Essay
Postmodernism: Intrusion or inevitability?
Michel Foucault
Buzz word though it is, postmodernism is not bereft of epistemological substance. In literature it crept in on easy terms, in social science it has faced hurdles. The Derridian onslaught on structuralism through the concept of de-centring, difference or deconstruction earned it linguistic acceptance in the early 1960s. In social science it took off in the 1970s. However, Derrida's polemic in this regard cut across both literature and social science. Social science from the very beginning set out to replicate methodological approaches of natural science, particularly techniques like empirical observation, verification or generalization. The Enlightenment in Europe, which advocated the notion of universal reason (thus viewing society through a single lens), also inspired social scientists to a large extent. As a result, building theory on society became an important agenda in social science. Marxian theory was quite wide in its scope as it included most institutions (economy, culture and politics) to explain their relationship, how they determine social change, including culture and politics. Within Marxism Gramsci accorded special importance to culture to understanding the perpetuation of and change in capitalism. After the First World War Marxian predictions of revolution in the capitalist countries of West Europe did not come to pass. Distrust developed about the effectiveness of Marxian theory. Further attempts at grand theory surfaced in configuring society as a system drawing analogy with structured organic beings, composed of different organs with defined relationships, where the totality defines the logic and a part in itself does not carry any meaning. In the late 1970s a major assault came from Jean Francois Lyotard through a commissioned study of the French Quebec government on the status of knowledge in contemporary society, it comprised arguments and nomenclature that became weapons of a strong arsenal encrypted in concepts like language game (a la Wittgenstein), meta-narrative and others. Infusing a high dose of relativeness, it compared knowledge accounts with narrative. The latter primarily means a body of reflections related to different levels of human existence, starting from intimate relations to scientific conjectures. Out of an imperative accounting of life and cosmos takes place, myths abound. Modernism is the most recent narrative of contemporary life. Each narrative is based on its own principles, furnishes analyses as well as justification. Think of different religions and how each builds a narrative to explain mundane events. While each narrative presumes to certify the validity of other narratives, it becomes a meta-narrative. Besides, it is more cosmological in its analyses, tries to fathom everything. The presence of different analytical paradigms in social science could not discard such theses of narrative, where the same phenomenon is interpreted in different ways just by changing the point of vision. Just think of the relationship between labour and capital. In the eyes of the conflict school, it is exploitation, while to functionalism it is mutual existence! Jean Baudrillard introduced the notion of simulacra or hyper reality. How do capitalism and contemporary society survive? By creating hyper reality catered through media and other means. Sordid reality is camouflaged by hyper reality, Disneyland is created to establish things the other way round, to show how rational contemporary society is (which actually it is not)! Baudrillard claims that modern man cannot distinguish actual reality from hyper reality: it takes the latter as actual! Such an initiative primarily comes from the maneuvering of signs. Think of the significance of brands in contemporary life, of how they keep consumers spellbound, making them flip from one brand to another. Michel Foucault's writings are a strong jolt to a conventional understanding of knowledge making. His notion of power or genealogy (derived from Neitzsche) puts into question the enterprise of disinterested knowledge that social science boasts of. Does knowledge come in so-called objective manner or does the power structure of a given society determine in the last instance its acceptability or validity? Dwell on recent polemics on the property rights of women, weigh the theological arguments. Do they listen to 'reason' and what they call atheism? Matters will be finally decided by the magnitude of mobilization of contending parties and semiotic maneuvering --- how to interpret divine knowledge, posing a counter religious authority to validate 'modern' interpretation. Then where is the function of universal reason? Why does reason fail to penetrate the mind of the orthodox? Why does the meta-narrative of modernity fail before power conflict? If so, how then can you defend the project of modernity? It means you cannot do science in contemporary society, which is informed by resurrected religion and the effect of power play. Actually the lack of a single paradigm has characterized social science since its inception, materialistic interpretation had to compete with interpretative understanding. Although Fredric Jameson linked post modernism with Marxism through the Lacanian notion of the unconscious, calling it cultural logic of late capitalism, he finally admitted that what is around is really different from what we generally know by way of modern society. He coined the term pastiche to designate cultural creations. Most postmodernists dealt with contemporary capitalism and the logic of commodity to understand different issues related to post modernism. A slide from high culture to popular culture is justified by its commodity logic rather than aesthetics. But without aesthetics where does one find emotion?
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