Michael W. Foley

Department of Politics
The Catholic University of America
<foley@cua>

 

Rosenau, Pauline Marie. Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1992.

 

On display in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibit of postmodernist drawing is a piece by Stephen Prima: 67 framed sheets, of various shapes and sizes, broad brushed, light tan ink wash on rag barrier paper, with the suggestive tag “No Title/(‘The History of Modern Painting, to label it with a phrase, has been the struggle against the catalog….’ Barnett Newman).” Pauline Rosenau’s book is a thoroughgoing repudiation of that (post)modernist preoccupation. To analyze postmodernism, in Rosenau’s mind, is to catalog it. In the process, her “postmodernists” mix and blend, as indistinguishable, but for her frames, as Prima’s paintings. Postmodernism plays on the ambiguity, contradiction, and confusion of the text. Rosenau falls victim to it. She mixes description and prescription, observer and observed, thinker, thought and thought-about in an eclectic and often bewildering catalog of postmodern opinion.

 

Running through the book is a distinction between two broad categories of postmodernists. The “skeptical post-modernists”

 

argue that the post-modern age is one of fragmentation, disintegration, malaise, meaninglessness, a vagueness or even absence of moral parameters and societal chaos. . . . In this period no social or political 'project' is worthy of commitment. Ahead lies overpopulation, genocide, atomic destruction, the apocalypse, environmental devastation, the explosion of the sun and the end of the solar system in 4.5 billion years, the death of the universe through entropy. (15)

 

Given such powerful and alarming claims, it may seem surprising that the skeptics also maintain “that there is no truth” and that “all that is left is play, the play of words and meaning” (15).

 

The "affirmatives" are a still more nebulous category: More indigenous to Anglo-North American culture than to the Continent, the generally optimistic affirmatives are oriented toward process. They are either open to positive political action (struggle and resistance) or content with the recognition of visionary, celebratory personal nondogmatic projects that range from New Age religion to New Wave life-styles and include a whole spectrum of post-modern social movements. (15-16)

 

Who are these post-modernists? We never learn, though Rosenau cites Baudrillard, Derrida, and articles by Todd Gitlin and Klaus Scherpe. The theorists of postmodernism and its exemplars exchange places freely in Rosenau’s account, and it is often difficult to tell which is being described. Nor do we get the opportunity to judge postmodern thought for ourselves; Rosenau rarely quotes her theorists and even more rarely explores an individual author’s work or argumentation. Postmodern thinkers, in her account, do not argue: they claim, they assume, they relinquish or adopt ideas, they reject or they share views; but they never appear to present a connected argument, elaborate an interpretation, or explain their case. How could they when, as Rosenau never tires of repeating, postmodernism “rejects reason,” preferring instead “the romantic, emotions, feelings” (94). This attack on reason, on the truth claims of modern science, on “the modern subject,” and on moral certainty make up, in Rosenau’s view, “one of the greatest intellectual challenges to established knowledge of the twentieth century” (5).

 

Rosenau is far from comfortable with that challenge. She dedicates her book to her parents, identified as “strong modern subjects, who had no confusion about their identity or their values.” She worries about the “cynical, nihilist, and pessimistic tone” of the skeptics, who find in “death, self-inflicted death, suicide,” “affirmations of power that conquer rationality” (143). She finds it alarming that “postmodern social movements” like fundamentalism have become “widespread and hegemonic” in some places, because “post-modernism in the Third World provides a justification for requiring women to adopt forms of dress that were abandoned by their grandmothers” and promotes the re-establishment of traditional marriage roles and the restoration of male prerogatives (154-5). In this book, Derrida lies down with the Ayatollah Khomeini; their issue is, as might be expected, monstrous.

 

Rosenau does scant better justice to her primary concern, the challenge of postmodernism to the social sciences. Though she cites work which has attempted to incorporate postmodern themes into a wide variety of social science disciplines, from international relations to urban planning, her treatment of these efforts is as superficial and unsatisfying as her references to Derrida, Foucault, or Baudrillard. More generally, though, she is inclined to pit postmodernism against social science. In the end, she suggests, efforts to create a “post-modern social science” run aground on what she sees as postmodernism’s fundamental denial of any standards for evaluating knowledge claims. “Can post-modernism survive for long,” she asks, “in a methodological vacuum where all means for adjudication between opposing points of view are relinquished?” The answer seems to be no. “Without any standard or criteria of evaluation post-modern inquiry becomes a hopeless, perhaps even a worthless enterprise” (136).

 

It is not clear in this presentation of an essentialized “post-modernism” that Rosenau grasps what her radical postmodernists are about. Baudrillard, she tells us, “claims the nuclear holocaust and the Third World War have already taken place; in so doing he violates all modern concepts of time” (68). Without linear time, she asks, what becomes of contemporary social science’s pursuit of causal explanation? Certainly Baudrillard challenges conventional notions of space and time. Does he do so to “overturn” them, as Rosenau asserts? Or to open up our thinking by shattering the self-validating presuppositions of “normal science”? Unless he and other postmodernists are offering an alternative metaphysic with exclusive truth claims of its own, it is hard to see how their “challenge” could be quite as cataclysmic as Rosenau imagines. Rosenau, however, prefers to stress the destructive confrontation of postmodern critique and social scientific presuppositions. In doing so, she evidently intends to take seriously both the most radical claims of the postmodernists and the most positivist pretensions of mainstream social science. But the maneuver is fatal, for it blocks an opportunity to investigate what is new about the postmodernist movement and how and to what degree it clashes with what is new and interesting in contemporary social science.

 

It is testimony to the cachet of postmodernism that this book found a publisher. That it found one in one of the better university presses perhaps testifies, as well, to that abandonment of standards of judgment which the author finds at the core of postmodernism. This may nevertheless be a book postmodernism deserves. The trouble with postmodernist theory lies, even more than in the overheated language of postwar French intellectuality, in its exaggerated claims. Skepticism, after all, is as old as Zeno, or Abraham, or the Buddha–pick your Father–and no doubt older: the Mothers had plenty of reason to be skeptical of the gods of the Fathers and the Father-Gods of even the skeptics. It was Hume who taught that “causality” was a figment of the imagination and the logical positivists who insisted that “truth” lay only in propositions, not in reality. So what is new in postmodernism? What does the movement have to say to the social sciences?

 

As a radical reaffirmation of traditional skepticism, probably not much. Reminders of the precariousness of our knowledge claims have regularly given way to fresh constructions: nominalism to Baconian inductivism, French skepticism to the Cartesian reduction, Humean skepticism to British empiricism, Kantian analysis to the idealist syntheses. Ultimately, the postmodern reconstruction of inquiry will hold more interest and have more impact than the initial, skeptical extravagances, however sound and however needed. Here too, however, it is not always clear how much the theorists of postmodernism run counter to even mainstream social scientific theory.

 

In an exchange between Lucien Goldman and Michel Foucault in 1969, Goldman attacked what he saw as a denial that “men make history” and quoted a bit of graffiti left on a blackboard in the Sorbonne by a student during the May 1968 uprising: “Structures do not take to the streets.” Foucault denied that he had ever called himself a structuralist, but another speaker, Jacques Lacan, attacked the aphorism because “if there is one thing demonstrated by the events of May, it is precisely that structures did take to the streets. The fact that those words were written at the very place where people took to the streets proves nothing other than, simply, that very often, even most often, what is internal to what is called action is that it does not know itself.”¹

 

Rosenau thinks this sort of argument captures postmodern thought. “Post-modern social science,” she tells us, would describe a society “without subjects or individuals,” in which structures “overpower the individual,” “beyond the reach of human intervention” (46). How curiously old-fashioned this sounds to a social scientist! Has the “sociological mind” ever been disposed to think otherwise? Lacan’s comment could have come from a scion of any of several lineages of social scientists, from Marx to Durkheim to Weber. Wasn’t it Freud who exploded the bourgeois self as Marx had exploded the bourgeois social order and Durkheim its moral order? American social scientists have no further to go than Robert K. Merton, whose definition of social science as the investigation of the “unintended consequences” of human action justly characterizes the mainstream of social scientific research since the nineteenth century.

 

Foucault himself seems only to echo Marx and Engels when he declared that every society controls the production of discourse in an attempt to “evade its ponderous, awesome materiality.”² By the time Foucault was well launched on his project to recover the hidden origins of our discourses about “man,” “madness,” and the criminal, moreover, Berger and Luckmann had published The Social Construction of Reality and Gregory Bateson had generated a good deal of heat, and some little light, with his notion of schizophrenia as a language disorder. It would not be altogether unfair to argue that French postmodernism paralleled developments that were already brewing in the social sciences, when it was not simply playing catch-up.

 

One area in contemporary social science in which divergence seems to overwhelm convergence, on the other hand, is precisely the question of human agency. What is really new in the social sciences, in political science perhaps above all, is an attempt to think through the implications of a “non-necessitarian” social science, in which the choices (and occasionally the personal skills) of individuals play a crucial role. The attempt to give the voiceless a voice, marked in contemporary feminism but also evident in important recent work in anthropology, history, sociology, and political science, likewise seems to run counter to any postmodern “denial of the subject.” Rosenau quotes a postmodernist feminist, Jane Flax, who finds “post- modernist narratives about subjectivity . . . inadequate” from the point of view of feminist theory (52). But she might equally well have cited work in the “new social history” or the Annales school.³

 

There are certainly tensions between postmodernist efforts to “decenter” the subject and the return to notions of human agency in contemporary social science. Rosenau plays on these conflicts, however, without really illuminating them, or even giving an adequate account of them. Despite the frequency with which the issue is joined, moreover, I suspect that postmodernists and their critics alike have been beguiled by the rhetoric and that there is a profound consistency in the efforts of Foucault, in particular, to banish the subject from the history of discourse while attempting to discover, in the everyday experience of the intolerable, new grounds for moral action on the part of an individual both constituted by prevailing discourse and free in the uncovering of its oppressive silences. Such possibilities go unglimpsed in Pauline Rosenau’s account, as they do in the moral and scientific positivisms which still dominate much social scientific practice. But they are well represented in recent social science, and they deserve better treatment than that afforded here.

 

Contemporary social science, moreover, both converges with postmodernism and borrows heavily from the attempts of Foucault, Bourdieu, and others to embed the new skepticism in new approaches to understanding. What characterizes these efforts is 1) a focus on discourse as the material (and thus powerful) vehicle for social understandings and action, and 2) the insistence that such understandings are best uncovered in examination of everyday practices. Behind these affirmations lie a discomfort with the rigidities of the various structuralisms and a rejection of “meta- narratives” like Marxism which attempt to capture the grand motions of history. Before them rages a still important debate on the justification for abandoning all such paradigms–or the possibility of doing so. But some of the best recent social science–like that of James C. Scott on “the arts of resistance,” Donald McCloskey on the rhetoric of economics, or Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivera on peasant economic discourse–uncovers the dynamics of concrete practices and bodies of discourse and demonstrates, in doing so, the fruitfulness of postmodern preoccupations. Rosenau’s book seems largely unconscious of this work. More’s the pity, because, as the postmodernists might insist, we will learn far more about postmodernism in the academy from the everyday practices and preoccupations of contemporary social scientists than by surveys of the self-consciously “postmodern.”

 

Notes

 

1. Quoted in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991), 210-11.

 

2. “The Discourse on Language,” in Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 216.

 

3. Curiously, Rosenau tells us that postmodernist skeptics “reject history as longue duree . . . because it claims to discover a set of timeless relations existing independent of everything else” (64). Unfortunately, she does not cite the postmodernists she has in mind, nor adequately explain their aversion to a key concept in the work of Fernand Braudel, an ardent supporter of Foucault.