Postmodernism: crisis of confidence or moment of truth

Postmodernism is the most slippery of terms. It encompasses a broad variety of developments, not only (and certainly not first) in philosophy and social science, but also in architecture, the arts, literature, fashion, and many other spheres of human endeavour. The term is used, and defined, in a multitude of ways. So too is the ‘modernism’ to which it is related by virtue of the preposition ‘post’, which in its turn is understood in almost equally inconsistent fashion.

Given that state of affairs, the explanation of postmodernism that follows in this chapter cannot purport to be the only way in which the sense and implications of the term might be unfolded. Instead, in keeping with the purposes stated at the outset of this book, what is contained in this chapter is offered as ‘scaffolding’ only and not as anything in the way of a finished edifice. It is simply one way—hopefully a useful way —of ‘sorting things out’.¹⁵

1. ‘POST’ WHAT?

The Latin word post means ‘after’. In terms such as postmodernism, it does not mean this in a chronological sense—or at least it does not necessarily mean this in a chronological sense. One might talk here of logical succession rather than a succession in time. ‘Postmodernism’ certainly does not imply that once there was a modernism and now this has been replaced by postmodernism. We will recall from earlier discussions that the emergence of post-positivism has not meant the demise of positivism. Nor has it meant that in post-positivism something utterly different has come to be. Post-positivism, we know, remains in the broad tradition of positivism and retains a number of its features. Similarly, we should expect that postmodernism remains in broad continuity with modernism and embodies many of its concerns.

Do we find this to be the case as we peruse the literature? Yes. And no. It depends on what we are reading. In some accounts, postmodernism is seen to emerge out of, and in reaction to, modernism, with the continuity between the one and the other strongly maintained. Milner writes, for example, of the postmodernist style’s ‘deeply derivative relationship to high modernism’ (1991, p. 108). In other accounts, postmodernism is presented as a definite rupture with modernism; it calls into question—indeed, stands in total opposition to—virtually all that modernism asserts and holds dear.

Why this disparity? It is, of course, because modernism means different things to different people.

Modernism is not a word found too often in sociology or the social sciences generally. There is far more talk of ‘modernity’ and ‘modernisation’. If the word ‘modernism’ is used, it tends to be a synonym for one or both of these. In the textbooks, we find modernity accepted as ‘the key concept in the study of social change’ and defined as ‘patterns of social life linked to industrialization’ (Macionis 1991, p. 617). Consequendy, modernisation becomes ‘the process of social change initiated by industrialization’ (1991, pp. 617, 619). As the textbooks see it, the industrial revolution ushered in a new form of human society. To be sure, across different societies, there are ‘infinite gradations of modernity’, one form of society displaying ‘a relatively low level of modernization’ and another ‘a relatively high level of modernization’ (Waters 1989, p. 403). Such gradations notwithstanding, we live now in a modem world and it is qualitatively different from the world that preceded it.

What is this modem world like? More than any other feature that might be cited, modernity is typically described in the textbooks as ‘rational’. Especially following Weber, the modem world is viewed as a world in which instrumental reason holds full sway. The rationality of modem society is embodied especially in the certainty and precision of its science and the astounding control and manipulation of nature that its science makes possible. In pointing this up, modernity is claiming its birthright as the child of the Enlightenment. With that intellectual movement of the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries, the world is seen to have been changed forever. The Enlightenment meant a radical and permanent break with the alleged irrationality and superstition of preceding ages.

Modernism, then, in the sense of modernity and modernisation, evinces great faith in the ability of reason to discover absolute forms of knowledge. Science and the scientific method are paraded as the paramount way in which this self-professedly universal and valid hold on reality is achieved. Modernism, taken in this sense, is proclaimed the path to emancipation, for it delivers us from the fetters of ignorance in which we were once held fast. According to Horkheimer and Adomo (1972, p. 3), the program of the Enlightenment ‘was the disenchantment of the world, the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy’. In this way, modernisation is seen as synonymous with progress.

As Horkheimer and Adomo point out (1972, p. 3), the Enlightenment ‘has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty’. Establishing their sovereignty indeed. In bringing clarity and certitude and banishing ambiguity, modernism, as modernity, posits an autonomous individual self that is self-reliant and very much in control.

Autonomy and instrumentality are the correlative qualities constituting modern subjectivity in a liberal, democratic social order. The modern subject is the product of the Enlightenment program. (Posnock 1991, p.56)

If this is modernism, postmodernism is a thoroughgoing rejection of what modernism stands for and an overturning of the foundations on which it rests. Postmodernism refuses ah semblance of the totalising and essentialist orientations of modernist systems of thought. Where modernism purports to base itself on generalised, indubitable truths about the way things really are, postmodernism abandons the entire epistemological basis for any such claims to truth. Instead of espousing clarity, certitude, wholeness and continuity, postmodernism commits itself to ambiguity, relativity, fragmentation, particularity and discontinuity. In the place of what may be seen as the arrogance and pomposity of Enlightenment modes of thought, postmodernism delights in play, irony, pastiche, excess—even ‘mess’. In the course of all this, postmodernism typically engages in a radical decentring of the subject, privileging ‘nonidentity (or the dispersal of identity) over any stable self- conception’ (Dallmayr 1997, p. 41).

This, it has to be said, is a clear-cut way of dealing with postmodernism and modernism. One is quite simply the antithesis of the other. It is problematic, all the same. The problem lies in the fact that the characteristics attributed here to postmodernist thought are not specific to postmodernism. While postmodernism (though not the postmodern) is commonly taken to have emerged since the 1960s, the things it is saying of modernity have been said long before that. In some cases they were said even before the turn of the twentieth century.

Already in this book we have considered the way in which constructionism has long rejected the objectivism inherent in the Enlightenment theory of knowledge. We have seen Adorno fighting against the tyranny of the concept and have heard his invitation to remedy the inadequacy of thought and thing ‘in the thing’ by looking to the important remainder that slips through the conventional conceptual net. ‘It is striking’, writes Dews (1987, p. 233), ‘that, in many contemporary accounts of “postmodern” culture, central emphases of Adorno’s work of forty years ago are reproduced’. Even Henry James (1843-1916), writing before and around the turn of the century, is a ‘hero of ambiguity’ and ‘practices a politics of nonidentity’, ‘refusing to resolve paradoxes or dissolve differences into identity’ (Posnock 1991, pp. 16, 66, 74).

Yet constructionists are not per se postmodernist. Adorno, let alone Henry James, cannot be seen as postmodernist. Nor, on the other hand, can they be classified as modernist on this understanding of modernism. There are glaring anomalies to be faced if we simply set postmodernism over against modernism understood as modernity/modernisation.

As it happens, this is not the only way in which we might conceptualise the matter. Modernism may not be a word commonly found in social science writing but it is certainly common enough in other spheres of thought and action. It looms very large in the vocabulary of art and literature where it is by no means identified with modernisation and modernity. Instead, it represents a response to modernisation and modernity that emerged originally towards the close of the 1800s and has continued in various forms throughout the present century. ‘Modernism’, writes Sarup, ‘concerns a particular set of cultural or aesthetic styles associated with die artistic movement which originated around the turn of the century’. Modernism, as Sarup describes it (1993, p. 131), emphasises ‘experimentation’, explores ‘the paradoxical, ambiguous and uncertain, open-ended nature of reality’, and manifests a ‘rejection of the notion of an integrated personality’.

Sarup uses the word ‘ambiguous’. The modernist response was, and is, thoroughly ambiguous. The Enlightenment brought a modem world into being, but modernism is neither an enthusiastic embracing of the Enlightenment project nor an outright rejection of the Enlightenment world. In those closing decades of the nineteenth century, there were plenty who did reject modernity and engaged in nostalgic longings for a return to the (putatively) idyllic days of a more bucolic past. Echoes of such a response can be seen in Tonnies’s antinomy between the Gemeinschaft (‘community’) of the past and the Gesellschaft (‘association’) of the present and in vitalist philosophies like those of Dilthey and Bergson. But this is antimodernism, not modernism. Modernism does not reject modernity. It accepts modernity—but its acceptance is made in full awareness of the many anomalies it holds. Lewis says of Weber that he ‘did not contemplate his age of reason with equanimity or with the cheerful complacency of so many subsequent British and American sociologists and economists, but with a sardonic acceptance of the inevitable’ (1975, p. 85). Weber’s is a modernist attitude.

In certain respects, Weber can, in fact, be seen as leading the way down the modernist path. In a phrase he has borrowed from the poet Schiller, he defines modernity as the ‘disenchantment of the world’. For him, the world has been robbed of its enchanting quality. It has lost its magic. The robber, above all other contenders for the tide, is bureaucratisation. ‘Precision, speed, unambiguity’, along with ‘unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction’, are what bureaucracy most values (Weber 1970, p. 214). In such a world, Weber points out, ‘there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play’. Instead, ‘one can, in principle, master all things by calculation’. In consequence, ‘the world is disenchanted’ (Weber 1968, p. 298). With the magic gone, we are left with the world of reason, ‘a world in which men lose their manifold natures in the specialised division of labour, devoting themselves in unambiguously defined tasks’ (MacRae 1974, p. 87). Weber’s life, MacRae adds, is a struggle against such a destiny.

Struggle he might, but Weber’s struggle is within, and not apart from, the world of modernity. The same has to be said of Benjamin and Adorno, authentic modernists both of them. While ‘neither Benjamin nor Adorno is entirely immune to the lure of nostalgia’, Posnock points out, ‘this moment of regression is far outweighed by their commitment to anatomizing modernity on its own terms rather than lamenting the allegedly unalienated past’ (Posnock 1991, p. 99).

Weber, Benjamin and Adorno typify the struggle of modernism generally. Modernism is far from retreating from the bourgeois world it finds itself inhabiting. Instead, it mounts a challenge to bourgeois beliefs and values from within, drawing not on relics of the past nostalgically preserved but on what the modem itself has to offer. Within the context of the modem and in essential relationship to the modem, modernist art and literature replace bourgeois realism with something quite different. The capitalist world, heir as it is to the Enlightenment and the progress of science, presents its forms of understanding as precisely ‘the way things are’. In doing that, it needs the support of a bourgeois art that, as a genre, conforms to such a project. For this reason, we find social realism pervading the arts and literature of the bourgeois world. Modernism, however, inaugurates a departure from bourgeois realism. ‘Modernism’, writes Lash (1991, p. xiii), ‘challenged previously existing aesthetic realism’s assumptions that aesthetic value came from some sort of correspondence between artistic representation on the one hand, and reality on the other’.

Picasso, for example, became modernist as he moved from the orthodox realism of his 1901 portrait of Senora Canals ‘to 1906, when he began to experiment with distortions and generalizations of the human image based on primitive Iberian and African art, to 1911, when, in paintings like Ma Jolie, the human image has disappeared entirely’ (Hardison 1989, p. 2). Hence the jolt Picasso’s work tends to cause in a society whose very mindset upholds the paramountcy of the autonomous human subject.

In architecture, nothing has provided a greater jolt to these same sensibilities than the building of the Eiffel Tower. Gustave Eiffel was a bridge builder. What he created to commemorate the centennial of the French Revolution was ‘a bridge rotated from horizontal to vertical and, at the same time, a fully realized abstract sculpture’ (Hardison 1989, p. 90). As Hardison goes on to describe, the leaders of the French establishment (Alexandre Dumas and Guy de Maupassant included) protested mightily ‘in the name of art and French history’. What they wanted, of course, was a realist monument that affirmed the social and political order obtaining at that time. Architecture that expressly reflects the liberating event of the Revolution and symbolises the order of things the Revolution has ushered in would fit the bill very nicely. The Tower fulfils neither of these functions.

Being abstract—devoid of historical allusions to the French Revolution— it can be read as a symbol of almost anything: a prophecy of flight, an expression of man’s aspiration for the infinite, a phallic symbol, an enlarged toy. It is none of these. It forces the viewer to look beyond historical myths to the revolution that surrounds him. (Hardison 1989, p.93)

In literature, likewise, the modernism that emerged in the late nineteenth century was, in large measure, an eschewing of bourgeois realism. Henry James is an outstanding example of this. Often described as the first modem American novelist, he portrays ‘movements beyond the conventional codes that impose intelligibility upon individual behavior’ (Posnock 1991, p. 3). In 1904 James returned to the United States after many years of living abroad. In The American Scene he presents what he describes in the Preface as his ‘gathered impressions’. He deliberately refrains from offering ‘information’. In fact, he states that he is ‘incapable of information’. A year before The American Scene was published, H.G. Wells had produced a book that reported on his travels in the United States. Wells’s book, tided The Future in America, is informative. It is essentially what James declares he does not want his book to be. Posnock describes The Future in America as the work of ‘a scientific socialist’ and a ‘hymn to “material progress’”. Henry James’s work is very different. It dissociates itself from ‘the authority of utilitarian, abstract reason (embodied in the journalist’s gathering of information) in a world dedicated to the Enlightenment ideal of progress’ (Posnock 1991, p. 148). Instead, James gives free rein to his ‘resdess curiosity’ as he wanders New York’s Lower East Side, or Charles Street in Boston, or the many other places to which his aimless meanderings (his flanerie, to use a term invoked by many others as well, Baudelaire, Simmel and Walter Benjamin among them) had brought him.

James is led on by what his autobiographical writings describe as ‘the play of strong imaginative passion’. ‘Fed by every contact and every apprehension’, this passion ‘constitutes in itself an endless crisis’ (James 1956, pp. 454-5). In James’s view, writers who share such passion, that is, writers possessed of the ‘largest responding imagination before the human scene’, are found ‘washing us successively with the warm wave of the near and familiar and the tonic shock, as may be, of the far and strange’ (1962, p. 31).

The far and strange. Here we are coming close to the basic purposes of the modernist endeavour. Modernity holds us firmly under the sway of what it presents as the sure and the true, but modernism shares the phenomenological purpose of calling such received notions into question. Posnock writes of ‘the ferment of experimental literary, artistic and intellectual activity that occurred roughly from 1875 to 1925’. Much of this experimental activity, he tells us, ‘erupted in protest against the bureaucratic dominance of abstraction, rational cognition, and instrumentality that had disambiguated modem life in obedience to the Enlightenment (or Baconian) imperative of efficiency’.

Thus modernism insists on an obdurate difficulty expressed in formal innovation that refuses the familiar comforts of realist presentation. Instead, defamiliarisation—a making new by estranging the familiar— characterizes modernism’s project to reunify human sensibility, dissociated by the hegemony of positivist science. Paradoxically, the healing of the breach between thought and feeling is achieved through deliberate shock tactics of dissonance. (Posnock 1991, p. 56)

This is highly reminiscent of the Russian formalist school of literary criticism, which came to see art as having the purpose of defamiliarisation. ‘In order to recover the sensation of life’, writes Merquior (1986, p. 22), describing the views of Viktor Shklovsky, ‘art had to defamiliarize, to make objects unfamiliar by making forms difficult, shattering the layer of custom on our humdmm perceptions’. Poetry in particular is considered a genre that does violence to language, thereby bringing about ostranenie, the process of defamiliarisation. Ostranenie is ‘the making strange of reality in order to create it anew’ (Bogdan 1990, p. 116). It is an attempt, Hawkes tells us, to ‘counteract the process of habituation encouraged by routine everyday modes of perception’. It is a modernist purpose through and through.

We very readily cease to ‘see’ the world we live in, and become very anaesthetized to its distinctive features. The aim of poetry is to reverse that process, to defamiliarize that with which we are overly familiar, to ‘creatively deform’ the usual, the normal, and so to inculcate a new, childlike, non-jaded vision in us. The poet thus aims to disrupt ‘stock responses’ and to generate a heightened awareness: to restructure our ordinary perception of reality.

The anti-bourgeois orientation emphasised in this account of modernism is not its only characteristic. Nor has modernism succeeded in displaying anti-bourgeois sentiment with total consistency. Still, its status as a spirited, if ambiguous, response to modernity, rather than a movement identified with modernity itself, is difficult to challenge.

What, then, on this accounting, is postmodernism?

Any answer to this question should be prefaced with a careful distinction between postmodernism and postmodemity. In discussing modernism, we have distinguished between modernism and modernity and we need to make a comparable distinction here as well. Postmodemity, like modernity, is a distinctive historical stage in societal development. Postmodernism, like modernism, is a response to a qualitatively new society, ‘a profound mutation in recent thought and practice’ (Samp 1993, p. xi). On the one hand, as Crook puts it, postmodemity has to do with a ‘structural transformation of advanced industrial societies’. On the other hand, postmodernism ‘implies the exhaustion of the dynamic principles of modem art, music and literature and heralds major transformations in the very idea of “art” and in its relation to other social practices’ (Crook 1991, p. 4).

As these words of Crook suggest, besides being a response to the postmodern world, postmodernism arises out of, and in reaction, to modernism. Milner underlines both aspects. Postmodernism denotes ‘a whole set of contemporary literary and cultural movements (for example, in painting or architecture) which self-consciously define themselves in opposition to earlier, equally self-consciously modernist cultural movements’ (Milner 1991, p. 104). At the same time, in at least some of its dimensions, it ‘alerts us to the possibility that postmodernist culture might have deep structural roots in some distinctively postmodern sociopolitical reality’ (1991, p. 108). Postmodemity, then, is postmodernism looked at as a moment in time, as an historical epoch in which world and society are seen to have been transformed. Postmodemism-as-postmodemity stands over against postmodemism-as- cultural response. With the emergence of this radically new socio­political reality, a new kind of cultural logic is required to understand it. Moreover, to convey the understanding that arises, there must be new forms of representation and communication. Such essentially different ways of thinking, representing and communicating constitute postmodernism as a cultural response to postmodemity.

Milner makes yet another distinction we may find helpful. This distinction—between ‘postmodernism’ and the ‘postmodern debate’—is a distinction between a complex of human behaviours and the attempt to conceptualise these behaviours theoretically. Milner has defined postmodernism as primarily a set of literary and cultural movements. It is, he observes, ‘only secondarily a set of efforts from within cultural theory to define the specific nature of these movements’. For this secondary meaning of postmodernism, that is, its sense as postmodernist theory, he suggests the term ‘postmodernist debate’ (1991, p. 104).

In short, the form of society in which we live has radically changed. Our world is now a world of postmodernity. Throughout many spheres of human activity—art, literature, philosophy and social science among them—experience of such a world elicits postmodernism-as-cultural- response. Furthermore, analysts and interpreters of this complex scene offer us a melange of postmodernism-as-theory.

With these distinctions in mind, we return to our question: If modernism is taken to be Posnock’s ‘ferment’ of experimental activity erupting within modernity but in reaction against its abstraction, rationalisation and instrumentality, what is postmodernism? Obviously, postmodernism has emerged out of this modernism, and in reaction to this modernism, but what is left to it that is not found in modernism itself? This is an important question because, as we have already seen, much of what is attributed to postmodernism today, even paraded as its very hallmark, is already found well entrenched in the modernist tradition. After listing the ‘basic features of modernism’, Sarup (1993, p. 131) writes: ‘One of the problems with trying to understand modernism is that many of these features appear in definitions of postmodernism as well’. Similarly, Richard Wolin reminds us that ‘in many respects postmodernism has merely carried out the legacy of modernism qua “adversary culture’” (1992, p. 8). Jonathan Ree goes so far as to claim that ‘the fact that modernism is itself acutely critical of modernity threatens the coherence of the whole project of philosophical postmodernism’ (1991, p. 256).

Take Loyal Rue’s presentation of postmodernism as an example. Rue describes postmodernism as ‘a philosophical orientation that rejects the dominant foundational program of the Western tradition’.

There are no absolute truths and no objective values. There may be local truths and values around, but none of them has the endorsement of things as they really are … As for reality itself, it does not speak to us, does not tell us what is true or good or beautiful. The universe is not itself any of these things, it does not interpret. Only we do, variously. (Rue 1994, pp. 272-3)

‘I find the postmodernist perspective theoretically agreeable’, Rue concludes (1994, p. 274). But is he embracing postmodernism or modernism? Everything he asserts here of postmodernism can already be found loud and clear in the modernist tradition. If Rue’s position is postmodernist, it is not merely because it embraces constructionism and anti-foundationalism. Our question remains to be answered, therefore. What would make Rue’s position postmodernist? What sufficiendy characterises postmodernism as to enable us to talk logically of both modernism and postmodernism rather than just one or the other?

Milner answers our question by pinpointing an aspect of postmodernism not found in modernism, or at least not found so prominently in modernism. It is the ‘progressive deconstruction and dissolution of distinctions’ lying at the very heart of postmodernism (Milner 1991, p. 106). Ihab Hassan had this in mind when, as Wolin points out (1992, p. 206), he ‘apdy characterized postmodernism as a movement of “unmaking”’.

It is an antinomian moment that assumes a vast unmaking in the Western mind—what Michel Foucault might call a post-modern episterrie. I say ‘unmaking’ though other terms are now de rigueur: for instance, deconstruction, decentering, disappearance, dissemination, demystification, discontinuity, differance, dispersion, etc. Such terms express an ontological rejection of the traditional full subject, the cogito of Western philosophy. They express, too, an epistemological obsession with fragments or fractures, and a corresponding ideological commitment to minorities in politics, sex and language. To think well, to feel well, to act well, to read well, according to the episteme of unmaking, is to refuse the tyranny of wholes; totalization in any human endeavor is potentially totalitarian. (Hassan, in Wolin 1992, p. 206)

What this progressive eradication of distinctions means for Milner in the first instance is a collapse of the antithesis found in the context of modernism ‘between high and low, elite and popular’. In pointing to this antithesis, Milner is placing the spodight on the mass culture that developed contemporaneously with modernism. Modernism may have brought new aesthetic self-consciousness, daring experimentahsm and formalist innovations, but alongside all this there grew ‘a whole range of technically novel cultural forms each of which is in principle near universally available (yellow journalism, penny dreadful and later paperback fiction, radio, cinema, and so on)’ (Milner 1991, pp. 105-6). Contemporaries though they are, high modernism and mass culture have never been allies. ‘Modernist art’, Milner insists, ‘emerges as an autonomous social institution, the preserve and prerogative of an increasingly autonomous intellectual class and thereby necessarily counterposed to other non-autonomous arts’ (1991, p. 106). Kipnis too writes of the ‘antinomies with the popular that constituted aesthetic modernism from its inception’ (1989, p. 154).

With postmodernism, this adversarial relationship between modernist and mass culture is considered to have come to an end. In the context of a new world variously characterised by, or as, radical internationalism and transnationalism, post-industrialisation (even post-capitalism), mass communications and telecommunications, universal consumerism, hyperreality, and (as Milner, for one, insists) hypermilitarisation, modernism has been unable to retain its elitist character. Postmodernism is characterised, instead, by ‘the deletion of the boundary between art and everyday life; the collapse of the hierarchical distinction between elite and popular culture; a stylistic eclecticism and the mixing of codes’ (Sarup 1993, p. 132). It is not that mass culture has broken down the barriers and forced a merger. Instead, it has been ‘an endogenous transformation, internal to elite culture itself and stemming from an inner ‘crisis of faith’ on the part of modernism (Milner 1991, p. 107).

All along, modernism’s challenge to modernity has been fuelled by its firm conviction that, operating within and as part of modernity, it can be at once subversive and redemptive. The emergence of postmodemity means for modernism a ‘collective crisis of faith in its own previously proclaimed adversarial and redemptive functions’ (Milner 1991, p. 107). All kinds of divisions and distinctions are evaporating within the world in the face of mass media, mass marketing, mass capitalisation, mass commodification, mass entertainment, rapid transport systems, and the rest, to the extent of calling into question even the distinction between the virtual and the real. How, then, can modernism, embodied in a distinct group of aesthetes and thinkers, retain faith in its ability to contribute effectively to the solution of the world’s problems?

And, with the dissolution of differences and distinctions, the process moves inexorably on. Fragmentation takes the place of totality and completeness. Ambiguity reigns where once there was clarity. The old certainties vanish, leaving us with the tentative, the provisional, the temporary, the contingent. Even our cherished antinomies are denied to us, those hierarchical oppositions between thought and language, nature and culture, reason and emotion, theory and practice, white and black, men and women. In the place of clear-cut distinctions and earnest logic, there is widespread irony, parody, pastiche, playfulness.

True enough, much of this denial is already there in the modernist movement. Now, however, set in the historical and socio-political context of postmodemity, it emerges as something different. The very setting prevents us from launching ourselves into challenging, subversive innovations with anything like a messianic vision for the future or any hope of redeeming the situation. As we have seen, owing to the extent and degree of the massification that has occurred, society is experiencing a state of implosion in which distinctions are obliterated and a postmodern condition of radical ambiguity, hyperreality, and simulation prevails. In such a society, the batde cry This way lies salvation! ’ is well and truly muted. Modernism, Huyssen reminds us, ‘always upheld a vision of a redemption of modem life through culture’. In other words, it always offered an alternative. Postmodernism upholds no such vision and offers no such alternative. That such visions are no longer possible to sustain may be at the heart of the postmodern condition’ (Huyssen 1988, 210).

Accordingly, with the evaporation of differences and the rejection of the goal of wholeness, the modernist emphasis on the redemptive role of aesthetic and intellectual work goes by the board. What, then, of positions that claim to be postmodernist but continue to hold out hope of redemption? Some feminist theory would seem to fall into this category. Milner distinguishes within second-wave feminism between ‘a largely American, politically interventionist, and often pseudo-popular, feminist cultural practice which is indeed often subversively postmodernist’ and ‘a largely French, theoretical, feminist post-stmcturalism, which is in fact almost classically modernist in character’. ‘Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous’, writes Milner (1991, p. 113), ‘do remain committed to the archetypically modernist notion that modem life can indeed be redeemed through culture, through writing in fact’. Waugh would seem to endorse this view. As she sees it, ‘feminism cannot sustain itself as an emancipatory movement unless it acknowledges its foundation in the discourses of modernity’ (1992, p. 190).

In argument of this kind, you will notice, postmodernism and poststructuralism are well and tmly distinguished from each other. Yet, in social science literature they are usually found closely allied.

Sometimes the terms are used interchangeably. Here, too, some ‘sorting out’ would seem to be in order.

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.