Postm odernism

Contemporary Social Theory

BS-Social Sciences
SZABIST, Karachi
Saad Lakhani

W hat is the Postm odern?

A cultural movement? a style, a way of life
After-moderntemporal description?
Radical departure from modernity/extremely advanced
version of modernity/Both?
An approaching nihilism nothing to believe in!
Anti-foundationalism, relativism nothing to stand for!
French free-floating careless irresponsible obscure pseudophilosophy and what not

D efi
n itions
Routledges Encyclopedia Politics Key Concepts refers to
Postmodernism as As a descriptor of society,
postmodernism refers to a much more contingent, unsettled
and disorderly social order rather than certainties around
which modernity was seemingly organized.
Lyotard: Incredulity towards metanarratives!: The rejection
of the scientific canon, of the idea there can be a single
coherent rationality or that reality has a unitary nature that
can be definitively observed or understood

If everything is socially constructed, nothing is!

Judith Butler: Who are these postmodernists? is it [not]

more often a name that one is called if and when one offers
a critique of the subject, a discursive analysis, or questions
the integrity or coherence of totalizing social descriptions?
It appears in dismissive statements such as if discourse is
all there is if everything is a text if the subject is
dead if real bodies do not exist?

Jean-Francois Lyotard
Born in Versailles, France. Lived 1924-1998
One of the worlds foremost philosophers and a notably selfproclaimed postmodernist
Taught at Lycee (Algeria), Saint-Denis (Paris), University of
California Irvine; also taught as visiting professor at John
Hopkins, Berkeley, Yale, Stony Brook, San Diego, San Paulo
(Brazil), Montreal (Canada)
Covered a variety of topics such as postmodern conditions,
modernist and post modernist art, knowledge and
communication, language metanarratives, and legitimization

The Postm odern Condition (1979)

The Post-Modern Condition was commissioned as a report
on the state of modern knowledge by the government of
Quebec (Canada)
Lyotard argued that the status of knowledge is altered as
societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and
cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.
1950s onward: Postmodern age

N o m ore big stories

Believed that grand narratives of knowledge had lost their credibility
in the postmodern society and their claims of legitimacy
Believed narratives are an integral aspect of culture and directly
affect the language of any given society
Used language games to contrast narrative and scientific knowledge
Defines modernism as the attempt to legitimate science by appeal
to metanarratives, or philosophical accounts of the progress of
history in which the hero or knowledge struggles toward a great
goal

 The Postmodern age is marked by an increasing incredulity

towards metanarratives and the emergence of
micronarratives in their place.
There is a disillusionment, or disenchantment, with total
explanations of realityexplanations that have a single
metaphysical answer to all questions of factssuch as those
offered by science, or religion, or political programs such as
Communism.
The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its
great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal.
In current times, a multiplicity of localized and specific language
games have emerged (save the whale, I am Karachi, Girls at
Dhabbas)

Language G am es
Utterances defined by rules that contextualize and
characterize their meaning.
Language Games do not need outside legitimation they
are valid so long as the participants participate in them.
Every utterance is move in a game. If rules change, so
does the game.
Denotative: Snow is white (correctly identity things)
Performative: I do, I promise (carries out an action)
Prescriptive: Give me money (requests, recommends,
commands)

M odern Science
Modern Science is a language game which legitimates itself
with reference to metanarratives:
to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating
useful regularities and seeks the truth, it is obliged to
legitimate the rules of its own game [it] legitimates itself
with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an
explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the
dialectics of Spirit [Hegel] the emancipation of the
rational (Enlightenment) or working subject (Marxism), or
the creation of wealth (Capitalism).

Postm odern Know ledge

Postmodern Science concerns itself with undecidables, the
limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by
incomplete information, portions, catastrophes, and
pragmatic paradoxes.
In other words, postmodern knowledge does not do
violence to the inherent complexity and diversity of the
natural and social world.
NOT guided by some eternal truth of history: the idea of
progress or the social emancipation of mankind.

M etanarratives are bad

Metanarratives impose a totalizing pattern on things
and give a false universality to actions carried out in its
name
Such grand narratives attempt to unify all aspects of life
in a single blowhuman liberty and emancipation can all
be brought about universally
Humanity will thus be capable of managing and
controlling everythinghumans, nature, human nature.

 Grand narratives are not trustworthy. Grand narratives

rely on a totalizing format as a way to legitimate its
authority and as a way of claiming truth
Science and its ideological framework can be naturalized
and normalized in society.
Metanarratives result in people thinking ends justify the
means; colonialism! (Western society was highest point in
human civilization)

Anti-Foundationalism ?
To say that postmodernity refuses foundations, and becomes
merely relativist, is to say that permanent and stable
foundations exist in the first place and that ones chooses to
ignore a foundation, a pregiven point of departure.
if foundations are things that are constructed and constituted
brought into existence not expressive of a realitythen to
question the act of constituting foundations is not to relativize
their existence as much as it is a matter of questioning the
political interests and forces that underscore that act.

Judith Butler on Subject Critique

The critique of the subject is not a negation or repudiation
of the subject, but, rather, a way of interrogating its
construction as a pregiven or foundationalist premise.
Butler
The subject is itself the effect of a genealogy which is
erased at the moment that the subject takes itself as the
single origin of its action, and that the effects of an
action always supersede the stated intention or
purpose of the act. 161

Exclusions and Erasures

For a subject to be a pregiven point of departure for
politics is to defer the question of the political construction
and regulation of the subject itself; for it is important to
remember that subjects are constituted through exclusion,
that is, through the creation of a domain of deauthorized
subjects, pre-subjects, figures of abjection, populations
erased from view.

 How do progressive organizations and groups challenge the

construction of the Pakistani subjectthe patriot? By invoking a
more inclusionary model of subjectivity.
But is that inclusion ever exhaustive enough? Does it not always
tend to leave out certain individuals?
Statements such as why dont liberals talk about how women are
effected by poverty or corruption? Does this mean women are
excluded beforehand from the subject of oppression, i.e. that
patriarchy cannot legitimately be oppression? What about children
being molested by members of the family?
Statements such as this is not an attack on
Christians/Hindus/Shia but is an attack on Pakistanis. Can
Christians and hindus, or shias, bolochis, sindhis, etc, only qualify
as victims when they are simultaneously granted citizenship?

 In every construction, says Butler, there is always erasure and

forgetfulness. Constructions construct the world in an orderly
fashion by doing violence to the manifoldness and multiplicity
present in the world.
Women rights, or women empowerment, tends to reinforce the
gender binary! But is it not the system of binary gender
relations that grounds the oppression of individuals (women,
children) and the exclusion of so many more (LGBT).
Does not every production of the subject do that!
Surely there is a caution offered here, that in the very
struggle toward enfranchisement and democratization, we
might adopt the very models of domination by which we were
oppressed, not realizing that one way that domination works is
through the regulation and production of subjects.

Language does m atter. A lot.

Read pp. 169-170

W hat is Postm odernism after all!

I dont know what postmodernism
is, but I do have some sense of
what it might mean to subject
notions of the body and materiality
to a deconstructive critique. 168

LiberalRefl
exivization (or guilt)
The retreat of the Big Other: we no longer live our
lives in compliance with Nature or Tradition; there is no
symbolic order or code of accepted fictions to guide us
in our social behavior
All our impulses, from sexual orientation to ethnic
belonging, are more and more often experienced as
matters of choice. Thing which once seemed selfevident how to feed and educate a child, how to
proceed in sexual seduction, how and what to eat, how
to relax and amuse oneself have now being colonized
by reflexivity and are experienced as something to be
learned and decided on.

 Public order is no longer maintained by hierarchy, repression

and strict regulation, and therefore is no longer subverted by
liberating acts of transgression (as when we laugh at a teacher
behind his back).
Instead, we have social relations among free and equal
individuals, supplemented by passionate attachment to an
extreme form of submission, which functions as the dirty
secret, the transgressive source of libidinal satisfaction.
In a permissive society, the rigidly codified, authoritarian
master/slave relationship becomes transgressive. This
paradox or reversal is the proper topic of psychoanalysis:
psychoanalysis does not deal with the authoritarian father who
prohibits enjoyment, but with the obscene father who enjoins it
and thus renders you impotent or frigid. The unconscious is not
secret resistance to the law, but the law itself.

Psychoanalyzing Postm odernism

What psychoanalysis properly concerns itself

with are the unexpected consequences of the
disintegration of the structures that have
traditionally regulated libidinal life. Why does
the decline of paternal authority and fixed
social and gender roles generate new guilts
and anxieties, instead of opening up a brave
new world in which we can enjoy shifting and
reshaping our multiple identities.

 For psychoanalysis, the perversion of

the human libidinal economy is what
follows from the prohibition of some
pleasurable activity: not a life led in
strict obedience to the law and
deprived of all pleasure but a life in
which exercising the law provides a
pleasure of its own, a life in which
performance of the ritual destined to
keep illicit temptation at bay becomes
the source of libidinal satisfaction.
Not lack of order/discipline

Violence has reasons. Plenty of them .

All the talk about foreigners stealing work
from us or about the threat they represent to
our Western values should not deceive us:
under closer examination, it soon becomes
clear that this talk provides a rather
superficial secondary rationalization. The
answer we ultimately obtain from a skinhead
is that it makes him feel good to beat
foreigners, that their presence disturbs him.
A Neo-Nazi skinhead who beats up black
people knows exactly what he is doing, but
does it anyway.

 these "useless" and "excessive"

outbursts of violence, which display
nothing but a pure and naked ("nonsublimated") hatred of the Otherness,
are the obverse of the "reflexivization"
of our daily lives.
What happens in psychoanalytic treatment
is strictly homologous to the response of
neo-Nazi skinhead who, when really
pressed for the reasons for his violence,
suddenly starts to talk like social workers,
sociologists and social psychologists,
quoting diminished social mobility, rising
insecurity, the disintegration of paternal
authority, the lack of maternal love in his
early childhood - the unity of practice and
its inherent ideological legitimization
disintegrates into raw violence and its
impotent, inefficient interpretation.

Repression of Class-Consciousness
Repression of Class Politics, or even any form of genuine
politics (social liberation at large) leads to ethnic and
religious fundamentalisms, i.e. racism
the excessive investment of the multiculturalist liberals in
protecting immigrants ethnic rights clearly draws its
energy from the "repressed" class dimension.