Trials of the postmodern

Abstract

The criminal courtroom is an important institutional site where a modernist epistemology works hard to keep the postmodern disturbance of such concepts as ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ at bay. Nevertheless, some popular television programs exploit the imagistic conditions of postmodernity in order to volatilize the truths certified as final ones by criminal courts. Similarly, in the first trial of the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King, the prosecution team exploited the instability of truth in a mediatized society in order to resignify events whose meanings had previously been configured quite differently. This essay examines these events as manifestations of cultural and political contestation in an image-saturated society where the modernist ‘reality principle’ has dissolved and been replaced by a mediatizing process of resimulation and resignification.     

Quantum mechanics and the postmodern in one country

Abstract

The orthodox interpretation of Quantum Mechanics was banned in the Soviet Union in 1947, an episode usually glossed as another illustration of repressive Soviet science. This paper argues that the roots of this ban should be located at a much deeper level, in a tension existing between the ‘postmodern’ form of orthodox Quantum Mechanics and an ideology of modernization. In the West a similar ideological tension had a different result: when the occasion demanded, the orthodox interpretation was covertly exchanged for an agnosticism about metaphysical matters, and potential areas of conflict with the principles of modernization were thus defused. The latter strategy benefited the orthodox interpretation, which enjoyed a virtual monopoly in the West from the 1940s through to the 1960s. Using the Freudian notions of ‘transference’ and ‘disavowal’, I explain why the ideological tension with modernization was resolved differently in the West and in the Soviet Union.     

The postmodern critique of ideology

Postmodernism is a complex cultural phenomenon which is characterised, among other things, by its distrust of totalising discourses, of reason and of universal truth. It propounds indeterminacy, the primacy of difference and the incommensurability between discourses, which are supposed to have their own regimes of truth. This is why postmodernism is suspicious about the critical concept of ideology, because according to its tenets it is impossible to pass judgement on a discourse from the perspective of another discourse. Hence the critical concept of ideology must be abandoned. However, an examination of Foucault's, Baudrillard's and Lyotard's work shows that they unwittingly end up re-introducing the concept through the back door thus contradicting themselves. While they doubt the validity of total discourses and of their ideological critique, they must assume the validity of their own critique of total discourses.     

Practicing as a postmodern supervisor

In this article, aspects of postmodern supervision are explored that highlight the blurring of boundaries that occurs between the multiple roles performed by supervisors. An approach to supervision is detailed that shows how a supervisor who navigates between roles can assist supervisees in constructing identities congruent with the stories they tell about themselves as successful therapists. Six of the many possible roles that supervisors play are illustrated through dialogue taken from a group supervision session. In the last part of this article, concepts that inform a postmodern approach to supervision, borrowed from the literature on narrative and constructionist therapy, are discussed.     

Philosophical affinities of postmodern sociology

Both the nature of philosophical and sociological discourses are undergoing a profound change, attuned to the gradual substitution of the postmodern sensibility for the cultural climate dominant during the modern age. In particular, philosophy sustained by legislative reason recedes, replaced by a philosophical style informed by interpretative reason; a movement in many respects reminiscent of the Pyrrhonian Crisis of the 16th–17th centuries. The passage from the orthodox consensus of modern sociology to a postmodern sociological strategy parallels this transformation. The present change, however, affects the very relationship between philosophy and sociology. From the search for the foundations of cognitive certainty, the outspoken domain of philosophy guided by the legislative reason, epistemological concerns move to the communicative problems of communally founded cognitive systems - the acknowledged realm of sociological investigation.     

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.     

Theorizing the present moment: Debates between modern and postmodern theory

Theory and Society -     

A question of perception: Bourdieu, art and the postmodern

Bourdieu and Darbel's classic study of European art museum audiences, The Love of Art (1991), remains one of the most influential academic studies of the social indices of art perception. Its findings were central to Bourdieu's on-going study of culture-mediated power relations, as found in the book Distinction (Bourdieu 1984), as well as social surveys of the behaviour of museum audiences across the world. Much in Bourdieu's account of art perception, however, has begun to appear dated and in need of supplementation. This paper will be a critical but sympathetic re-reading of Bourdieu's sociology of art perception in the light of recent criticisms of his approach. Whilst fine art and its institutions continue to function as sources of social identification and differentiation, this paper argues that the relationship between perception and stratification is somewhat looser than connoted in Bourdieu's work. Beyond the shift to a less rigid taxonomy of social formations, the immense expansion of the visual arts complex has opened up possibilities for the dissemination of art knowledge beyond the cultivated bourgeois. The erosion of boundaries between the aesthetic and the economic, between art and popular culture, are the result of processes of commodification that have placed museums alongside shopping malls within the realms of consumption and entertainment. New audiences have emerged from this mix with less dichotomized - that is, either cultivated or popular - ways of seeing culture that suggest a revision of Bourdieu's overly integrated account of class and cognition. An alternative, 'postmodern', approach to art perception is entertained, where an aesthetics of distinction is replaced by a culture of distraction, but this abstracts culture from any structural grounding. Capturing the shift to an accelerated cultural present, instead, requires a warping of Bourdieu's categories to account for broader patterns of culture and economy and the accentuation of modern visual culture.     

Digital hyperconnectivity and the self

Theory and Society - Digital hyperconnectivity is a defining fact of our time. In addition to recasting social interaction, culture, economics, and politics, it has profoundly transformed the self....     

Encountering the postmodern: new directions in cultural anthropology

Faisant appel à la littérature d'études culturelles, cet article suggère que la condition de post-modernité crée de nouveaux challenges pour le domaine d'anthropologie culturelle qui vont au delà du problème pourtant significatif de la représentation ethnographique. Explorant le projet post-moderniste comme l'un de ceux qui impliquent une approche particuliere des phénomènes culturels dans une économie globale, l'article pousse les anthropologues à reconcevoir le concept de culture et à explorer les politiques culturelles de la vie quotidienne dans le contexte d'une representation globale du capitalisme.
Drawing upon cultural studies literature, this article suggests that the condition of postmodernity poses new challenges to the field of cultural anthropology that go beyond the (still significant) problem of ethnographic representation. Exploring the postmodernist project as one that involves a particular approach to cultural phenomena in a multinational global economy, the article urges anthropologists to reconceive the concept of culture and explore the cultural politics of everyday life in the context of the global restructuring of capitalism.     

Towards a postmodern understanding of crisis communication

From a postmodernist perspective, it is possible to see crisis as a disruption in the dominant narrative that members of an organization's power elite wish to perpetuate. The crisis itself often evolves into a multiplicity of competing narratives. Much standard advice given by crisis communication experts—such as to tell the truth, choose a single spokesperson, and establish a crisis command center to regain control of the crisis—sounds suspiciously like the self-protecting actions favored by the power elite within the organization. A postmodernist approach might instead favor mitigation of suffering, attention to dissent, and a polyvocal organizational response.     

Technological sensibilities and the cyberpolitics of gender: Donna haraway's postmodern feminism

In this article, I discuss the far reaching implications of Donna Haraway's cyborg feminism for social and cultural theory. I argue that it allows us to re‐think the collapse of modernity not so much as the death of the social and the death of the subject, but as the eclipse of ‘Modern Man’ as the ‘natural’ anchorage of views from nowhere. Highlighting the inevitable particularism of embodiment, her notion of the cyborg marks the possibility of differential politics which combine critique with agonistique. Such an alliance could serve as particularly effective way of working through the challenge of postmodernity without either surrendering to ‘anything goes’ liberal pluralism or the romantic desperation of nihilistic fatalism.     

The relevance of postmodern and feminist philosophy for the study of aging

The work of postmodern and feminist philosophers such as Jean-Francois Lyotard and Luce Irigaray has a special relevance for the study of aging. It paves the way towards a more intricate perspective on subjectivity and rationality, allowing for a more adequate view on the relation between theory and practice and the role of values in the practice of care.     

Sustaining edges: CSR,postmodern play,and SMEs

Globalization challenges organizations to make sustainable connections between enterprise, equity, ethnicity, and the environment. This article contends that to date, the main responses cluster round corporate social responsibility (CSR). It further claims that CSR often results from adverse publicity (and so has been defensive in nature, and reactive rather than proactive); and that its emphasis on corporations marginalizes small to medium enterprises (SMEs), who form a huge part of the world economy. The article illustrates how one SME, Dawnraid Entertainment, from the socio-cultural and geographical edge of Aoteoroa/New Zealand, responds by pioneering community-embedded enterprises.     

A postmodern view of public relations: Sign and reality

This essay looks at postmodernisn as a critical theory to give some insight into modern public relations practice. A critical view of the signs and symbols of a culture allow one to see the allocation of power and the dominant ideology. Public relations practitioners can be called symbolmakers if one considers their work is largely word and image.The case here is the 1990 Hill and Knowlton client, Citizens for a Free Kuwait. It was the H & K involvement with this client that produced the testimony before Congress that led to the US commitment to war against Iraq.The media theory of Jean Baudrillard serves as the cultural studies paradigm in this essay. His postmodernist theory of simulacra, illustrates the kind of society in which the signs of the media become their own reality, and do not stand for anything. They generate reality for themselves; they become the reality. That is what happened in the H & K case since the testimony before Congress was never substantiated even though that testimony, initiated by the H & K public relations firm, became the catalyst for US involvement in the war. This article uses the postmodernist insight from Baudrillard to argue that the signs and symbols demanded by media are their own reality.Public relations practitioners can manipulate the image because they know the importance people place on signs and symbols in the culture. But, since media technology today gives us the facts as presented simply because they are presented and have little or no reference to truth, one could pose the serious question of whether the field of modern public relations practice must today and in the future be held to even greater accountability and tighter scrutiny.Mickey is Professor of Communication Studies at Bridgewater State College. He recently published a book on public relations theory called Sociodrama: An Interpretive Theory for the Practice of Public Relations.