The Promise of the Postmodern Sociologist

Abstract

To provide illustration for my comments on Stanford Lyman's book on postmodernism and sociology, I will make reference to two anecdotal situations which will place the contrasts between absurdist sociology and a postmodernist sociology in perspective. These anecdotes are concerned chiefly with the ways and means by which individuals in contemporary so ciety attempt to splice together a perceived reality of personal and collec tive "accounts," to borrow Lyman's term, of identity through a process of uniting variously skewed or marginalized social, spiritual, and intellectual orientations. For it is the' very attempt to locate some meaningful identity, solid or fluid, which seems to sit at the heart of the distinction which Lyman is making between an absurdist and a postmodernist sociology. The first anecdote pertains to the recent murder of a middle-aged man, allegedly, by two adolescents in Central Park. The part of the story relevant to the discussion of absurdist versus postmodernist sociology is not the grisly murder itself, but rather the millieux of constructed role-identi fications taken up by relatively wealthy teens in Manhattan's private school circuit which apparently created the social psychological space within which this murder could take place. In the June 1, 1997 issue of New York maga zine, the journalist Nancy Jo Sales attempts to make sense of this sinisterly absurd situation by delving into the adolescent milieu of the Park and de scribing the way teens who frequent Central Park splice dissonant social realities through language and action to combat their experiences of enuui and frustration in everyday privileged life. Sales writes: