A Postmodern Analysis of Disabilities

Abstract

In this paper, the basic theoretical tenets of postmodernism are outlined. As part of this process, the implications for social interventions are also discussed, including the political side of this philosophy. In general, postmodernism breaks with the reductionism that is inherent to the biomedi-cal model and offers the opportunity to develop more holistic modes of diagnosis and intervention. As a result of this shift, disabilities can no longer be viewed in an essentialist manner, but instead must be approached as social constructions. Therefore, rather than destroying culture, postmodernism supports an awareness of the so-called ‘culture of disability’ that allows persons to be understood in their own terms.     

Global sociology or “Ghettoized” knowledges? The paradox of sociological universalization in the Third World

The relationship between First and Third World scholarship may be characterized as a type of ideological dependency. This dependency can be seen in the founding of sociology departments in many Third World universities that followed closely the development of tertiary education during the colonial and postcolonial periods. These departments provide an important link between Third World aspirations to modernize and First World production of sociological knowledge for rationalizing modern experiences. They can therefore be considered a type of institutional measure of the fate of modernity in the Third World. Because of the quest for modernity in the Third World, postmodernism will not likely be considered seriously as a reevaluation of and challenge to modernity. The institutionalization of sociology and its probable response to postmodernism will be examined in the context of a Third World nation, namely Malaysia.     

Five sketches of postmodernism

Abstract

There is a long history of work in systems thinking and operational research (henceforth referred to as ‘systems/OR’) geared to facilitating organizational change and/or wider social improvement. Recently, however, the ‘improvement’ agenda has been subject to a sustained critique from people who take an explicitly postmodern stance. This paper presents five ‘sketches’ of postmodernism, and draws out some implications for systems/OR. The first sketch is of a dogmatic postmodernism that places conversation at the forefront of its agenda, but fails to enter into a conversation itself. It therefore collapses under the weight of a contradiction between its theory and practice. The second is of a more open postmodernism that is prepared to recognize its own status as a conversational device, and thereby its own transitory nature. This suggests the need for the systems/OR community to act as participants in debate, continually developing their own and others’ views. The third sketch focuses on the central contradiction of a postmodern meta-narrative condemning all meta-narratives but its own. This raises some interesting issues, not the least of which is the realization that the term ‘meta-narrative’ is usually used pejoratively. We may therefore need to moderate the use of such language to facilitate productive debates on key issues of concern for the future of systems/OR. The fourth sketch looks at the irony of inevitable contradictions in postmodern theory, and the consequent move away from the notion that the role of rationality is to harmonize ideas. Several possible consequences for systems/OR are identified: further rational (harmonizing) explanations of ‘inevitable contradictions’ in postmodern theory may be provoked, or the shift away from a traditional notion of rationality may liberate systems/OR from a relatively narrow range of analytical methods. The fifth and final sketch examines the political consequences of postmodernism as expressed in liberalism. A disturbing picture is presented of the ‘privatization’ of forms of solidarity which are not legitimated through dominant ideologies, leading to powerlessness and alienation amongst those who experience largely unrecognized oppression, or who feel solidarity with the oppressed. A key implication is drawn out: there continues to be a crying need for new ideas in social theory to address the shortcomings of liberalism and inform the practice of systems/OR. People advocating postmodernism, amongst others, may make a useful contribution to the development of these new ideas.     

… the (unbearable) ‘in-betweenness’ of being …

ABSTRACT

It seems that there are no clear and mutually exclusive categories of modernity and traditionalism in modern Africa. Modernity still includes forms of traditionalism and at the same time modernity creates its own traditions in what Kaphagawani terms as C4-Contemporary Confluence of Cultures on the Continent of Africa.

We need to position ourselves somewhere between the over-romanticized idea of a golden era in the past and an overly pessimistic view of the family as a disappearing primary care institution; between the “warm, loving, caring, socially-oriented …” African generations and the “cold technology-oriented” Western generations. This search for a relative social realitywill be dealt with by a narrative/discursive approach. This framework should, for a start, aim towards intergenerational programmes with at least one of three outcomes: transmission of positive values, relevant imageries and a developmental approach.     

Challenging disenchantment The discreet charm of occult TV

Abstract

Occult imagery is widespread in the contemporary global mediaverse, including in TV programs such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, Sightings, and The X-Files. This article considers the popular cultural presence of the otherworldly and the magical in relation to the strand of theorizing, beginning with Max Weber and taking a postmodern turn in Jean Baudrillard, that treats the cultures of Western modernity as disenchanted ones. In particular, it turns to Baudrillard's concept of seduction, which, while generating controversy in cultural theory circles, has had only a limited impact in media studies. The article argues that 'tele-visions of the otherworldly' constitute an enchanting challenge to modernist dis-illusionment, serve as a counterpoint to Baudrillard's 'obscene' media hyperrealism, and promote forms of imagination that, like magic realist literary fiction, undermine certain drives toward mastery associated with the dominant knowledge formations of Western modernity. TV's occult imagery can thus serve as the site of an unsettled and unsettling critical imagination, a skeptical popular subjunctivity.     

Radicalised civil society and protracted political actions in Kerala (India): a socio-political narrative

ABSTRACT

Kerala modernity and its widely acclaimed model of development, among other factors, is a result of radicalised civil society and protracted political action. The political actions of multiple actors such as social reform movements, communist movements, public theatre, people’s science movements, library and radical public policy played decisive role in this direction. In contrast to the two dominant conceptions of modernity – western capitalist modernity and eastern socialist modernity, which conceptualised that modernity is the result of industrialisation and centralised planning and development, respectively – modernity in Kerala was the result of political actions from below, which forced the state to adopt radical social and political reforms. These exceptionalities in Kerala modernity distinct itself from rest of the modernities in societies of the Global South.     

Postmodern rural geography? A reply to Murdoch and Pratt

Jonathan Murdoch and Andy Pratt's thoughtful response (Journal of Rural Studies9, 411–427) to Philo (1992) (Neglected rural geographies: a review. Journal of Rural Studies8, 193–207) is considered. Their suggestions about the engagement between rural studies and the intellectual currents of ‘postmodernism’ are important ones, and offer both an extension of the claims made by me and a critique of my own lack of self-reflexivity. I outline my partial agreement with their analysis, but offer certain qualifications arising from a different understanding of ‘postmodernism’. I indicate my approval of their call for a ‘sociology of postmodernism’ alert to the making of ‘the rural’ as a concept in circulation, but argue that central to this call is the necessity of investigating the senses of rurality held by all manner of ‘other peoples’ beyond the academy. In this respect, then, the approach of Murdoch and Pratt may be more consistent with my own ‘postmodern rural geography’ than it might first appear.     

Insurrectional Politics in Colonial Southeast Asia: Colonial Modernity,Islamic ‘Counterplots’, and Translocal (Anti-colonial) Connectivity

Abstract

This article focuses on the idea of ‘colonial modernity’ to pursue a dual theoretical purpose: to interrogate the givenness of ‘modernity’ as an overarching and over-determining epistemological framework; and, secondly, to indicate how movements against colonial modernity were part of a ‘deep, global infrastructure of anti-colonial connectivity’. By examining a number of Islamic movements in the Dutch Indies and in British Malaya, this article seeks to map out some of the translocal spaces created and occupied by these movements, which linked North Africa to Saudi Arabia and to South East Asia. The focus on translocality speaks also to the existence and enactment of exteriorities to modernity. My deployment of ‘exteriority’ signals here certain historical, political, and cultural lateral relations among colonial spaces, through which the colonized generate and activate what June Nash calls ‘counterplots’ to colonial modernity.     

The Paradoxical Unity of Chicago and Modern Boy

Abstract

This essay investigates how the interconnected nature of popular culture provides apt illustrations to reveal the ambivalent nature of modernity. I argue that the notion of modernity and popular culture emerged together in the early twentieth century in both the cities of Gyeongsung (old name of Seoul, Korea) and Chicago when technology and mass consumer culture were promoted over the world. Also, I examine how popular culture represents a complex of mutually-interdependent perspectives and values that influence society and its institutions in various ways as the image of modernity continues to build in the contemporary era. For this argument, I comparatively consider two movies released in 2002 and 2008 that exemplify the complexities of modernity in Chicago and Gyeongsung of the 1920s and 30s: Chicago and Modern Boy. Ultimately, this essay pays attention to how popular culture devotes itself to other images or narratives instead of referring to the real world and its output revisits the contemporary or past times in other places, being a means to produce and reproduce the accumulated images of the modern which shapes ceaseless simulacra of modernity over complexities of modernity.     

Young persons as epistemological agents in social work assessment and intervention

SummaryLiterature debates whether young persons' participation in social work decisions is tokenistic in nature or it empowers them to shape their world. By and large, young persons deemed at risk remain the targets of intervention. This paper aims to underscore the need to move beyond soliciting young persons' voice merely in order to corroborate information provided by adults and professionals in social work assessment and intervention. Instead, it explicates the philosophical foundation for social workers to treat young persons as knowledgeable agents capable of contributing to professional knowledge.FindingsThrough reinterpretation of a published case study on children of sex worker mothers in India, this paper highlights how young persons are active agents of their own lives even in extreme dire situations. These children of sex worker mothers were capable of advocating for their own rights as well as that of their mothers. Through the secondary analysis of data, we illustrated the dynamic process of knowledge construction by young persons.ApplicationBy paying attention to the young persons' capacity as knowledgeable agents we propose social workers to intentionally incorporate their knowledge in their practice.     

Danger,Pleasure, Vulnerability,Shame: Reply to Commentaries

Hartman's and Blechner's responses to my essay highlight some illuminating differences with my own theoretical and clinical inclinations. In particular, Hartman's postmodernism and Blechner's empiricism allow me to clarify my own thinking, in particular the centrality of my concern with vulnerability. Sedgwick's challenge to my clinical case says much of interest about shame. It also permits me to address misunderstandings that can take place between analysts and patients, as well as between psychoanalysts and academics.     

后现代思潮对我国青少年的影响与对策

出于反思"现代性"而出现的后现代主义,目前已经发展成"带有西方色彩"的全球性社会思潮。它反对理性主义、整体主义、中心主义,主张多元价值取向,注重人文关怀,具有否定的全面性与不彻底性、价值取向的无中心性、传播形式的灵活性与多样性、行为表现的随意性等特点。后现代主义在一定程度上有助于培养我国青少年的批判性思维,有助于青少年的天性成长,但也往往易于模糊青少年的是非判断标准,侵蚀青少年积极有为的责任担当,诱使青少年养成享乐主义的生活习惯。为此,需要从强化社会主义核心价值观的引领作用、加强对西方后现代思潮的理论研究、加强人文精神和心理健康方面的教育、引领网络与大众传播方向等方面做文章。     

Retheorising Emile Durkheim on society and religion: embodiment,intoxication and collective life

In this paper we argue that Emile Durkheim's sociology contains within it a theory of society and religion as a form of embodied intoxication that is implicit in his writings on effervescent assemblies but has not yet been explicated or developed fully by subsequent commentators. This holds that for social or religious collectivities to exist, the bodies of individuals must be both marked by insignia, customs and techniques that facilitate the possibility of culturally normative patterns of recognition, interaction and action, while also being excited, enthused or intoxicated sufficiently to be inhabited as collective rather than egoistic beings. Our paper begins by investigating the central features of Durkheim's theory – including his interest in the ritual steering of these processes – as developed most fully in his last major study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. We then develop our own analysis of Durkheim's concern that modernity has stimulated a rise in ‘abnormal’ forms of embodied intoxication that fail to attach individuals to the wider societies in which they live, and demonstrate the utility of our analytical framework by employing it to assess the recent resurgence of charismatic Christian revivalism.     

Classical theory,postmodernism, and the sociology liberal arts curriculum

This article presents classical theory as a modernist endeavor to apprehend the phenomenon of “unity of disunity.” It presents the three ways that classical theory comes to grips with the problem of wholes and parts: the holism of Durkheim, the dialectical materialism of Marx, and the pluralism of Weber. It argues that postmodernism liquidates, rather than solves, the unity of disunity problem by treating “wholes” as mere appearances. The article contends that postmodernism needs to be taken more seriously than it has been by sociologists but that, ultimately, the challenge presented by postmodernism validates the relevancy of classical theory. The article concludes that the postmodernist influence has diminished sociology’s relevance to real-world problems and, as a result, made the discipline less relevant for undergraduates. It calls for a revitalized sociology of sociology with the capacity to think through the trap formed by neoconservatism on the one side and the micro politics of postmodernism on the other.     

Mystification as an Artistic Strategy in Milan Kundera's Work

ABSTRACT

Using close reading of Kundera's texts, Jan ?ulík argues that many arguments in Milan Kundera's literary works are deliberate provocations. Kundera's approach is undoubtedly related to post-modernism, although he used his mystification techniques long before the arrival of postmodernism, as early as in the Stalinist 1950s when he published fake quotes from Lenin in official Stalinist publications. In Jan ?ulík's view, it is the purpose of Milan Kundera's systematic use of false facts, distortions and disrupted logic to warn his readers against against the unreliability of words and human communication. Kundera seems to argue that the world in its complexity is basically unknowable and the only thing that is left for us is, in despair, in our ignorace of what is going on around us, to carry out pranks.     

The poverty of postmodern human services

Abstract

Postmodernism cannot or will not tell the difference between truth and falsehood, reality and simulacra, principle and dogma, or right and wrong. As a corollary, it is unable or unwilling to make any ‘veritable‘ difference to the nature or order of things. Indeed, there is no escape from, nor anything outside of, the ’panopticon of language’. Accordingly, there is no significant probative difference between the practice and experience of genocide, and talking or writing about it. All one can do is be sceptical about discourses, even those concerned with ethnic cleansing and the like. As ludicrous as this sounds, it has not prevented postmodernism from monopolising discourses about significant aesthetic, cultural, economic, intellectual, political and social practices and sensibilities. Postmodernism manifests itself in a host of disciplines, and its presence is being increasingly felt in human services education and practice. If, as I shall argue, postmodernism is such a thoroughly baseless, reductive and inert doctrine, then why persist with it? The poverty of postmodernism prompts a timely return to the rich legacy of Marxism.     

9-11 and Its Anxious Phantoms

Abstract

“Metaphysical mutations – that is to say, global transformation in the values to which the majority subscribe – are rare in the history of humanity. The rise of Christianity might be cited as an example.

Once a metaphysical mutation has arisen, it tends to move inexorably toward its logical conclusion. Heedlessly, it sweeps away economic and political systems, aesthetic judgments and social hierarchies. No human agency can halt its progress – nothing except another metaphysical mutation.”     

Living in a “Half-Baked Pageant”

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the ways in which new suburban identities were forged through the architecture, design, and decoration of the modest mock-Tudor semi-detached house in the interwar years in England. It focuses particularly on the tensions between the longings for the past and aspirations for the future displayed in the architecture and interiors of “Tudorbethan” houses. It argues that such houses embodied a specifically suburban modernity, which looked backwards to the past whilst looking forward to the future. Although contemporary critics dismissed it as ersatz and backward-looking, the Tudorbethan semi signified a coming together of nostalgia and a particularly suburban form of modernity. Speculative builders created Tudorbethan houses with modern methods of construction that combined half-oak timbering with concrete. Furthermore, whilst some of the furniture that filled the Tudorbethan semi may have been nostalgically Jacobethan in its styling, it was modern in its purpose, with metamorphic designs that made the most of small spaces. This article challenges the dominance of Modernist aesthetics and values on writing on design, architecture, and consumption by exploring popular conceptions of the “modern” that accommodated past and present, nostalgia and modernity.     

Trending Trousers: Debating Kastom,Clothing and Gender in the Vanuatu Mediascape

This paper presents an ethnography of contemporary media practices in Vanuatu, with a particular focus on media narratives and debates around gender equality and women's clothing, exploring how the discourses of kastom, Christianity and ‘modernity’ are being employed and communicated across various media platforms. The use of community media to promote awareness of gender equality through participatory and entertaining content, and the use of mainstream media to communicate a narrative that reinforces existing gendered power structures are each explored. In addition, social media platforms are identified as an emerging communication tool through which users can straddle the line between producers and consumers of media content and narratives, and engage in frank debate around the issue of gender equality.     

The Mobilization Against the 2005 Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe: A French Mobilization for Another Europe

ABSTRACT

Offering a contribution to cultural approaches to studying social movements, this paper explores how people incorporate social change efforts into broader self-projects. I use the contemporary abstinence pledge movement as an archetypal example of a lifestyle movement, a movement that advocates for lifestyle change as its primary challenge to perceived cultural problems. To capture the public face crafted by this movement, I coded complete website content for ten pledge organizations, as well as their print and social media presence. The data demonstrate: how pledge organizations explicitly target culture, rather than pressuring the state to enact policy change; how participants employ individualized tactics while still believing in their collective power to engender change; and that pledgers craft a moral self, engaging in ‘personal’ identity work. Expanding the lifestyle movement literature to think about outcomes and influence, I then show how pledgers contest perceptions of movement success, redefining effectiveness towards abstract, long-term, and subjective measures. I conclude by locating lifestyle movements in the context of late modernity and suggesting how theorists might use and further develop the concept in the future.