercy of all other interests” (57). The notion of solidarity of individuals on which the
modern state came into being in the 19th
century is now outdated. Consumer ideology
creates the same sense of alienation in individual consumers as did the ideology of
production in labour in the 19th
century. Baudrillard suggests that with the
intensification of consumer identity, the relation between the political state and civil
society needs to be redefined. He argues that society was always an imagined territory
over which the state, so far, exercised immense control. The commodity-market has
now relegated the state to a secondary position and therefore the social is no longer a
viable aggregate.
Baudrillard’s argument focuses largely on consumption as the defining aspect
of the culture of capitalism. The argument presupposes some systemic changes in the
organization of capitalism that may be responsible for consumer culture. Scott Lash
and John Urry, in their book The End of Organized Capitalism (1987), suggest that
these general transformations in culture are the result of larger “disorganization of
capitalist societies.” (285). They partly attribute the “disorganization” to “the rise of
the service class” (285) in advanced industrial societies. Further, they point out that
the reduction of culture to acts of consumption shows that the social identity of a
particular class of people whose culture is determined through such acts is now deeply
fractured. They identify this class as the service class for whom consumption becomes
a leisure time activity. However, “the fractions of the service class are crucial in
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establishing a transformed cultural hegemony in disorganized capitalism” (285). This
shows that the culture of consumption is an inevitable corollary of disorganized
capitalism. Its goal is certainly not the integration of needs since it would imply the
integration of the social also.
Lash and Urry agree with much of Baudrillard’s proposition of the media
image acting as the referent in postmodern culture but prefer to make certain serious
exceptions. They argue that Baudrillard’s contention that domination can occur only
when there is a “single and univocal meaning or signified to the signifiers,” (289) is
completely flawed. They suggest that “Baudrillard’s argument is that the masses
reject signifiers attached to media images” (289). Baudrillard sees the rejection of the
signifiers as the resistance of the masses in contemporary consumer societies; it is
resistance directed at “established power, as well as the signifieds which the left has
promoted (such as the people, the proletariat)” (289). Lash and Urry argue that they
have no problem in accepting the idea that “post-industrial domination” takes place
through “communications in the sphere of production,” (298) or the idea that what is
produced “in the media, a large part of the service sector, in parts of the public
sector,” consists of “communications and information” (289). However, they strongly
disagree with “the principle of cultural resistance in consumer society” (290) arguing
that this principle “is in fact more often than not its principle of domination” (290).
Hence, what appears as consumer resistance to signifieds of domination and
subordination is a principle of domination of media images. It is important to
understand that the media is yet another form of capitalist reproduction.
The principle of domination functions not through the “attachment of
meanings to images by cultural producers, but by the “particular strategies of
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dominant social groups to refuse to attach meanings to such images” (290.) This is
their first argument against Baudrillard’s theory. The second is that there is nothing
“necessarily disruptive, much less subversive, about masses who implode meaning
and their subjectivities into flat hyper reality” (290). Moreover, in all explanations of
social movements, “resistance is conditional upon coherent forms of identity, or more
precisely collective identity” (290). Therefore, it hardly matters if subjectivity is
imploded in an endless chain of signifiers in “lifelike Baudrillardian networks of
communication,” for in the final analysis, “collective identities are constituted around
ultimate sets of meanings” (290-291). Baudrillard’s logic of the hyper real world
dissolving meanings and subject identities does not carry much weight. It pales before
the forceful logic of Lash and Urry. One can conclude that the logic of postmodern
culture need not necessarily entail a postmodern society. Moreover, since the
modernist state has not entirely withered away, a reconfiguration of the social is
uncalled for. Social policy initiatives are still part of every national government. It
means that the social constitutes itself more or less along the same rationale of
collective identity of socio-economic class.
Pescosolido and Rubin in their influential article “The Web of Group
Affiliations Revisited,” argue similarly against the need to reconsider social
organization in the wake of postmodernism. At the turn of the century, the millennial
hopes of many in the Christian world were of the Second Coming and Apocalypse.
However, these were the dominant beliefs of the theologians and their
neoconservative supporters. But, it now appears as if the turn of the century has
betrayed those millennial hopes. However, in the intellectual sphere of the social
sciences, scholars have claimed the end of history, end of philosophy, end of
individualism, and also the end of the social. Such claims have often been made by
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post-structuralists, but Pescosolido and Rubin ask “whether these social shifts are
sufficiently different in character to have produced a new social form, one suitably
widespread and anchored to become visible” (Pescosolido and Rubin 52). While they
agree with the postmodernists’ claim that “we have entered an era of ambiguity,” they
reject their claim that the resultant social change constitutes a new society. They argue
that the postmodernists’ “embrace of the resulting “chaos” as a new social form is
misguided” (52). In their view, the chaos is only a reflection of the “societal
transition” that is underway but, ironically, the postmodernists mistake it for a new
enduring social structure or even a hybrid of modern society” (52).
They contend that what many contemporary western societies are witnessing
today culturally and historically “bears a striking similarity to the place on the cultural
and historical map that created sociology at the end of the last century” (52). They
refer to “rising suicide rates, the growing prominence of protestant countries and the
subsequent demise of Catholicism’s hold on the Western world,” (52) as some of the
striking parallels between the two histories. They justify the approach of Durkheim,
Marx, Weber and Simmel because they did not “embrace the change and ambiguity
they surveyed;” on the contrary, “they struggled to describe new, systematic,
overarching patterns of work, religion and social interaction and linked these patterns
to the fortunes and tragedies of individual lives” (53). They proclaim that like these
social thinkers, they too believe that one of the major tasks of sociology at the turn of
the century is to “struggle to understand the new institutional and personal structures
that characterize contemporary social forms” (53). Sociology’s new burden is much
the same as the old one though the challenges may be bigger. Hence, Pescosolido and
Rubin suggest that it is important for sociology to understand and theorize the
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transitions, rather than “abdicate to other disciplines the task of making sense of
emergent societal transitions and structures” (53).
They also propose that the current transitions that have apparently resulted in
“personal, social and institutional chaos” compel sociologists to develop an agenda to
understand the character of society by what it is and not by what it is not” (53). By
positing this argument they propose that postmodernism does exactly this. It defines
itself in terms of everything that modernity is not. Pescosolido and Rubin rightly
argue that postmodernism cannot offer a positive analysis of society owing to its
negativism. One of the most important and interesting aspects of postmodernism is its
enthusiasm to capture “the spirit of social change” and to highlight “the limitations of
contemporary social research” (60). However, its biggest failure lies in its inability “to
offer an equally compelling set of imaginaries and agendas in response” (60) to the
social change. The call to reconceptualize sociological research does not come from
postmodernists alone. And, more importantly, postmodernism fails to explain in
theory as to “what follows the postmodern transition in terms of new social structures
with their attending opportunities and limitations” (60). Postmodernism is too
ambitious and therefore tries to remove all limits. Hidden in its vaulting ambition to
exceed limits is its desire to institutionalize change. This, however, is sociologically
impossible. Sociology would expect postmodernism to first describe and explain the
domain of discourse. Sociology is deemed to show with new descriptions and
interpretations “what social arrangements are, not simply what they are not” (60).
Pescosolido and Rubin express doubts whether “postmodernism has the
epistemological orientation to do this” (60). If there are new social structures
emerging in contemporary times, then it is the business of sociology to understand
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new formations. And “the search for the social foundations of the new social
arrangements remains an important aspect of understanding social life” (61).
The search for foundations of new social arrangements is one of the main
concerns of contemporary sociology. However, there is another school of thought that
believes that sociology is no longer the study of order but of change and movement.
This is the primary conflict between sociologists who prefer closed systems and those
who argue for open systems. Even a postmodern sociologist like Alain Touraine, in
his article “Is Sociology still the Study of Society?” admits that “a sociology of action
and change casts doubt on all interpretations which describe social life in terms of a
system of an organism capable of self-regulation and striving for equilibrium”
(Touraine 178). Such sociology, according to Touraine, would not only undermine the
“roles of institution and socialization,” but also put forth a dangerous demand that
“the very idea of society should be eliminated” (178). Given the fact that the state in
every democratic country still functions as the foremost social institution, it will be
difficult to accept the idea that sociology is now “the study of social relations and –
increasingly – social change,” (178) alone. There is a need to strike a balance between
the study of change and stabilities. Change need not necessarily mean chaos; on the
other hand, we need to consider “our increased ability to transform our existence,”
(178) to adapt to change.
Bauman has a long list of prescription for developing a proper sociology.
However, in the given condition where subjects are granted greater autonomy; it will
be extremely difficult to define the field in which they would experiment their actions
responsibly. With greater freedom there is greater responsibility on individuals to
respond appropriately to collective desires and ambitions. The highly individualized
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setting of postmodernism may afford a larger space for agency but it may also cancel
the sense of dependency that was always a corollary of social action. Moreover, the
domain circumscribed by postmodernism is extremely vague and fluid; it is “as
emergent as those of the actions and their meanings that form it” (“A Sociological
Theory of Postmodernity” 152). The postmodern domain is neither a totality nor an
aggregate; on the contrary, it seeks a free discursive space for itself without any
boundaries.
There is no overall organization or coordinating systems that can map this
domain. In such a context, it is impossible to imagine any sociological method that
will delineate the principles and actions that constitute what Bauman prefers to term
“the habitat” (152). Habitat is a term used to refer to the environment, ecology and
geographical territory that particular species of animals live in and adapt themselves
to naturally. The human species, however, is one single species occupying a much
larger space. Moreover, humans organize themselves into groups based on complex
mechanisms and variable denominators that go beyond territorial space. Therefore, it
is always important to identify the discursive boundaries and the common coordinates
of sociality that can be broadly applied to different societies than focus much upon
pluralities and indeterminacies. Such a move to shift focus to micro level differences
may lead sociology back to the study of ethics and morality.
That would mean reverting to the beginning of modern sociology which would
be a retrograde step. Instead sociology could come out of its insularity to engage itself
with major political and social conflicts of our times. At the same time, its new goal
would be to find out if postmodern culture seeks to reorganize society on a different
set of principles. However, postmodernists like Steven Siedman for example, continue
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to insist on “the notion of a self with multiple identities and group affiliations…with
multiple possibilities of empowerment,” (“The End of Sociological Theory” 136)
which goes to prove that they have no interest in any form of aggregates or
foundations. Therefore, sociology would do well to treat postmodern culture as
another change effected by technological development rather than looking at it as a
major social transformation. Such a step would be a forward movement towards
understanding cultural transformations. Sociology could perhaps develop appropriate
methods to study the cultural impact of high technologies, globalization and flows of
mass cultural products. This would provide new opportunities to sociological theory
to reenter public discourse in significant way. It would also help sociology to win
back its political space that was encroached by media-oriented cultural theorists.