The term post-modernism (and post-modern) has been used variably to refer to what are interpreted as major changes in the way the contemporary world can and ought to be represented. The term, introduced from architecture and art criticism which then passed into philosophy and literary studies, has now become something of a commonplace in the social sciences. In architecture, where it first gained currency, post-modernism referred to an active break with the principal tenets of modern architecture and the emergence of new combinations of older styles, the return of concrete as opposed to abstract forms, the active use of kitsch and pastiche. In a renowned programmatic statement, the French philosopher F.Lyotard (1984) announced the demise of the great paradigm of scientific rationality and the return of multiple wisdoms, cultures, a relativism of knowledges. Richard Rorty (1980), another early representative of philosophical post-modernism, stressed the impossibility of scientific models of progress and argued for ‘edifying conversation’ among paradigms rather than cumulative development. The early discussion in the social sciences was very much intertwined with the more general philosophical discussions and was especially focused on Habermas’s (1981) critique of Lyotard, Bell (1973) and others, and the ensuing debate between proponents of post-modernism vs. modernism. For Habermas (1987), post-modernism was a dangerously conservative rejection of the incomplete modern project, a capitulation to the apparent failure of the emancipatory content of that project. For Lyotard (1984) it was a liberation from the straitjacket of rationalist purity of the master discourses of a totalitarian modernity.
The onslaught on hegemonic discourses has occurred across the whole of the social fabric. In anthropology, ‘ethnographic authority’ came under attack in the 1980s and was to be replaced by more dialogical approaches (Clifford 1988). More extreme, perhaps more consistent, versions of the attack on anthropological authority (Tyler 1990) questioned the very adequacy of written language to represent ‘the other’. The attack on general scientific paradigms has been a central issue in sociology and other social sciences, but it has remained more varied and perhaps more general than in anthropology, where the question of authority and voice are central methodological issues. In sociology, especially cultural sociology, the issue of post-modernism has come increasingly to focus on a characterization of contemporary western societies, i.e. ‘the post-modern condition’. This is evident in work by Lash and Urry (1987), Mingione (1991), Vattimo (1987), Baudrillard (1970; 1972; 1978), Featherstone (1991), and others whose approaches are often quite opposed to one another in spite of rather strong similarities with regard to the nature of the conditions they describe. Literary theorists and the growing field of cultural studies have had a significant place in many of these discussions (e.g. Jameson 1991). Numerous sets of oppositions have been used to characterize the difference between post-modernism and modernism. Among the most common are the following:
Modernism
scientific knowledge
grand theory
universalism
mono-vocality
symbolic meaning
coherence
holism
history
rational ego
intellectual
Post-modernism
wisdom (cultural knowledge)
relative cultural corpuses
particularism
poly-vocality
simulacra
pastiche
fragmentation
histories
libidinal self
tactile
We should distinguish between the terms post-modern and post-modernism. The former might be said to refer to a social and cultural condition, whereas the latter refers to a mode of thought, strategy or style. Very much of the discussion during the 1980s concerned the pros and cons of post-modernism as an intellectual position. More recently the discussion has begun to move towards an attempt at interpreting the social conditions themselves. There are numerous interpretations of the ‘post-modern condition’. For some it is an aspect of what Bell (1973) referred to as post-industrialization, the movement from mass industrial towards information-based technology and the emergence of an information society in which control of communication was to become central. For Bell (1976) the post-modern is a product of modernism itself, the effect of the destruction of meaning, of morality of authoritative structures, leading ultimately to ‘pornotopia’. Baudrillard’s interpretation of the advent of information technology argues that symbolic meaning is disappearing, being replaced by a plethora of floating signifiers where the social is reduced to simulacra. The latter interpretation represents a world devoid of meaning in which there is little hope in the future, whereas for other approaches (e.g. Lyotard) the post-modern is the advent of a non-hegemonic political and intellectual strategy. It is not always easy to separate political identity from analysis in the discussions of the post-modern. Advocates of post-modernism have openly attacked modernism as a hegemonic discourse, a structure of control and domination in which discipline was instated by way of rationality itself. For Jameson (1991) and others, post-modernism is characterized, instead, as the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’, a dissolution of modernism related to the breakdown of meaning structures, itself a product of disintegration of the modern ‘Oedipal’ self with a centre of authority and capable of symbolic practice. The result resembles Baudrillard’s vision of superficiality and pastiche, but the explanation is explicitly Marxist, as opposed to the former’s use of notions of consumer society and information society. Attempts to come to grips with the social transformations underlying the apparent decline of modernity are represented by Lash and Urry (1987) and Harvey (1990). For Lash and Urry (1987) the decline of modernity is part of a general process of disorganization of capitalism, a fragmentation of formerly hierarchical processes leading to various forms of social disorder, and a demand for flexibility. For Harvey (1990) the major process involved is the time—space compression produced by an increasingly rapid process of capitalist reproduction on a global scale. Vattimo (1987), in another important analysis of the degeneration of modernity, has tried to link post-modernism to the decline of western hegemony and the emergence of multiple political voices in the centre itself. This interpretation is very close to Friedman’s view of post-modernity as a label for the cultural aspect of the decline of hegemony itself, the fragmentation of a formerly homogeneous/ranked universe, both social and representational (Friedman 1988; 1992; 1994).
It could be argued that what is often designated as post-modernism is an aspect of the fragmentation of the global system. Here there is a link between the decentralization of capital accumulation, the decline of western hegemony, the decline of modernism as a strategic identity of self-development, and the emergence of multivocality, multiculturalism and of indigenous, Fourth-World movements. There is an interesting parallel among different sets of fragmentations: the fragmentation of knowledge into separate relative fields, the disintegration of the evolutionary scheme of social types into a plethora of different cultures which have been interpreted as incommensurable with respect to one another, the real ‘ethnification’ of the nation state, both as a result of regionalization and immigration, the apparent rise of so-called narcissistic disorders that might be indicative of the dissolution of individual ego structures. The individual is also subject to changes in conditions of existence which in their turn alter practices of identification and meaning construal. This is the key to understanding the relation between economic and social processes and cultural phenomena characteristic of post-modernity.
Post-modernism has had special significance for anthropology. This can be accounted for in terms of the special place of anthropology in western identity and its various discourses. Anthropology is that field which represents ‘the others’ of the world to the centre. These others have been part and parcel of our identification of the world and thus our self-identity. Whether evolutionist or relativist, anthropology has provided a scheme within which we could place ourselves. This was largely dependent upon the ability to represent the populations of the periphery in unproblematic terms. The attack on ethnographic authority began to undermine the capacity to represent. The anthropologist could no longer ‘read’ or simply represent in any other way. This hierarchical practice would have to be replaced by a more sensitive relation to our ‘object’, so that instead of translating ‘them’ into a homogeneous text we would have a multivocal representation of their reality. In numerous collections of articles (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fisher 1986), the question of authority, voice and text were discussed at length. While the initial work was very much self-centred on problems of the ethnographer it is also the case that Clifford, and later Marcus, were aware of the larger context of the shift from a homogeneous/neatly ranked and hegemonic world order to a situation of increasing fragmentation. Marcus explicitly speaks of the need to grasp the ethnographic realities of the world system, and it is clear that the purely methodological critiques of representativity in ethnography are critical for the field today.
The re-evaluation of ethnographic method, especially as applied to contemporary heterogenous and multi-layered realities, may not have been the goal of post-modernist critiques, but it may prove to be their major contribution. The analysis of the contemporary world in anthropological terms has not, however, played a salient role in these discussions. Oblique reference to the decline of the colonial power structures is mere background material for the focus on voice and text that so preoccupies anthropologists of the postmodern. To the extent that anthropologists have begun to study the post-modern world rather than concentrating on post-modernist implications for method and questions of representation, they have taken to analysing various aspects of the changing global situation: the formation of diaspora cultures and multicultural contexts, the politics of identity, processes of social disintegration, ‘balkanization’, changing forms of consumption, etc. These studies might not have anything in particular to do with post-modernity as such. But in their concern with understanding contemporary situations in global terms and with doing ethnography that is concrete and multivocal, as is required by studies geared to revealing the complexity of these situations, they can be said to be contributing to an anthropology of the post-modern situation. There is thus a certain convergence here in the social sciences: an anthropology increasingly focused on the disjointed present, a sociology focusing on the social conditions involved in what appears to be a decline or at least radical transformation of modernity, a political science focused increasingly on aspects of multiculturalism, problems of democracy in the Second and Third Worlds, and the relation between culture and power (Apter 1993; Bayart 1989; Young 1993). It is likely that this orientation to an understanding of a world undergoing vastly changing power relations and their cultural consequences shall eventually replace or fill in the categories that are currently referred to as postmodernity and post-modernism.
Jonathan Friedman
University of Lund
References
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