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)