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Morris. However, in current usage, ‘post-industrial society’ was articulated, almost simultaneously in the early 1960s, by Daniel Bell (1973) and Alain Touraine (1968). The concept of ‘post-industrial society’ is intended to encapsulate the changes that have occurred within capitalism in the post-war period. The post-industrial society was presented as a new social form, as different from industrial capitalism as capitalism had been from feudalism. The central idea is that theoretical knowledge has now become the source of social change and policy formation. The society is highly educated, with significant levels of resources invested into the production of theoretical knowledge (in higher education and commercial research and development). The economy therefore shifts from the production of goods and raw materials, to the production of services. The dominant industries become those which are dependent upon theoretical knowledge (such as computing and aerospace). This is accompanied by a decline in the old working class, and the rise of ‘white collar’ (or non-manual) classes. New professional and technical classes (or a ‘knowledge class’) become dominant. The difference between Bell’s and Touraine’s accounts rests largely upon the enthusiasm with which they embrace post-industrial society. For Bell it is a positive development, leading to greater social integration, and the reduction of political conflict. For Touraine, post-industrial society threatens to become a society dominated by a technocratic elite, who are insensitive to the humanist values of traditional university education. Further reading: Kumar 1978. AE
POSTMODERNISM ‘Postmodern, if it means anything,’ Anthony Giddens argues, ‘is best kept to refer to styles or movements within literature, painting, the plastic arts, and architecture. It concerns aspects of aesthetic reflection upon the nature of modernity’ (1990:45). Giddens in fact also links it to Nietzsche and Heidegger, and an abandonment of the Enlightenment project of rational criticism. Postmoderns, though, Giddens continues, have nothing better to offer in the place of the ideals of the Enlightenment. Amongst other critical works which have dealt with postmodernism, David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity has sought to analyse it in socio-economic terms. Harvey argues that the postmodern can be taken to signify a decentralised, diversified 256
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stage in the development of the market place, in which the Fordist rationale of production concentrated in a single site (the factory) has been replaced by a form of manufacture which co-ordinates a diversity of sources (e.g. parts of one final product are made in more than one place and then shipped elsewhere for purposes of assembly) in search of greater flexibility of production. In turn, this has had the effect of producing workforces which are mobile and disposable in a way in which the earlier labour markets of Fordist period were not. Thus, for Harvey postmodernism is in fact an extension of those social processes which Marx diagnosed as being characteristic of the logic of capitalist society. In effect, on this view, postmodernism (at least in its philosophical guise) may well be regarded as a form of apology for capitalism. One thing, therefore, is certain about postmodernism: the uses of the word display such a diversity of meanings that it defies simple definition. In architecture, for example, postmodernism has been taken to mean the overcoming of earlier, rigid conventions underlying modernist tastes (as exemplified by Le Corbusier’s functionalism) in favour of a more eclectic, playful and non-functional aesthetic. The ‘postmodern’ novel, in contrast, could be described as embodying an experimentalism with narrative form through which a rejuvenation of the established conventions of the form itself is sought (by way of a simultaneous retention and redeployment of those conventions in the name of an avant-gardism which harks back to modernism). Writers often associated with postmodernism include Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Luce Irigaray. Perhaps the most coherent account of what constitutes postmodernism has been offered by the philosopher Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge and most succinctly in the essay included at the end of that volume, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard provides an account of postmodernity which stresses the collapse of ‘grand narratives’ (e.g. that of Marxism), and their replacement with ‘little narratives’ in the wake of technologies which have transformed our notion of what constitutes knowledge. To that extent, the view offered in this text concentrates on the epistemology of postmodernity, i.e. the postmodern conceived of in terms of a crisis in our ability to provide an adequate, ‘objective’ account of reality. In the essay ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, Lyotard offers an analysis of Kant’s notion of the sublime (as presented 257
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in the Critique of Judgement) as a means of elucidating the postmodern. The sublime, Kant argues, is a feeling aroused in the spectator by the presentation to the intellect of something which defies conceptualisation. Likewise, Lyotard holds, the postmodern can be characterised as a mode of expression which seeks to put forward new ways of expressing the sublime feeling. In other words, postmodernism is an avant-garde aesthetic discourse, which seeks to overcome the limitations of traditional conventions by searching for new strategies for the project of describing and interpreting experience. Significantly, Lyotard argues that the postmodern ought not to be understood in terms of an historical progression which signals a present departure from a past modernism. Rather, modernism is in fact characterised as a response to a set of concerns which are themselves already postmodern. According to Lyotard, modernism embodies a nostalgic yearning for a lost sense of unity, and constructs an aesthetics of fragmentation in the wake of this. Postmodernism, in contrast, begins with this lack of unity but, instead of lamenting it, celebrates it—a claim made most evident by Lyotard’s comparison of the modernist ‘fragment’ (i.e. the artwork conceived of as a part of a greater, albeit unattainable, whole) with the postmodern ‘essay’ (taken in the sense of an essaying-forth, in the spirit of an experimentalism which disdains either to construct or lament totality—the characterisation of the latter bearing a strong resemblance to T.W. Adorno’s analysis in his ‘The Essay as Form’). More recently, Lyotard has moved away from his earlier exposition of postmodernism. On the one hand, he has sought to redefine it in terms of a ‘rewriting’ of the project of modernity (see the essays collected in The Inhuman). On the other hand, a work like The Differend: Phrases in Dispute at least hints that postmodernism may be considered in a rather less positive (and certainly more modest) light than that afforded it in The Postmodern Condition: ‘an old man who scrounges in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers . . . a goal for a certain humanity’ (The Differend, section 182). Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo has also offered an account of the postmodern in his essay ‘Nihilism and the Postmodern in Philosophy’ in The End of Modernity. Contrary to Giddens’s view, Vattimo specifically relates postmodernism to philosophy, rather than the arts. As with Giddens, two thinkers mark the opening of postmodernity: Nietzsche and Heidegger. Vattimo turns to Heidegger’s notion of Verwindung as a means of explicating his position. The word Verwin¨ berwindung (i.e. a critical overcoming of dung represents neither an U contradiction through the use of reason) nor a Kantian Verbindung, 258
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which seeks to establish a priori modes of combination as a means of grounding transcendental critique in primary rules of understanding and principles of reason. A Verwindung, rather, is a ‘twisting’ of meaning which makes room for a form of relativistic criticism which disdains all pretensions to objectivity. This, then, allows for Vattimo to account for the ‘post-’ in postmodernism, for it does not presuppose the possibility of transcendental critique. Interestingly, it is Nietzsche, and not Heidegger, whom Vattimo regards as the first philosopher to talk in the terminology of Verwindung. Indeed, for Vattimo, postmodernity is born with Nietzsche’s writing (The End of Modernity, p. 164). Turning to Nietzsche’s book Human, All-TooHuman, Vattimo argues that this work defines modernity as a process of constant replacement, wherein the old (expressed through notions such as ‘tradition’) is abandoned in favour of the new, which in its turn decays and is replaced by ever-newer forms. Within such a context, the modern can never be overcome, since each overcoming is merely another repetition of the fetish of the new. Having offered this diagnosis, Nietzsche’s text refuses to envisage a way out of modernity by way of recourse to, for example, a Kantian transcendentalism. Rather, a Nietzschean account seeks to radicalise the modern through a dissolution of ‘its own innate tendencies’ (p. 166). This is achieved through the following chain of reasoning: (i) a criticism of mores (dominant forms of ethical behaviour) is undertaken by Nietzsche through a strategy of ‘chemical reduction’ (see Human, AllToo-Human, sections 1ff., where Nietzsche writes of constructing a ‘chemistry of the moral and religious sensations’); which leads to (ii) the realisation that the ontological ground and methodological basis for this reduction (i.e. truth) is destined likewise to dissolve under such scrutiny; and (iii) that truth, in consequence, is rendered the product of historical contingency. As such, it is realised that truth (and consequently the language of truth) is both (a) subject to and (b) moulded by forces such as the need for survival, and rests on such notions as the untenable belief that reality can be known; this, in turn, leads to the conclusion that (iv) truth is rooted in the metaphorical function of language (language as a tool for coping with the world, not as a means of describing reality). Within this context, truth is dissolved and (most famously) God dies, slain by his own metaphysics (the Christian metaphysical demand for truth having turned on Christianity itself, finds it unable to live up to its own ideal). For Vattimo, this nihilistic conclusion offers a way out of modernity, and marks the birth of postmodernity, i.e. an interest in grounding knowledge in concepts of truth and Being is replaced by one which stresses the historical 259
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analysis of ‘appearance’ and the predominance of contingency in our forms of knowledge. It is worth noting that such an account leaves out many aspects of Nietzsche’s thought which would not conform with Vattimo’s view (e.g. his later diagnosis of modernity as a decadent form which must be ‘overcome’, and likewise his criticisms of modern ‘nihilism’ as a symptom of ‘decadence’ or cultural decline). Further readings: Giddens 1990; Harvey 1989; Hassan 1987; Jenks 1991; Lyotard 1988, 1989, 1991; Vattimo 1988. PS
POST-STRUCTURALISM Movement of thought in various fields—literary criticism, cultural studies, political theory, sociology, ethnography, historiography, psychoanalysis—which grew out of (and to some extent reacted against) the earlier structuralist paradigm adopted by mainly French theorists in the 1950s and 1960s. Structuralism took its methodological bearings from the programme of theoretical linguistics devised some four decades earlier by Ferdinand de Saussure. This work was rediscovered—with considerable excitement—by structuralist thinkers who proceeded to apply his ideas to a range of social and cultural phenomena supposedly exhibiting a language-like (systemic) character, and hence amenable to description and analysis in terms deriving from Saussure’s structuralsynchronic approach. Thus, in each of the above-mentioned disciplines, the aim was to break with an existing (merely ‘empirical’ or case-by-case) treatment of the innumerable narratives, myths, rituals, social practices, ideologies, case histories, cultural patterns of belief, etc., and to focus rather on the underlying structure—the depth-logic of signification—which promised to fulfil Saussure’s great dream of a unified general semiology. Such would be the structuralist key to all mythologies, one that explained how such a massive (empirically unmanageable) range of cultural phenomena could be brought within the compass of a theory requiring only a handful of terms, concepts, distinctions and logical operators. Among them—most importantly— were Saussure’s cardinal distinctions between signifier and signified, langue and parole, and the twofold (diachronic and synchronic) axes of linguistic-semiotic research. Beyond that, the main task was to press this analysis to a point where it left no room for such supposedly nai?ve ideas as that of the subject—the ‘autonomous’ subject of humanist discourse—as somehow existing outside or beyond the 260
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various structures (or ‘subject-positions’) that marked the very limits of language and thought at some specific cultural juncture. Thus structuralist thinking most often went along with a strain of theoretical anti-humanism which defined itself squarely against such earlier ‘subject-centred’ movements of thought as phenomenology and existentialism. In this respect, and others, there is a clear continuity between structuralism and post-structuralism. Indeed, there has been much debate among theorists as to how we should construe the ‘post-’ prefix, whether in the strong sense (‘superseding and displacing the structuralist paradigm’) or simply as a matter of chronological sequence (‘developing and extending the structuralist approach in certain new directions’). Post-structuralism also finds its chief theoretical inspiration in the programme of Saussurean linguistics, though it tends to play down—or reject outright—any notion that this might give a ‘scientific’ basis for the analysis of texts, semiotic systems, cultural codes, ideological structures, social practices, etc. That claim is now viewed as just a species of ‘metalinguistic’ delusion, an example of the old (typically structuralist but also Marxist) fallacy which holds that theory can somehow attain to a critical standpoint outside and above whatever it seeks to interpret or explain. On the contrary post-structuralists argue: there is no way of drawing a firm methodological line between text and commentary, language and metalanguage, ideological belief systems and those other (theoretical) modes of discourse that claim to unmask ideology as a product of false consciousness or—in the language of a structural Marxist like Louis Althusser—a form of ‘imaginary’ misrecognition. Such ideas took hold through the false belief that theory could achieve a decisive ‘epistemological break’ with the various kinds of naturalised ‘common-sense’ knowledge which passed themselves off as straightforwardly true but which in fact encoded the cultural values of a given (e.g. bourgeoishumanist) socio-political order. However, this position becomes untenable once it is realised that all subject-positions—that of the analyst included—are caught up in an endless process of displacement engendered by the instability of language, the ‘arbitrary’ relation between signifier and signified, and the impossibility that meaning can ever be captured in a moment of pure, self-present utterer’s intent. Thus the ‘post-’ in ‘post-structuralism’ is perhaps best understood—by analogy with other such formations, among them ‘postmodernism’, ‘post-Marxism’ and, more lately ‘post-feminism’—as marking a widespread movement of retreat from earlier positions more directly aligned with the project of political emancipation and critique. However, post-structuralism does lay claim to its own kind 261
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of radical politics, one that envisages a ‘subject-in-process’ whose various shifting positions within language or discourse cannot be captured by any theory (structuralist, Marxist, feminist or whatever) premised on old-style ‘Enlightenment’ ideas of knowledge and truth. Most influential here, at least among literary theorists, was the sequence of changing allegiances to be seen in the work of Roland Barthes, from his early high-structuralist phase (in texts such as Mythologies (1957) and ‘The Structural Analysis of Narratives’ (1977b)) to his late style of writing (e.g. S/Z (1970) and The Pleasure of the Text (1973)) where he renounces all claims to theoretical rigour, and instead draws freely and idiosyncratically on whatever sources come to hand—literature, linguistics, structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism and a vast range of intertextual allusions—while treating them all with a consummate deftness and irony which disclaims any kind of orthodox methodological commitment. In Mythologies Barthes had provided by far the most convincing application of a highly systematic (Saussure-derived) structuralist method to the analysis of various items of late-bougeois ‘mythology’, from advertising images to French culinary fashion, from ‘The Romans on Film’ to the myth of the jet pilot, and from ‘the brain of Einstein’ (a fetish object created by the modern ideology of scientific genius) to the spectacle of boxing as a prime example of cultural artifice passing itself off as a natural sporting event. A decade later he reflected ruefully that this method could now be applied by anyone who had picked up the necessary analytic tools and learned to demythologise just about everything that came their way. So one had to move on, renounce that false idea of ‘metalinguistic’ analysis, and instead produce readings that would ‘change the object itself ’—the title of a later essay—by actually rewriting the myths concerned through a process of creative textual transformation. Otherwise there would always come a stage—repugnant to Barthes—when radical ideas began to settle down into a new orthodoxy, or when theories that had once seemed challenging and subversive (like those of ‘classical’ structuralism) were at length recycled in a safely packaged academic form. In Barthes’s later writing one can see this diagnosis applied to certain aspects of post-structuralism even though that movement had not yet acquired anything like its subsequent widespread following. Thus, for instance, it became a high point of post-structuralist principle (deriving from the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan) that the unconscious was ‘structured like a language’, that its workings were by very definition inaccessible to conscious thought, and that the human subject was irreparably split between a specular realm of false 262
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(‘imaginary’) ego-identification and a symbolic realm where its ‘identity’ consisted of nothing more than a series of shifting, discursively produced subject-positions. Then again, post-structuralists have been much influenced by Michel Foucault’s sceptical genealogies of knowledge, his argument that ‘truth’ is always and everywhere a product of vested power interests, so that different regimes of ‘power-knowledge’ give rise to various disciplinary techniques or modes of subjectively internalised surveillance and control. These ideas are presented as marking a break—a radical break—with the concepts and values of a humanist discourse which concealed its own ‘will to power’ by fostering the illusion of autonomous freedom and choice. So the claim is that post-structuralism affords a potentially liberating space, a space of ‘plural’, ‘decentred’, multiple or constantly destabilised subject-positions where identities can no longer be defined according to such old ‘essentialist’ notions as gender or class affiliation. For some theorists, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe among them, it points the way towards a politics—an avowedly ‘post-Marxist’ politics—that acknowledges the sheer range and variety of present-day social interests. On this view it is merely a form of ‘meta-narrative’ delusion to suppose that any one privileged theory (like that of classical Marxism) could somehow speak the truth of history or rank those interests on a scale of priority with socio-economic or class factors as the single most important issue. Rather we should think— in post-structuralist terms—of subjects as ‘dispersed’ over a range of multiple positions, discourses, sites of struggle, etc., with nothing (least of all some grand ‘totalising’ theory) that would justify their claim to speak on behalf of this or that oppressed class or interest group. Still there is a problem when it comes to explaining how anyone could make a reasoned or principled choice in such matters if every such ‘choice’ were indeed just a product of the subject’s particular mode of insertion into a range of pre-existing discourses. Nor is this problem in any way resolved by the idea that subjects are non-self-identical, that subjectivity is always an ongoing process, or again—following Lacan—that there never comes a point where the ego escapes from the endless ‘detours’ of the signifier and at last achieves a wished-for state of ‘imaginary’ plenitude and presence. For this still works out as a determinist doctrine, a theory of the subject as constructed in (or by) language, whatever the desire of some post-structuralists to give it a vaguely utopian spin by extolling the ‘freeplay’ of the signifier or the possibility of subjects adopting as many positions—or ‘performative’ roles—as exist from one 263
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situation to the next. In Barthes’s later work it is the very act of writing, exemplified in certain avant-garde literary texts, that is thought of as somehow accomplishing the break with oppressive (naturalised or realist) norms, and thus heralding a new dispensation where identity and gender are no longer fixed by the grim paternal law of bourgeois ‘classical realism’. Such ideas have a certain heady appeal when compared with the bleak message conveyed by theorists such as Foucault and Lacan. Nevertheless, they are open to the same objection: that the subject remains (in Lacan’s phrase) a mere ‘plaything’ of language or discourse, and that reality likewise becomes just an optional construct out of various signifying codes and conventions. One result—as seen in post-structuralist approaches to historiography and the social sciences—is a blurring of the crucially important line between fictive discourse (novels, stories, imaginary scenarios of various kinds) and those other kinds of narrative that aim to give a truthful account of past or present events. That confusion of realms is carried yet further in the writing of postmodernist thinkers like Jean Baudrillard who argue—largely on the same premise—that we now inhabit a world of ubiquitous mass-media simulation where the very idea of a reality ‘behind appearances’ (along with the notions of truth, critique, ideology, false consciousness and so forth) must be seen as belonging to a bygone age of nai?ve Enlightenment beliefs. This is all—as post-structuralists would happily concede—a very long way from Saussure’s original programme for a structural linguistics based on strictly scientific principles. Whether or not their more radical claims stand up to careful scrutiny is still a topic of intense dispute among theorists of various persuasions. Further reading: Attridge et al. 1987; Barthes 1975; Belsey 1980; Harari 1980; Harland 1987; Sturrock 1979; Young 1981. CN
POWER A term which has a variety of meanings. Most usually, power is taken to mean the exercise of force or control over individuals or particular social groups by other individuals or groups. Power, in this view, is something extrinsic to the constitution of both individuals and society. For example, the theory of the role of the state in the writings of liberalism normally conceives of legislative power in terms 264
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of limitations on the state’s ability to use justifiable force with regard to the behaviour of individuals who fall under its jurisdiction. On such a view, it does not follow that the exercise of power is a priori coercive in nature, since power exercised within the limits of legality is taken to be justly exercised. On the other hand, liberals would regard any exercise of power which compels individuals to behave in ways that they would not freely choose as coercive. Power and authority are not necessarily synonymous. Thus, for example, the seventeenth-century political philosopher James Harrington (an exponent of civic humanism) drew a distinction between de facto power (the possession of power as a matter of fact) and de jure authority (authority by right, i.e. by means of justification). Harrington notes that one may have the one without the other. Power without authority expresses for him the essential feature of the modern or ‘Gothic’ form of government, which corresponds with the de facto possession of power by a monarch, who is not answerable to those citizens who fall under his or her jurisdiction and thereby rules without the authority of their consent. The writings of French philosopher Michel Foucault have often been taken as influential (principally amongst exponents of one form or other of post-structuralism or postmodernism, both of which Foucault has been identified with at one time or another) in their attempt to redefine what the term ‘power’ means. Foucault, following Nietzsche, seeks to redefine power in a way that is notably different from how it is conceived within more traditional theory. Thus, power, in Nietzsche’s view (see especially The Will to Power, 1968b: section 1067), does not so much express differences in the relationships that exist between individuals or groups as permeate the entirety of reality and thereby become its essence. Likewise, Foucault conceives of power as existing not as something that is exercised over individuals or groups, but as being constitutive of both the relations which exist between groups and hence equally of individual and group identities themselves. Important in Foucault’s analysis is the claim that power is not only constitutive of social reality and of such social forms as subjectivity. He also claims that discourses of knowledge are in fact an expression of power relations and themselves embodiments of power (a view that goes back to English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who saw knowledge as an expression of power, and indeed well beyond him—for example, the Ancient Greek figure Georgias, discussed in Plato’s dialogue of the same name). On this view, power becomes so universal and immanent to 265
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social relations that it is difficult not to regard it as a metaphysical conception. Further reading: Foucault 1980; Harrington 1992; Mill 1984; Nietzsche 1968b. PS
PRAGMATISM A philosophical movement that exerted a profound influence upon American thought during the first part of the twentieth century. Principal thinkers associated with pragmatism include C.S. Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910), John Dewey (1859–1952), George Herbert Mead (1862–1931) and Clarence Irving Lewis (1883–1964). However, these thinkers do not share one basic doctrine on the basis of which they may all straightforwardly be classified as pragmatists. It is, rather, in virtue of a shared approach to philosophical problems that the term ‘pragmatism’ is best applied to each of them. Although an exclusively American movement, unsurprisingly (given the fact that its thinkers were schooled in European philosophy and literature) pragmatism owes much to British and continental European philosophy. Thus, pragmatists like Peirce devoted their attention to elucidating problems in the sphere of the theory of knowledge that they had encountered in the work of Descartes or Kant. It is perhaps best to turn to Peirce’s own account of pragmatism, given in the essay ‘What Is Pragmatism’, for a concise exposition of his notion of pragmatism: a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life [ . . . ] if one can define accurately all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the affirmation or denial of a concept could imply, one will have therein a complete definition of the concept, and there is absolutely nothing more in it. (Peirce 1998:332) In other words, in Peirce’s view, pragmatism involves placing emphasis upon the concrete outcomes of our concepts as a means of determining their value as expressions of knowledge. Thus, according to Peirce in ‘Definition and Description of Pragmatism’, there is ‘an inseparable connection between rational cognition and rational purpose’. Hence, Peirce outlined pragmatism as ‘the doctrine that the 266