PostModern Theory

Deana Van Brocklin

Many social theorists have grown tired of

the mainstream and traditional sociological
theories of functionalism, conflict, and symbolic
interactionism.

This discontent led to the development of

alternative sociological theories and mirrored
Western societies transition from modernity
to postmodernity.

The roots of modern and

postmodern theory
Many disciplines use the term modernism and
postmodernism, for vague concepts and are
arbitrarily applied to social phenomena.

Stephen Feldman (2000) applied the terms to

his study of the legal profession.
He stated, To travel from premodernism through
modernism and into postmodernism might take
several centuries and even millennia.

Continued..
When scholars think beyond present (modernity), they
allow for both a future (postmodernity) and,
consequently, a postmodern thought.
According to Alexander Riley (2002), The history of
postmodern thought begins in the French Third
Republic, roughly during the second half of the life of
the Republic, from about 1900 to the outbreak of World
War II in 1939. In the aftermath of the fall of the second
Bonaparte Empire and of the Paris Communes rise and
demise, the late nineteenth century saw the
emergence of a great number of political and cultural
debates that would touch on the entire French society.
The social force that would change French society was
secularism.


C. Wright Mills (1959:166) simply states that
modern age was being succeeded by a
postmodern period.
John Deely (1994), agreeing with the simplicity
of the term postmodernism, argued that there
is a nearly indisputable consensus that the
word post can only exist in opposition,
continuity, or complementarity with the
universe which it presupposes, that is, the
world of modernity.


As you can see, there is a lot of debate on postmodernism and
its roots, however, for American sociological theory,
postmodernism followed the dominancy of functionalism in the
1950s and the prevalence of neo-Marxist and conflict theory in
the 1960s and 1970s.
Many social theorists point to Thomas Kuhns book The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) as a significant
indicator that a reliance on science and scientific analysis was
not a criterion shared by sociologists.
Horwich (1993:1) states, Kuhns critique called into question
many of the central elements of the traditional picture the
concept of absolute truth, the observation/theory distinction,
the determinacy of rational choice, and the normative function
of philosophy of science and it provided an alternative model
of scientific change that dispensed with these notions
altogether, Kuhns radical views have been the focus of much
debate not only by philosophers, historians and sociologists
but also by large numbers of practicing scientists.

Defining Postmodernism
theory
Postmodernism is a late 20th century movement
in the arts, architecture, and criticism that was
a departure from modernism.
Postmodernism articulates that the world is in a
state of perpetual incompleteness and
permanent unresolve.
Many postmodernist theorists disagree with one
another about what are the parameters of
postmodernism and that is what makes defining
postmodernism so difficult.

Continued..
For example, Norman Denzin (1991:vii), a sociologist whose
thinking has made the postmodern turn, provided a definition of
postmodernism as it being undefineable.
On the other hand, George Ritzer (2000c) shared his view on the
difficulty of defining postmodernism. His thoughts were that
there is great diversity among the generally highly idiosyncratic
(peculiar or individual) postmodern thinkers, so it is difficult to
offer generalizations on which the majority would agree. For
clarity the terms are distinguished between postmodernity
and postmodernism. Postmodernity referring to a historical era
that is generally seen as following the modern era.
Postmodernism is cultural products and postmodern social
theory is a way of thinking that is distinct from modern social
theory.
Thus, the postmodern encompasses a new historical era, new
cultural products, and a new type of theorizing about the social
world.

Jacques Derrida
Wallace and Wolf (1999) stated that two famous names in
postmodernism are Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.
Jacques Derrida was born in El-Bair, Algeria, in 1930. Derrida is a
French philosopher and essayist, rather than sociologist. His works
utilize a deconstructive approach. (Deconstruction is a strategy of
analysis that has been applied to such areas as literature, linguistics,
philosophy, law, and architecture.)
Derridas deconstructive approach is illustrated in his three books;
Speech Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and Writing and Difference.
His publications are focused on the deconstructive analysis of
language.
The concept of discourse is derived from his works. In using the term
discourse, Derrida and other postmodernist mean to emphasize the
primacy of the words we use, the concepts they embody, and the
rules that develop within a group about what are appropriate ways of
talking about things. They mediate between us and reality. (Wallace
and Wolf, 1999:407)

Jacques Derrida on
Logocentrism
Derrida was critical of grand narratives and viewed their
construction as the product of what he referred to as
logocentrism. Logocentrism are modes of thinking that apply
truth claims to universal propositions.
In other words, our knowledge of the social world is grounded
in a belief that we can make sense of our ever-changing and
highly complex societies by referring to certain unchanging
principles or foundations. The postmodernist stance
articulated by Derrida calls for a repudiation of logocentrism,
which entails taking what postmodernist refer to as an
antifoundational stance.
In its most extreme versions, postmodernism constitutes a
profound reputation of the entire Western philosophical
tradition and represents a form of extreme skepticism about
our ability to carry on the sociological tradition as it has been
conceived since the 19th century.

Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926 in Poitiers,
France. Foucault led a very interesting life that was cut
short when he died of AIDS in 1984, at the age of 57.
There is some debate as to whether Foucault was a
postmodernist, a functionalist, or something else. He uses
Marxs terms; class, political economy, commodity,
capital, labor power, and struggle. However, the labels of
Marxist, structuralist, semiotician are those of his readers,
not his.
Foucaults work is difficult to understand because of his
wide range of historical references and his use of new
concepts, but perhaps most of all because his theories do
not fit very well into any of the established disciplines.

Continued..
In his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison (1977), Foucault described how prisons are
examples of coercive social institutions found in all
societies and throughout most of human history.
Institutions such as prisons and asylums are
highlighted by regularized routines designed to
control and repress human behavior. Foucault
examined the last three centuries of the history of
prisons and found that one form of torture had been
replaced by another.
Foucaults structural analysis of total institutions led
him to conclude that modern prisons reflect modern
views of appropriate forms of discipline, especially as
determined by those who posses power.

Foucault on Punishment and

discipline
Punishment became gentle, though not for humanitarian
reasons, suggests Foucault. He argues that this theory of
gentle punishment represents the first step away from
excessive force of the sovereign, and towards more generalized
and controlled means of punishment.
This involved putting convicts on display in a more controlled
and effective spectacle. Prisoners would be forced to do work
that reflected their crime, thus repaying society for their
infractions. This would have allowed the public to see the
convicts bodies enacting their punishment, and reflect on crime.
The emergence of prison as the form of punishment for every
crime grew out of the development of discipline in the 18th and
19th centuries, according to Foucault. He looks at the
development of highly refined forms of discipline and of
discipline concerned with the smallest and most precise aspects
of a persons body.

Continued..
Foucaults argument is that discipline created docile
bodies (people willing to cooperate). Which is ideal for
the new economies, politics and warfare of the modern
industrial age.
But, to construct docile bodies the disciplinary
institutions must be able to constantly observe and
record the bodies they control and ensure the
internalization of the disciplinary individuality within the
bodies being controlled.
Discipline must come without excessive force and
through careful observation; molding the bodies into the
correct form through this observation.

David Riesman
David Riesman was born in Philadelphia in 1909.
Riesman graduated from Harvard College in 1931 and
earned a degree from Harvard Law School in 1934.
He served as a clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Louis Brandeis and later taught at the University of
Buffalo Law School.
In 1949 he joined the social science faculty of the
University of Chicago. Then, The Lonely Crowd was
published in 1950 and became a best seller, as well
as winning the admiration of his academic peers.
He co-authored the book with Nathan Glazer,
professor emeritus of education and social structure,
and Reuel Denney. But, according to Glazer, Riesman
was the real author of the work.

The Lonely Crowd

The Lonely Crowd (1950-2001) can be viewed
as a modern to postmodern discourse in that
Riesman discussed dramatic social changes that
were reshaping American society.
The Lonely Crowd was jargon-free, so it was
easier to understand. In the preface to Faces the
Crowd (1952) Riesman spelled out his intent for
The Lonely Crowd as a wholly tentative effort to
lay out a scheme for the understanding of
character, politics, and society in America.

Continued..
The postmodern approach is illustrated by Riesmans
attention to the challenge in Americas social character
from the 19th century to the mid 20th century.
Riesman defined social character as that part of
character which is shared by significant social groups
and is the product of the experience of these groups.
He explains this by saying, The link between character
and society is to be found in the way in which society
ensured some degree of conformity from the individuals
who make it up. In each society, such a mode of ensuring
conformity is built into the child, and then either
encouraged or frustrated in later adult experience.
In other words, the agents of socialization, beginning with
the family and extending to the media, employers, religion
and so on, attempt to make individuals conform to the
expectations of specific social groups of society in general.


Riesman used a number of significant terms in The Lonely Crowd.
Among them are; tradition-direction, inner-direction, other-direction, the
oversteered child, bohemia, and the self-consciousness.
In tradition-directed societies, social change is at a minimum.
Conformity is ensured by incorporating a near-automatic obedience to
tradition.
The concept of inner-direction is intended to cover a very wide range of
social types.
Riesman applied the term other-direction especially to upper-middle
class persons in large cities. The other-directed person is shallow, freer
with money, friendlier, and more demanding of approval.
Individuals who attempt to meet the standards of significant other risk
being oversteered. This is especially true of children. There is a
danger for children who are born to and raised by exemplary persons to
be oversteered, that is, to find themselves set on a course they cannot
realistically follow.


An aspect of any modern society is the fact that
some individuals do not wish to conform or blend
into the mode dictated by other-directed forces.
Such people attempt to find autonomy or harmony.
Riesman called this place Bohemia.
Riesman believed that self-consciousness
constitutes the insignia of the autonomous in an era
dependent on other-direction. He has a very
profound idea regarding self-consciousness;
achieving self-consciousness is undoubtedly difficult,
and even those who attain it often fail to mold it into
the structure of an autonomous life and succumb to
anomie.

Jean-Francois Lyotard
Jean-Francois Lyotard was born in Versailles,
France in 1924. He was once one of the worlds
foremost philosophers and noted
postmodernist.
His interdisciplinary discourse covers a wide
variety of topics, including the postmodern
conditions, modernist and postmodernist art,
knowledge and communication, language,
metanarratives, and legitimization.

Jean-Francois Lyotard on
Legitimation
Lyotards definition and usage of postmodernism are
linked to the three concepts of legitimation, language,
and narratives.
According to Lyotard, narration is the quintessential
form of customary knowledge in at least five ways:
1. Popular stories recount the successes and failures of
the heros undertakings. These failures successes
bestow legitimacy upon the hero (which may be an
individual or a social institution). Thus, the narratives
allow the society in which they are told, on the one
hand, to define this criteria of competence and, on the
other hand, to evaluate according to those criteria what
is performed or can be performed within in.

Continued..
2. The narrative form, unlike the developed forms of the
discourse of knowledge, lends itself to a great variety of
language games.
3. The pragmatic rules that constitute the social bond are
transmitted through these narratives.
4. Rhythm, time, and metrical beat are emphasized because
they make narratives easy to remember.
5. A culture that gives precedence to the narrative form
doubtless has no more of a need for special procedures to
authorize its narratives than to remember its past. It is even
harder to imagine a society handing over the authority for its
narratives to some opposing narrator.
Narratives are an integral aspect of culture and directly
affected the language of any given society.


Lyotard utilized the methodology he called
language games. In The Postmodern Condition he
uses the method of language game analysis to
contrast the pragmatics of narrative and scientific
knowledge.
He defines modernism as the attempt to
legitimate science by appeal to metanarratives,
or philosophical accounts of the progress of
history in which the hero of knowledge struggles
to ward a great goal such as freedom, universal
peace, or the creation of wealth.


Language exemplified the first efforts of
legitimacy. Rulers of past societies utilized
language constructs when they formed
governments and regimes. Kant referred to this
as the legitimation of the normative instance.
Each human who is born into the world comes
to a place that has been previously labeled, or
constructed. These labels have been legitimized
by past events, and by those in power.

Relevancy
Modern and postmodern theories are promoted as alternatives
to the more traditional sociological theories. The terms modern
and postmodern are themselves problematic, in that they are
vague and have been applied to a wide variety of phenomena
over a period of many centuries.
The concepts of modernism and postmodernism are usually
used in connection with technological advancements and new
modes of thinking (such as preindustrial, industrial, and
postindustrial.)
Every era has considered itself modern. When social thinkers
and policymakers think beyond the current era, they may be
thought of as postmodernists. Thus, in order to think like a
postmodernist, a social theorist must break from the taken-forgranted world, the given rules, and the claims to authority
found in a society.

Continued..
Modern and postmodern theorists have disdain for
positivism and the scientific methods of data collection
and analysis. They reject the grand theorizing and
narratives that are common in the more traditional
sociological theories.
There are those who wonder whether modern and
postmodern theories are actually theories at all.
Sociological theory has traditionally consisted of grand
narratives and big ideas. Consequentially, rejecting
grand theorizing is similar to rejecting sociological theory.
Sociological analysis is the examination of large social
events: societies, organizations, cultures, and so on.


Successful sociological analysis is, for the most part,
dependent on a broad and macro approach. With this reality in
mind, it is easy to understand why a large number of
criticisms are levied against modern and postmodern social
thought.
The first criticism directed toward modern and postmodern
theories is aimed at their refusal to employ empirical studies
with statistical analysis. It is difficult to examine whether their
observations and theories are accurate because there are no
systematic tests of these assertions (Tuner, 2003:246).
In this regard, modern and postmodern theories offer no more
to social theory than do the critical theorists; they question
existing sociological interpretations of events, but offer little
concrete evidence that their perspective is any better.
Sociological theory must be, at the very least, falsifiable;
otherwise we are no better then philosophy.


It may be that modern and postmodern theorists
are indeed onto some new revelation and insight
regarding society and social interaction.
However, if it remains unsubstantiated with
proof we will never know its validity.
Free and unconstrained by the rules of science
and the dispassionate rhetoric of the modern
scientist, postmodernists have allowed
themselves to create broad generalizations
without qualifications (Ritzer, 2000c484).

Conclusion
Since every society has considered itself modern,
the term is too vague to apply to a theoretical
approach.
Within a short period of time (50-100 years) from now,
future generations will look back at this era and laugh
at claims of modernity and postmodernity just as we
do to past generations.
Postmodern discourse is itself vague and abstract, so
it is difficult to connect to the social world.
Thus, modern and postmodern theory may not really
be a theory at all; it may more accurately be viewed
as an ideological belief system.