Dr Pod's 'Recommended Albums By His Bobness The Zimmerman'

bob dylan (62)

the freewheelin’ bob dylan (63)

the times they are a-changin’ (64)

another side of bob dylan (64)

bringing it all back home (65)

highway 61 revisited (65)

blonde on blonde (66)

john wesley harding (68)

nashville skyline (69)

new morning (70)

pat garret & billy the kid (73)

planet waves (74)

blood on the tracks (75)

the basement tapes [67] (75)

desire (76)

hard rain (76)

street legal (78)

slow train coming (79)

at budokan (79)

saved (80)

biograph [62-81] (85)

oh mercy (89)

the bootleg series 1-3: rare and unreleased 61-91 (91)

good as i been to you (92)

world gone wrong (93)

time out of mind (97)

the bootleg series 4: live 66: the “royal albert hall concert” (98)

love and theft (2001)

the bootleg series 5: live 75: the rolling thunder revue (2002)

the bootleg series 6: live 64: concert at philharmonic hall (2004)

the bootleg series 7: no direction home soundtrack [59-66] (2005)

live at the gaslight 1962 (2005)

modern times (06)

30 Essential Zappa Collections: 1966 - 1996

Jun 66 Freak Out! Mar 66
Jun 67 Absolutely Free Nov 66
Mar 68 We’re Only In It For The Money Feb - Oct 67
May 68 Lumpy Gravy c. 61 - Oct 67
Dec 68 Cruising With Ruben & The Jets Dec 67 – Feb 68
Apr 69 Uncle Meat Sep 67 - Jul 68
Oct 69 Hot Rats Jul - Aug 69
Feb 70 Burnt Weeny Sandwich Aug 67 - 69
Aug 70 Weasels Ripped My Flesh Dec 67 - 69
Aug 71 Fillmore East, June 71 Jun 71
Mar 72 Just Another Band From L.A. Aug 71
Jul 72 Waka/Jawaka Apr - May 72
Nov 72 The Grand Wazoo Apr - May 72
Sep 73 Over-Nite Sensation Mar - Jun 73
Mar 74 Apostrophe (’) Mar 70 - 74
Sep 74 Roxy & Elsewhere Dec 73/May 74
Jun 75 One Size Fits All Aug - Dec 74
Oct 75 Bongo Fury Jan - May 75
Sep 78 Studio Tan Dec 74 - 76
Mar 79 Sheik Yerbouti Oct 77- Feb 78
Sep/Nov 79 Joe’s Garage Acts I, II & III Mar - Jun 79
Sep 81 You Are What You Is Apr - Sep 80
May 88 You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 1 Feb 69 - Aug 84
Oct 88 You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 2:
The Helsinki Concert Sep 74
Oct 88 Broadway The Hard Way Feb - Jun 88
Jun 91 Make A Jazz Noise Here Feb - Jun 88
Apr 93 Ahead Of Their Time Oct 68
Nov 93 The Yellow Shark Sep 92
Dec 94 Civilization Phaze III 67/91/92
Feb 96 The Lost Episodes 58 - 74


The albums are listed in order of release. Dates on the right are recording dates.

Notes

[i] ‘Modernism’ was the movement in the visual arts, literature, music and drama thatemerged at the turn of the twentieth century and which challenged broadly Victorian ideas about the production and meaning of art. ‘Modernity’ is often equated with ‘capitalism’. It can also be understood as the accumulation of capitalism’s social, cultural and technological forms. Alan Hudson suggests that ‘modernity is merely the phenomenal form of capitalist social relations embodying all the contradictions of that society.’ A. Hudson, ‘Introduction’, in F. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, (London, Junius, 1995), p. xxxiii. For James Heartfield, meanwhile, ‘the idea of ‘modernity’… is hopelessly imprecise’:After all, which modernity are you talking about? The one with the bakelite fixtures and the telegraph wires, or the one with the formica and the mainframe? Modernity was always a useless category because it fixed not on social determinants, like the free market, but on technical features, like ‘heavy industry’. Being itself an imprecise category, qualifications like postmodernity are even less satisfactory, since we do not necessarily agree on what modernity is, let alone what comes after.J. Heartfield, ‘The Risk Zone’, Living Marxism, No. 80 (June 1995), p. 48. Broadly speaking, postmodernists use the terms ‘modern’, ‘modernism’ and ‘modernity’ interchangeably as the embodiment of the Rationalist and Enlightenment ideas of the 17th and 18th centuries, and their implementation throughout the 19th and 20th.[ii] See C. Jencks, What is Postmodernism?, (London, Academy Edition, 1986); E. Lucie-Smith, Movements in Art Since 1945, (London, Thames and Hudson, 1992)[iii] See H. Foster, Postmodern Culture, (London, Pluto, 1985); S. Connor, PostmodernistCulture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, (Oxford, Blackwell, 1989); D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, (Oxford, Blackwell, 1989); F. Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (London, Verso, 1991); M. Morris, The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism, (London, Verso, 1988); R. Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, (London, Routledge, 1981); S. Sim (ed.), The Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought, (Cambridge, Icon Books, 1998), especially S. Sim, ‘Postmodernism and Philosophy’, pp. 3-14; A. Easthope, ‘Postmodernism and Critical and Cultural Theory’, pp. 15-27; I. H. Grant, ‘Postmodernism and Politics’, pp. 28-40; D. Morgan, ‘Postmodernism and Architecture’, pp. 78-88; C. Trodd, ‘Postmodernism and Art’, pp. 89-100; M. O’Day, ‘Postmodernism and Television’, pp. 112-120; B. Lewis, ‘Postmodernism and Literature (or: Word Salad Days, 1960-90)’, pp. 121-133, D. Scott, ‘Postmodernism and Music’, pp. 134-146; L. Spencer, ‘Postmodernism, Modernity and the Tradition of Dissent’, pp. 158-169[iv] See J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (Manchester,Manchester University Press, 1984); P. Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory, (London, Verso, 1987); M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. C. Gordon, (Brighton, Harvester Press, 1980); J. Derrida, Between the Blinds: A Derrida Reader, ed. P. Kamuf, (London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991)[v] J.-F. Lyotard, ibid., p. xxiv[vi] Ibid., p. xxiii[vii] Ibid., p. 81[viii] Ibid., p. xxiii[ix] M. Featherstone, ‘In Pursuit of the Postmodern: An Introduction’, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 5, No. 2/3 (June 1998), p. 198[x] R. Usher and R. Edwards, Postmodernism and Education, (London, Routledge, 1994),p. 2[xi] S. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism, (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1996), p. 12[xii] J.-F Lyotard, op. cit., p. 79[xiii] Ibid., p. 79.[xiv] A. Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique, (Cambridge, Polity, 1989), p.18[xv] I say ‘ostensibly’ because it would be wrong to take modernism’s radical credentials forgranted. In 1992, the conservative critic, John Carey, upset the received wisdom of the liberal intelligentsia when, after exposing the explicitly anti-democratic credentials of many of modernism’s leading figures, he cast doubt on the presumed connection between modernism and progressive thought. J. Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939, (London, Faber & Faber, 1992)[xvi] M. Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, (London, Verso, 1983), p. 345[xvii] Ibid., p. 346[xviii] M. Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Poststructuralism and Postmodernism, (London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 133[xix] See D. Bell, The Coming of Postindustrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting,(New York, Basic Books, 1973); V. Mosco and J. Wasko (eds.), The Political Economy of Information, (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); A. Callinicos, op. cit., pp. 121-127[xx] A. Callinicos, ibid., p. 170

Chapter 1: The Contemporary Sources of Relativism: Lyotard

1. Lyotard
Any critique of relativism in the current period must take into account the impact of postmodernism on social and political thought, and acknowledge the scope of its influence. Throughout this thesis, many of the major themes of postmodernism are apparent: the rejection of rational and universalising theories; the celebration of difference and diversity over common values; and the treatment of ‘reality’ as a discursive or conventional phenomenon. But understanding the extent to which postmodernism delimits these themes is problematic, not least in relation to the definitional imprecision of the terms ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’, ‘modernity and ‘postmodernity’. Therefore, despite being well established in the lexicon of contemporary social theory, it is important to highlight the different ways in which these terms are applied to social, economic and cultural phenomena before we can clarify both the temper of current intellectual trends and the need to explore the wider sources of the epistemological relativism that undergird postmodernist thought.

Postmodernism has come to be associated with a variety of developments within aesthetics, literary theory, philosophy and social theory. The term was first applied in relation to innovations in art and architecture, music, film and literature. In these particular fields, postmodernism came to represent the rejection of much of the modernist agenda, including the idea that originality is the highest expression of artistic endeavour, best accomplished through experimentation with aesthetic forms. From the 1950s onwards, the move towards eclecticism, pluralism, irony and pastiche became the most recognisable features of a postmodern aesthetic. Wider concerns about the relationship between representation and originality, the status of the ‘author’ and the ‘mediatization’ of reality accorded with the influence of postmodernist social theory, which began to emerge as a more or less distinct body of thought by the 1970s.

The many tracts produced in its name suggest that ‘postmodernism’ does not imply a consistent method of analysis towards the aesthetic, philosophical, cultural and political themes that it denotes. But what we can say is that by rejecting broadly rationalist notions of society and progress, as well as the idea of an intelligible, objective reality, the leading figures of postmodernism accelerated a tendency towards relativism throughout the social sciences.
Postmodernist philosophers and social theorists justify their celebration of indeterminacy, in part, by claiming to have exposed the restrictions that humanism and universalism have placed on the analysis of identity, culture and ‘difference’. Later in this chapter, I address this question by focussing on some of the ways in which poststructuralism and deconstruction have provided the intellectual framework through which the universal human project commonly associated with the Enlightenment and its heritage has been challenged. At this stage, however, in order to clarify the use of the terms, ‘postmodern’, ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postmodernity’, I want to concentrate on the ideas of two authors in particular: Lyotard and Baudrillard. Lyotard and Baudrillard are both associated, to a greater or lesser degree, with poststructuralism, but what sets them apart from other leading contemporary figures associated with the emergence of postmodernism is that much of their work centres around the characterisation of the current conjuncture as an identifiable shift in social, economic and cultural life. Their conceptions of this new ‘reality’ differ in focus, but they both identify postmodernity as a more or less distinct historical phase in the evolution of capitalism, and share a concern to address the philosophical problems borne of this alleged transformation.

In his seminal work, The Postmodern Condition (1979), Lyotard sets out to clarify the intellectual orientation of postmodern thought: ‘Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives’. The ‘metanarratives’ against which Lyotard’s scepticism is directed can be characterised as any attempt to make sense of the human experience by relating it to general or determinate tendencies in social development. During the last two centuries, Lyotard argues, this has given rise to four more or less distinct discourses: ‘the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, [and] the creation of wealth.’ Each of these expressions of allegiance to ‘Progress’, he maintains, anticipates the gulag and the gas chambers. ‘The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take’, he remarks. It is therefore imperative that we abandon such ‘grand narratives’, insofar as they have been applied to legitimate science, politics and ‘the modern’.

All attempts at realising the Enlightenment project, Lyotard concludes, are ‘totally obsolete’. However, whilst distancing himself decisively from the ideological narratives of socialism and capitalism, and from the wider intellectual foundations of ‘modernity’, Lyotard does not read postmodernism simply in terms of the supercession of ‘modernism’. At the same time as identifying the exhaustion of ‘the modern’, Lyotard’s conceptualisation of the postmodern is also oriented towards realising the potential of many of modernism’s aesthetic concerns. In their own attempt to define postmodernism, Robin Usher and Richard Edwards write: ‘Perhaps it is best understood as a state of mind, a critical self-referential posture and style, a different way of seeing and working, rather than a fixed body of ideas’. But although his ideas are consistent with this interpretation of postmodernism as an ‘intellectual mood’, Lyotard offers a definition of postmodernism that proves to be altogether more revealing, especially in light of his concern to highlight its affinity with modernism. Hence postmodernism, Lyotard claims, ‘is not modernism at its end but in its nascent state’.

This celebration of postmodernism as an extension of a progressive dynamic within modernism can be read as an attempt to fully realise the potential suggested by the aesthetic experiments undertaken by the major figures of ‘high modernism’. In the case of literature, for example, the shift from the supposed objectivity provided by fixed, all-knowing third person narratives – the ‘God’s-eye view’ – to the notion of multiple, discontinuous narratives is, according to Lyotard, consistent with his own emphasis on the incoherence and fragmentation of meaning that he sees as constitutive of the postmodern condition. Indeed, for Lyotard, ‘the postmodern’

would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia of the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work…. Postmodern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo).

Presented in this way, Lyotard’s vision of postmodernism appears to coincide with the aesthetic ambitions of modernism, inasmuch as, for instance, the works of modernist authors – from dos Passos and Doblin, to Joyce, Eliot and Pound – capture ‘our inability to experience reality as an ordered and integrated totality’.

Nonetheless, whilst Lyotard’s postmodernist outlook rejects all universalist political ambitions as grand narratives that have outlived their usefulness, the fragmented view of both the Subject and ‘History’ associated with modernism did not preclude (at least, ostensibly) aspirations towards social change and emancipation. Similarly, modernism’s articulation of regret at the loss of certainty and meaning in the modern world was accompanied by a celebration of modern life’s thriving creativity. Like Marshall Berman’s vision of the archetypal modernist, the postmodernist, too, may find him or herself ‘at home in the maelstrom’ of a world ‘in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction’. And yet Lyotard turns away from the kind of nostalgia for wholeness that saw modernists, despite the prominence that they gave to aesthetic innovation, obsess over a past they felt compelled to reconstruct. Instead, Lyotard identifies ‘the unpresentability of the whole’ and the fragmentation of history and subjectivity as primarily opportunities to promote a liberating social and political diversity in the present. Thus instead of the belated application of modernism’s most experimental ideas, postmodernism is a body of thought that welcomes and interprets the contingency and provisionality of social relations as an arena for the reconfiguration of radical thought.

This returns us to the second dimension of the postmodern. Lyotard presents the postmodern condition as a specific historical situation – ‘postmodernity’ – marked by distinct ideological, philosophical, social, cultural and technological trends. The disunity and fragmentation that Lyotard embraces in the modernist aesthetic finds its social and economic counterpart in a distinct stage in the development of late, ‘consumer’ capitalism. For Lyotard, ‘postmodernity’ represents the transformation of knowledge. The ‘computerisation of society’, he reasons, has ensured that the primary criterion of the social order, along with technology itself, is the statutory competition over information at a national and international level. From this perspective, ‘computerised knowledge’ has become ‘the principal force of production’, such that knowledge that cannot be transformed into computerised information is no longer applicable.

It is this alleged shift in the condition of knowledge that suggests parallels between Lyotard’s ideas and theories about the transition to a ‘postindustrial’ age. Later in this chapter, we will see that what concerns Lyotard above all is the question of whether or not knowledge, ‘scientific’ or otherwise, can be grounded in truth. What is clear however is that Lyotard’s approach to understanding the transition to a postmodern age confirms and complements a wider belief in the exhaustion of both ‘modernity’ (understood as the implementation of the Enlightenment project) and a Subject-centred society (through which the individual is understood to acquire self-knowledge through reason and rationality).

This question of the ‘decentred’ Subject is a key theme for philosophers and sociologists working within the orbit of postmodernism. Deriving principally from structuralist anti-humanism, it is of central importance, for instance, to radical interpretations of the political role and constitution of gender, race and ‘difference’ more generally. The idea of the decentred Subject takes on renewed significance for poststructuralists. The radical implications of this for social and political thought are touched upon in some detail later, in both this and subsequent chapters. What I want to stress here is how the relativist trajectory of poststructuralist and postmodernist ideas arose partly as a consequence of the breakdown of (structuralist) semiology. This is reflected in the work of Baudrillard, the second of postmodernism’s most prominent theorists to have provided ‘lengthy philosophical commentaries on the present’, and whose ideas about the ‘depthlessness’ of postmodern capitalism I now want to turn to.

Notes:

A. Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert,
(London, Heineman, 1976); P. L. Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, (London, Penguin, 1967). Although its theoretical origins lie with Edmund Husserl, the dictum that ‘reality is a social construct’ is commonly attributed to the Austrian sociologist Alfred Schutz. It is also associated with the American sociologist Peter Berger, who, together with the German sociologist Thomas Luckmann, ‘moved American sociology irretrievably out of the positivist orbit with his phenomenologically inspired’ work. J. Heartfield, ‘American Pragmatists’, Intellectual
Currents of the Twentieth Century, (http://www.heartfield.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/pragmatic.htm, July 1997)
‘Modernism’ was the movement in the visual arts, literature, music and drama that
emerged at the turn of the twentieth century and which challenged broadly Victorian ideas about the production and meaning of art. ‘Modernity’ is often equated with ‘capitalism’. It can also be understood as the accumulation of capitalism’s social, cultural and technological forms. Alan Hudson suggests that ‘modernity is merely the phenomenal form of capitalist social relations embodying all the contradictions of that society.’ A. Hudson, ‘Introduction’, in F. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, (London, Junius, 1995), p. xxxiii. For James Heartfield, meanwhile, ‘the idea of ‘modernity’… is hopelessly imprecise’:

After all, which modernity are you talking about? The one with the bakelite fixtures and the telegraph wires, or the one with the formica and the mainframe? Modernity was always a useless category because it fixed not on social determinants, like the free market, but on technical features, like ‘heavy industry’. Being itself an imprecise category, qualifications like postmodernity are even less satisfactory, since we do not necessarily agree on what modernity is, let alone what comes after.

J. Heartfield, ‘The Risk Zone’, Living Marxism, No. 80 (June 1995), p. 48. Broadly speaking, postmodernists use the terms ‘modern’, ‘modernism’ and ‘modernity’ interchangeably as the embodiment of the Rationalist and Enlightenment ideas of the 17th and 18th centuries, and their implementation throughout the 19th and 20th.
See C. Jencks, What is Postmodernism?, (London, Academy Edition, 1986); E. Lucie-
Smith, Movements in Art Since 1945, (London, Thames and Hudson, 1992)
See H. Foster, Postmodern Culture, (London, Pluto, 1985); S. Connor, Postmodernist
Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, (Oxford, Blackwell, 1989); D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, (Oxford, Blackwell, 1989); F. Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (London, Verso, 1991); M. Morris, The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism, (London, Verso, 1988); R. Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, (London, Routledge, 1981); S. Sim (ed.), The Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought, (Cambridge, Icon Books, 1998), especially S. Sim, ‘Postmodernism and Philosophy’, pp. 3-14; A. Easthope, ‘Postmodernism and Critical and Cultural Theory’, pp. 15-27; I. H. Grant, ‘Postmodernism and Politics’, pp. 28-40; D. Morgan, ‘Postmodernism and Architecture’, pp. 78-88; C. Trodd, ‘Postmodernism and Art’, pp. 89-100; M. O’Day, ‘Postmodernism and Television’, pp. 112-120; B. Lewis, ‘Postmodernism and Literature (or: Word Salad Days, 1960-90)’, pp. 121-133, D. Scott, ‘Postmodernism and Music’, pp. 134-146; L. Spencer, ‘Postmodernism, Modernity and the Tradition of Dissent’, pp. 158-169
See J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (Manchester,
Manchester University Press, 1984); P. Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory, (London, Verso, 1987); M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. C. Gordon, (Brighton, Harvester Press, 1980); J. Derrida, Between the Blinds: A Derrida Reader, ed. P. Kamuf, (London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991)
J.-F. Lyotard, ibid., p. xxiv
Ibid., p. xxiii
Ibid., p. 81
Ibid., p. xxiii
M. Featherstone, ‘In Pursuit of the Postmodern: An Introduction’, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 5, No. 2/3 (June 1998), p. 198
R. Usher and R. Edwards, Postmodernism and Education, (London, Routledge, 1994),
p. 2
S. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism, (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1996), p. 12
J.-F Lyotard, op. cit., p. 79
Ibid., p. 79.
A. Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique, (Cambridge, Polity, 1989), p.
18
I say ‘ostensibly’ because it would be wrong to take modernism’s radical credentials for
granted. In 1992, the conservative critic, John Carey, upset the received wisdom of the liberal intelligentsia when, after exposing the explicitly anti-democratic credentials of many of modernism’s leading figures, he cast doubt on the presumed connection between modernism and progressive thought. J. Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939, (London, Faber & Faber, 1992)
M. Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, (London, Verso, 1983), p. 345
Ibid., p. 346
M. Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Poststructuralism and Postmodernism, (London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 133
See D. Bell, The Coming of Postindustrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting,
(New York, Basic Books, 1973); V. Mosco and J. Wasko (eds.), The Political Economy of Information, (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); A. Callinicos, op. cit., pp. 121-127
A. Callinicos, ibid., p. 170

Inroduction

Introduction


This thesis explores several related themes linked to the tendency towards relativism and anti-humanism in social theory. Within the broader context of the influence of poststructuralism and postmodernism I seek to identify the main sources of social constructionist (conventionalist) theories of ‘the social’, and to clarify their relationship to the politics of ‘difference’. Paying particular attention to the impact of these trends on theories of gender and race I suggest the need to retrieve a humanist and historical materialist approach to understanding the relationship between the universal and the particular, difference and the Subject.
Much of the academic writing on questions of ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ expresses explicitly political concerns. This thesis is also concerned with the political questions raised by recent developments in social and cultural theory. However, my concern is to confront the conservative assumptions of postmodernist thought, by focussing on the ways in which the inter-dependence of relativist and anti-humanist ideas profoundly restricts the scope of progressive thought. Indeed, deriding and relativising traditional certainties, postmodernism denigrates the possibility of a society-wide political project of any kind. Beginning from the assumption that a universal worldview cannot be fashioned from the fragmentary nature of human experience postmodernists celebrate difference and its irreducibility to a single theory. My contention is that postmodernism and radical relativism, by celebrating marginality, make a virtue of powerlessness and inequality.

Central to postmodernist thought is a rejection of the humanist ideal of universal truth. Conflating objective reality with our interpretations of it postmodernists argue that ‘truth’ resides entirely within language, discourse and representation. It follows from this moreover that our means of making sense of the world are inextricably linked to cultural context. Hence science and logic, rationality and universalism are deemed to be no less culture-bound than other forms of human thought. The pessimistic and defeatist ideology of ‘difference’, I suggest, is rooted in this relativistic outlook.

The immediate pre-history of the trend towards relativism in radical social theory is to be found in the involution of French humanism. First, during the 1960s, French rule in Algeria became the focus for political and intellectual opposition to ‘French universalism’, which was widely judged to be a mask for European racism, and thus a justification for barbarism.[i] Second, precipitated by the failures of the French left, over Algeria and May 1968, a broad theoretical retreat from the Subject saw the focus of social change shift from the working class to the New Social Movements. It was through the New Left’s radical critique of universalism that the philosophy of ‘difference’ first took hold.

Theoretically, the gestation of postmodernist thought began with the deconstruction of the Marxist tradition, but culminated in the dismissal of all ‘grand narratives’. Lyotard and Baudrillard, both former Marxists, are crucial in this respect; and I consider their theories of the postmodern here.[ii] Lyotard in particular is pivotal to my examination of the main themes of postmodernist philosophy, as his work goes furthest in enlarging upon its political implications. The theoretical anti-humanism of postmodernism also owes much to Althusser’s structuralist interpretation of Marxism; and I examine his contention that the Subject is an effect of ideology mainly via its influence on the ‘identity’ theory of Hall and Butler. Althusser interprets Marx’s rejection of the ‘bourgeois’ Subject as hostility to humanism per se. Subsequently, through their challenge to the allegedly exclusive nature of traditional/modern notions of subjectivity, identity theorists have developed the idea of the socially limited Subject. This, I argue, is the starting point for the reciprocal relationship between relativism and anti-humanism.

Postmodernists argue, correctly, that women, black people, gay people, the mentally ill, and other marginalised persons and groups have been excluded from the status of Subject. Furthermore, because they argue that the Subject is subordinate to a narrowly ‘Eurocentric’ social order, they conclude that any struggle to be ‘included’ within a ‘universalist’ worldview will be counter-productive. Rather it is necessary, they claim, to establish different ways of articulating ‘identities’. Paradoxically, the perception that such an intellectual project risks being reduced to counterposing a ‘true’ Subject to a ‘false’ one also gives rise, ostensibly, to the tension between the particular and the universal in identity theory.

This problem of the meaning and scope of identity and difference is central to my overall thesis. For instance, I evaluate developments within feminist theory on the basis that its particularist theoretical trajectory explains both its failure to theorise women’s oppression and its disintegration as a body of thought. The particularism-universalism problematic within feminism, I argue, emerged in stages. First, radical feminism established a fundamental basis for unity between women: the capacity to bear children and a transhistorical system of male oppression (patriarchy). Second, socialist-feminism attempted to substitute a materialist explanation for women’s oppression for the biological essentialism of radical feminism, but remained attached to the ahistorical framework of patriarchy. Third, French poststructuralist feminism sought to explore, articulate and celebrate gender-specific differences, only to endorse an idealistic universalisation of femininity. Lastly, constructionist and postmodern feminisms have set out to deconstruct the abstract conceptualisations of the particular and the universal adopted by ‘identitarian’ feminisms, positing, in the process, an equally abstract ‘universalised difference’.

My criticisms of the failure of Butler to resolve the particularism-universalism problematic within feminism apply no less to Hall, despite some differences in his approach to theorising difference. Yet the question of ‘universalising difference’ necessarily has a much broader scope in my discussion of race and ethnicity. The historical and theoretical paths taken by cultural relativism are looked at in detail here, and I evaluate wide-ranging developments in the relationship between social constructionism/poststructuralism and theories of ethnicity. Despite its changing contours and different expressions there is a persistent emphasis within radical social theory on the different ways in which identities are said to be ‘constructed’. Similarly, ‘anti-foundationalist’ or ‘anti-essentialist’ arguments are frequently directed at what is widely considered to be the excessively restrictive nature of a politics built upon ‘universal’ allegiances: ‘woman’, ‘black’, ‘gay’.

Primarily, these theoretical disputes address the question of how to undermine the universal pretensions of the Subject without reproducing the ‘false universals’ of ‘interpellated’ Subjects. My evaluation of Hall’s and Butler’s approaches to resolving these tensions between the particular and the universal brings together elements of two broad theoretical themes that I explore throughout the thesis: structuralist/poststructuralist influences on theories of ‘difference’, and conventionalist (or social constructionist) theories of the social. Derrida is arguably the most important philosopher of poststructuralism, and many of the most important aspects of his work, and their influence on the politics of difference, are examined here. I argue that, to a great extent, poststructuralism’s anti-humanist approach to problems of identity radicalises rather then overthrows themes that are derived from structuralism.

Poststructuralism adopts the structuralist move of treating all discourses as analogous with language, only to allow for a greater emphasis on indeterminacy and difference by rejecting structuralism’s claims to be able to disclose society’s underlying signifying systems. Poststructuralist ideas are addressed here in relation to their role in enabling social and cultural theorists to theorise difference in terms of discursive practices.
Conventionalism is explored in terms of its reduction of the social to inter-subjectivity. Within identity theory, the tendency to fragment social relations into their immediate cultural context arises from the tendency to conflate the mediate social with the immediate intersubjective. The impact of anti-essentialism is considered in this context. Because of its opposition to the idea of a ‘social essence’ anti-essentialism obscures social determinants. This, I argue, is a central failing of much of postmodernist social theory.

Whilst I situate the problem of relativism and anti-humanism largely within the ‘postmodernist’ discourses of recent decades I also look to wider sources to explain some of the philosophical and methodological tendencies in contemporary thought. In this respect, I address three broad areas. First, I examine the roots of the conventionalist approach to theorising the social in Wittgenstein’s ‘second philosophy’, Kuhn’s philosophy of science and Husserl’s phenomenology. Second, I consider the importance of German anti-rationalist thought for contemporary social and cultural theory, focussing on the parallels between both Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s ideas and the radical pessimism of postmodernism. And third, I look at the emergence of cultural relativism in the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, and its subsequent elaboration within social and cultural anthropology. Here, I pay particular attention to the work of the structuralist Lévi-Strauss, whose ideas form an important link to poststructuralist and postmodernist theories of culture and difference.

A final dimension to my critique is a consideration of the concept of the Other. I argue that the reconceptualisation of Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic, which can be attributed to several sources (Kojeve, de Beauvoir, Sartre), and which has been applied in feminist and anti-racist thought (Irigaray, Cixous, Said, Hall), eternalises the opposition between Self and Other. As the mainstay of the project to decentre the Subject, the concept of the Other leaves ‘difference’ impossible to overcome.

Methodology
My methodology can be situated within the Marxist tradition. It owes much, for example, to the work of Lukács, especially his analysis of ideology, his concept of ‘totality’ and his defence of the ‘subjective factor’. I also draw on Guldberg’s defence of a ‘unitary’ theory of women’s oppression. Other important reference points for my work include Heartfield’s critique of post-materialism, Malik’s analysis of ‘race’ and Füredi’s critiques of academic Marxism. Recent Marxist scholarship has also been useful (Anderson, Callinicos, Palmer, Wood, Žižek).[iii]

The historical materialist approach that I adopt is also important in understanding the philosophical scope of this thesis. First, a major concern for me is the abandonment of Marxism by important theorists of the ‘postmodern condition’ (Lyotard et al.). As such, whilst there have been several attempts to defend the Subject against the effects of relativism (Rawls, Rorty, Taylor), my critique is motivated by the way in which the degradation of Marxist thought, especially in Althusser, continues to inform the idealism and impressionism of many of Marxism’s former adherents.[iv] Second, because I am concerned primarily with the impact of relativism and anti-humanism on social theory, the philosophical breadth of this thesis is somewhat limited. It is the specific impact of different strands of philosophical thought on the development of postmodernism and sociology that I am concerned with, not philosophy as such. My focus is on defending a materialist and ‘essentialist’ approach to grasping the character of social phenomena.

Terminology
The terminology associated with relativist thought can mystify more than it clarifies; and postmodernism can often make obfuscation a virtue. Nonetheless, terms like ‘relativism’, ‘particularism’ and ‘perspectivism’ should generally be treated as interchangeable here. By contrast, I have endeavoured to make clear that ‘conventionalism’, whilst it implies a relativist outlook, is not reducible to it. To avoid confusion, I understand conventionalism (or ‘social constructionism’) as the tendency to reduce determinate social relations to contingent, intersubjective relations.

Structure
The structure of this thesis is designed to explore these themes in relation to both established and growing trends in social thought, and the prospects for a credible challenge to them. Chapter 1 maps out some of the important contributions to, and influences upon, postmodernist and relativist thought. Chapters 2 and 3 look at the different ways in which ‘identity’ has become one of the principal concerns for radical thought. The two major areas of interest are ‘gender’ and ‘race’. Chapter 2 explores the most significant developments within feminist theory over recent decades, and relates these changes to the inherently particularist nature of feminist epistemology. Chapter 3 considers the ways in which notions of ‘difference’ have been developed in relation to theories of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’, and examines the implications of these ideas for anti-racist thought. Chapter 4 looks at Hall’s and Butler’s attempts to resolve the particularism-universalism problematic. It also tackles the specific limitations of identity theory and conventionalist theories of ‘the social’. Lastly, it addresses the current status of the Subject in radical thought. The conclusion considers, briefly, the retreat from engagement that the politics of difference represents; and highlights some strengths and weaknesses in recent Marxist writing on postmodernism and anti-humanism. Finally, it points towards some important critical developments.


[i] J.-P Sartre, ‘Preface’, in F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington,
(Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967), pp. 7-26
[ii] J.-F. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. I. H. Grant, (London, Athlone, 1993); J.
Baudrillard, ‘The Mirror of Production’, in J. Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. M. Poster, (Cambridge, Polity, 1988), pp. 98-118
[iii] G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. R.
Livingstone, (London, Merlin, 1971); G. Lukács, A Defence of ‘History and Class Consciousness’: Tailism and the Dialectic, trans. E. Leslie, (London, Verso, 2000); J. Heartfield, Need and Desire in the Post-Material Economy, (Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam University Press, 1998); F. Füredi, The Soviet Union Demystified: A Materialist Analysis, (London, Junius, 1987); F. Füredi, ‘Introduction’, in F. Jakubowski, Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism, (London, Pluto, 1990), pp. vii-xxxiii; F. Füredi, Mythical Past, Elusive Future: History and Society in an Anxious Age, (London, Pluto, 1992), pp. 260-267; K. Guldberg, ‘Introduction’, in F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, (London, Junius, 1994), pp. ix-xxv; B. D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History, (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1990); P. Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, (London, Verso, 1998); A. Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique, (Cambridge, Polity, 1989); E. M. Wood and J. B. Foster (eds.), In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda, (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1997); S. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, (London, Verso, 1999)
[iv] J. Rawls, Political Liberalism, (New York, Columbia University Press, 1993); R. Rorty,
Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991); C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989)

A Doctoral Thesis To Pass The Time With

Abstract

This thesis explores several related themes linked to the tendency towards relativism and anti-humanism in radical social theory. Within the broader context of the influence of poststructuralism and postmodernism I seek to identify the main sources of social constructionist (conventionalist) theories of ‘the social’, and to clarify their relationship to the politics of ‘difference’. Paying particular attention to the impact of these trends on theories of gender and race I suggest the need to retrieve a humanist and historical materialist approach to understanding the relationship between the universal and the particular, difference and the Subject.
Chapter 1 maps out some of the important contributions to, and influences upon, postmodernist and relativist thought. Chapters 2 and 3 look at the different ways in which ‘identity’ has become one of the principal concerns for radical thought. Chapter 2 explores the most significant developments within feminist theory over recent decades, and relates these changes to the inherently particularist nature of feminist epistemology. Chapter 3 considers the ways in which notions of ‘difference’ have been developed in relation to theories of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’, and examines the implications of these ideas for anti-racist thought. Chapter 4 looks at Hall’s and Butler’s attempts to resolve the particularism-universalism problematic. It also tackles the specific limitations of identity theory and conventionalist theories of ‘the social’. Lastly, it addresses the current status of the Subject in radical thought. The conclusion considers, briefly, the retreat from engagement that the politics of difference represents, and highlights aspects of recent Marxist writing on postmodernism and anti-humanism. It also points towards some important critical developments.