Postmodernism One Last Time: A Comment on Seidman et al.

Abstract

The recent symposium in Sociological Theory (9:2, pp. 131-90) on postmodernism and the end (re: resurrection) of theory strikes me as typical of American sociology's belated reception of works that had their origins in other contexts and were motivated by entirely different problems. Invariably, it seems, those works are reframed in terms of their utility (or lack thereof) for theory or practice, a parasitic process that aims at their commensurability and whose effect is to strip away whatever excesses, outrages, blasphemies, and other seductive qualities they originally may have possessed. This is in fact what the tired and increasingly passe term postmodernism accomplishes: it reduces a field of multiple, heterogeneous discourses to homogeneous use-values, ready to be pressed into the service of a crusade. When Steven Seidman, for example, who I think otherwise is right to advocate a localized and contentious form of theorizing, raises the of postmodernism as the sign of a revitalization of of its transformation into he has in mind a very different project than do the authors whom both he and I admire (Seidman 1991, p. 144). Aside from being grouped together indiscriminately and even misleadingly under the postmodernist rubric, analyses of the kind performed by Michel Foucault or Jean Baudrillard (or works still relatively unassimilated by sociology, such as those by Gilles Deleuze, Paul Virilio, or Michel Serres) are not unqualifiedly social, whatever their apparent relevance to the discipline. Nor would those authors have been particularly interested in the question of what sociological theory might resemble as a consequence of its appropriating antifoundationalist language. Baudrillard, in fact, claims to have left sociology behind, and not in order to become a theorist. He argued that theory is superfluous in view of the fact that contemporary relations already are simulated thoroughly, that what is in them has disappeared into the electronic media, information, models, and codes (Baudrillard 1983, pp. 4, 66). From quite different perspectives, Foucault, Deleuze, and Virilio likewise have made abundantly clear, through the very absence of conventional models in their work (whether class-based, institutional, or interpretive varieties), their indifference to sociology (see, for example, Foucault 1987, pp. 108-10). That does not mean, however, that any of these authors, as far as I am aware, has taken up the banner of a new kind of social theory, whether that project is conceived in antifoundationalist or antiessentialist terms. Even more telling, the term postmodern rarely is thematized in these works, especially to qualify a particular mode of analysis or critique. (Baudrillard, who eschews critique, once referred to his work as postmoder, somewhat resignedly, in the face of continuous pressure to characterize his writings. Like Foucault, however, he nevertheless has tried to remain mobile and elusive with regard to this and all labels.) Even Lyotard, who more than any of the above authors has dealt at length with the topics of postmodernism and postmodernity (Lyotard 1984), rarely mentions them these days. For all that, sociologists still seem to insist on a simplistic and (I think) illegitimate reframing of works that both constitute and traverse a multiplicity of discourses. In these discourses