Chapter III: Is there a Postmodern Sociology?

Postmodernism’s attempt to integrate art and life by aestheticizing commodity culture

resulted in an interesting reversal where art itself became commodified. The new

culture came to be identified as the culture of excess, the culture of late capitalism,

consumer culture and so on. Culture is never a stable, immutable category; on the

contrary, it is an ongoing process of evolution. Traditionally, it has been a subject

discussed under Anthropology. Only recently, after literary criticism took a cultural

turn, did culture become a subject of study in departments of English. This

development can be attributed to the academicization of culture by British cultural

studies experts beginning with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams. It was later

followed up by theoreticians like E.P Thompson and Stuart Hall. It was without

doubt, an important turning point in the study of culture that began to look at it not as

a form of elitist high culture but as forms of material practices of everyday life.

Cultural studies emerged “from a literary critical tradition that saw popular culture as

a threat to the moral and cultural standards of modern civilization” (Turner 2).

However “the work of pioneers in cultural studies breaks with that literary tradition’s

elitist assumptions to examine the everyday and the ordinary” (2). The work of these

pioneers helped establish “the consideration of popular culture –from the mass media

to sport to dances crazes – on an academic and intellectual agenda from which it had

been excluded.” (2). This chapter will examine the development of the concept of

culture using the theoretical framework provided by Raymond Williams and others

and try to establish its relation with society. Such an analysis will provide a better

understanding of the contemporary nuances of the term. It will certainly lend useful

clues to understand the development of postmodern culture. The discussion that

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follows will also try and examine whether postmodern culture necessarily entails a

postmodern sociology.

Culture and society have always been treated as complementary categories.

However, the two are being considered as separate, autonomous categories only in

recent times. Therefore it is important to define their categorical boundaries and also

identify overlappings if any, in order to explain the relation between the two. One can

then investigate what is commonly perceived as a paradoxical relationship between

cultural postmodernism and societal post-modernity. It might then be possible to

define postmodernism in sociological terms and also inquire into the possibility of a

postmodern sociology. Etymologically, the word culture has its roots in cultivate,

grow or tend; however, its meaning has obviously undergone many transformations to

mean what it does today - aesthetic forms and everyday practices of a group of people

or community. This definition however, is a broad generalization. It is necessary to

clarify the concept of culture in order to develop a radical critique of postmodern

culture and also to review its relation with society.

Raymond Williams offers a conceptual clarification of culture in his book

Marxism and Literature (1977). He suggests that any serious analysis of culture can

be undertaken only through an understanding of the historical consciousness of

culture. He writes, “The concept at once fuses and confuses the radically different

experiences and tendencies of its formation. It is then impossible to carry through any

serious cultural analysis without reaching towards a consciousness of the concept

itself: a consciousness that must be, as we shall see, historical” (Marxism and

Literature 11). Historically, one can say that the economic, social and cultural

spheres functioned not as separate bounded categories till very recently. They only

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begin to get separate identities with the advent of modern institutions when society

came to mean “a general system of order” (11) and economics “the management of a

community” (11). Williams also suggests that, “In their modern development the

three concepts did not move in step, but each at a critical point, was affected by the

movement of the others” (11). However, he also argues that the concepts of economy

and society are limited terms referring to a rational controlling “system of production

distribution and exchange” (11) and a “formulation of experience we now summarize

as ‘bourgeois society’” (11) respectively. These areas continue to remain contentious

and problematic with many unresolved issues that surface time and again as political

issues in liberal democracies. The concept of culture though, assumes significance

with the growth of bourgeois social and economic practices. Compared to the other

two spheres, culture is a much larger and delimited area which is “less normative” and

carries greater “functional freedom” (11) with it. Nonetheless, according to Williams,

the three spheres – cultural, economic and social – must be taken together along with

their interconnections and historical evolution within the concept of civilization.

Culture, as a broad delimited category began to bear heavily on the other two

categories that were so rigidly limited. Williams suggests that till the eighteenth

century, culture was “still a noun of process: the culture of something – crops,

animals, minds. The decisive changes in society and economy had begun earlier in the

late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; much of their essential development was

complete before culture came to include its new and elusive meanings” (13). Only in

the eighteenth century, the meaning of culture came to assume a new significance by

being associated with the meaning of civilization. Civilization, however, was

understood as the product of a larger historical process that could be contrasted with a

previous state of barbarism. Linked with the rational, enlightenment thought of

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progress, it was now to be taken as “an achieved state of development, which implied

historical process and progress” (13). Although this process was “secular and

developmental and in that sense historical,” (14) “it was a history that had culminated

in an achieved state: in practice the metropolitan civilization of England and France”

(14). Williams subtly hints that the notion of civilization was always centred round

the cultural achievements of Europe. This idea of civilization faced opposition from

representatives of dogmatic religious and metaphysical systems who reacted sharply

to the concept of achieved state. They perceived a threat to their traditional ideas of

order from this new value system of “achieved and achievable progress” (14).

Therefore, the notion of civilization as developmental was gradually replaced with the

idea of civilization as cultural, so much so that “‘civilization’ and ‘culture’ (especially

in its common early form as ‘cultivation’) were in effect, in the late eighteenth

century, interchangeable terms” (14).

However, very soon the two terms became distinctly different categories

again with civilization carrying the meaning of ‘cultivated forms of politeness and

luxury,” (14) which was obviously an external property as compared to the

“alternative sense of ‘culture’ – as a process of ‘inner’ or ‘spiritual’ as distinct from

external development” (14). Such an understanding of culture had an immediate effect

on the meaning of society as the latter came to be understood as constituted of all the

external forms and practices of communities in the emergent bourgeois system of the

eighteenth century. Moreover, culture came to be associated with “religion, art, the

family and personal life, as distinct from and actually opposed to civilization or

society in its new abstract and general sense” (14). With this new development culture

gained different meanings and its relation with society became problematic. Even

though the influence of religion weakened due to several changes in the material

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practices of society, culture continued to carry meanings of “subjectivity or creative

imagination” (14) which remain even to this day as aspects of secular culture. Society

became a distinctly different category constituted of “objective, material forms and

practices,” whereas culture was a representation of “subjective and imaginative

experiences of individuals” (14).

The dissociation of the meaning of culture from that of society not only led to

a lot of confusion, but also created conflict with other existing institutional practices.

The meaning of culture changed continuously with intermittent overlapping with the

meaning of civilization .As a result, both the terms got the meaning of “an achieved

state” which, in practice, was identified “with the received glories of the past” (15).

Culture and civilization became static concepts with a historical reference to a past

and came to be seen as “received states rather than as continuing processes” (15). This

development, according to Williams, brought culture into conflict with almost all the

dominant institutional forces of modern industrial society, namely “materialism,

commercialism, democracy, socialism”(15).

When civilization acquired a new meaning of “an achieved state of

development” (16), culture underwent another important transformation to become

“‘culture’ as a social – indeed specifically anthropological and sociological –

concept”(15). With this change, culture came to play a significant role in defining the

concept of society. However, if society is understood as a stage of development in the

whole process of historical evolution of civilization, then what is its relation to

culture? This problematic has to be resolved in order to understand the complex

relationship between the two. The complexity of the meaning of culture posed several

problems ever since it began to play a double role with its “dual meanings, first as a

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“noun of ‘inner’ process, specialized to its presumed agencies in ‘intellectual’ life and

‘the arts” (Williams 17) and second as “a noun of general process, specialized to its

presumed configurations in ‘whole ways of life’” (17). This distinction in the

meanings of culture is crucial for the debate on postmodernism although it poses

some challenge for cultural analysis. Williams suggests that, “any modern theory of

culture, but perhaps especially in a Marxist theory, this complexity is a source of great

difficulty” (17).

In the 19th

century, industrial society came to include in its meaning all the

material practices that determined the relations of people. Marxism provided a new

method that emphasized the importance of the material process of history for

analyzing the nature of industrial society. However, cultural theorists like Raymond

Williams propose that Marxism had not paid enough attention to culture; instead,

culture was treated as a secondary aspect and confined to the superstructure. Recent

interpretations of the Marxist concept of the superstructure like that of Jameson

assume that culture was, from its inception, meant to be a direct reflection of the

material base of productive relations. But, Williams rightly suggests that the relation

between base and superstructure must be understood in terms of a double movement

of consciousness interpreting social reality and the latter determining consciousness.

He offers a clarification on the notion of superstructure in his book Problems

in Materialism and Culture. Williams suggests that Marx himself made some

qualifications about “the determined character of certain superstructural activities”

(Problems in Materialism and Culture 32). The notion of superstructure, according to

Williams, “had been the reflection, the imitation of the reproduction of the reality of

the base in the superstructure in a more or less direct way” (32). However, it was not

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easy to establish a direct relationship “in many real cultural activities;” the idea of

time lag and mediation was introduced to explain the distance of certain cultural

activities from “the primary economic activities” (33). In the latter half of the 20th

century, the “notion of homologous structures” was introduced which replaced the

earlier notions of reflection or reproduction between “the superstructural process and

the reality of structures” (32). With this development, the base – superstructure

dialectics was redefined in terms of a correspondence rather than mediation or

reproduction. Williams suggests that it is important to understand these qualifications

to the superstructural concept and suggests that it is even more important to

understand the base of “real relations of production” if we are to “understand the

realities of cultural process” (33).

In Marxism and Literature, Williams argues that in Marxist theory, “culture

was made dependant, secondary, and superstructural: a realm of mere ideas beliefs,

arts, customs, determined by the basic material history” (Marxism and Literature 19).

“Instead of making cultural history material,” (19) it was reduced to a superstate.

Such a reduction of culture on a structural basis apparently suggested a schism

between culture and its reproductive forms and the processes of material social life.

This demarcation between culture and society in Marxist theory unfortunately left

both the concepts inadequately developed and also allowed later theorists of culture to

develop the two as separate spheres functioning autonomously with very little

interaction between them. Williams regrets this flaw in orthodox Marxist theory when

he says that “the full possibilities of the concept of culture as a constitutive social

process, creating specific and different ways of life…could have been remarkably

deepened by the emphasis on a material social process, were for a long time missed,

and were often in practice superseded by an abstracting unilinear universalism”(19).

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The distinction between culture and society, allowed the possibility of a

further development in the concept of culture which, in the hands of those who

assumed an authority over it, “broke its necessary connections with society and

history and, in the areas of psychology, art and belief developed a powerful

alternative sense of the constitutive human process itself” (19). This alternative sense

of culture has, ever since, come to dominate debates in the human sciences, especially

in developing areas like structural anthropology, psychology and linguistics and made

significant interventions in other branches too. Such a development in the

understanding of culture has indeed had different implications for the concept of

society, especially for the one significantly developed and analyzed so thoroughly in

Marxist theory. Therefore Williams suggests that “it is then not surprising that in the

twentieth century this alternative sense has come to overlay and stifle Marxism” (20).

Culture superseded economics and politics in emerging theories of society. Williams

suggests that any debate on culture can end up making “diverse” conclusions even

though “the idea of culture describes our common enquiry” (Culture and Society

285). Therefore, he suggests that culture “in its modern meanings,” indicates “not a

conclusion” but “a process” (285). However, it is necessary to create conditions for

people to participate “in the articulation of meanings and values” (“The Idea of a

Common Culture” 36). The idea of a common culture presupposes the free

participation of people in the process of creating new meanings. Williams makes an

appeal to open up the hitherto exclusive cultural sphere for greater participation as

this “would involve … the removal of all material obstacles to such participation”

(36).

If Marxists like Raymond Williams tried to reestablish the connections

between culture, economics, and society by proposing a theory of common culture,

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neoconservatives like Daniel Bell were arguing that capitalism had given birth to an

adversary culture. The term ‘adversary culture’ was first used by Lionel Trilling in his

book Beyond Culture (1965). Around the 1960’s in America, intellectuals of various

hues began to develop a cultural critique of capitalism. As Norman Podhoretz rightly

points out in his article “The Adversary Culture and the New Class,” these cultural

critics launched an attack on American big business but the “assault” was “directed

against the spiritual and cultural power of business…against the very values which the

populists and the progressives and the labor movement shared with big business”

(Podhoretz 21). It is interesting to note that these American intellectuals like Trilling

or Bell used ideas as their weapons to criticize the “business civilization” though their

intention was not to “expose the injustices flowing from” (21) the capitalist system.

Nevertheless, their critique becomes useful because they end up critiquing

capitalism, though, in an indirect way. This cultural critique charged that the

American society, by making business “the leading species of enterprise,” had “put a

premium on selfishness while doing everything it could to dampen the altruistic

potentialities of human nature” (21). The cultural critics argued that it had resulted in

“an erosion of communal attachments and loyalties” and created “a brutal, heartless

society of isolated individuals” (21). This cultural criticism was developed by

intellectuals in the arts who attacked “individualism, materialism, and philistinism” of

“business civilization” (21). However, their belief “was rooted in Christianity,” and

the strength of their criticism derived its effectiveness from “Christian belief in the

United States” (21). Therefore, their outlook gained a lot support from

neoconservatives who saw a political opportunity in such a cultural outlook.

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Bell is one such cultural critic who undertakes the task of critiquing capitalism

while sticking to orthodox ideas of culture. He blames capitalism for the birth of

adversary culture. In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Bell begins

his argument by suggesting that society is not a unified, integrated system. On the

contrary, it has many disjunctions where “the different realms respond to different

norms, have different rhythms of change, and are regulated by different, even

contrary, axial principles” (Bell 10). Bell’s view contradicts the Marxist view that

society functions as an integrated structure with a determining base of productive

economic relations.

Bell attributes the developments in the concept of culture to developments

within modernity. He argues that modernity was responsible for promoting the idea of

an autonomous self. This emphasis on a self determining individual, who would not

only achieve freedom but also “expand frontiers in a relentless desire to reach new

goals” (16), was the modernist ideal, which, according to Bell, unfolded a twofold

development. In the economy, the bourgeois entrepreneur emerged, “freed from the

ascriptive ties of the traditional world with its fixed status and checks on acquisition,”

(16) and in the realm of culture, “we have the independent artist, released from church

and princely patron, writing and painting what pleases him rather than his sponsor; the

market will make him free”(16). Individual free will was the driving force behind the

rise of the entrepreneur in business and of the modernist artist in culture. Bell argues

that both the “impulses” of business and art emerged from the same “sociological

surge of modernity” (Bell 17). According to Bell, the bourgeoisie was primarily

responsible for institutionalizing these revolutionary impulses in the general system of

capitalism. However, a split in the bourgeois consciousness resulted in a contradiction

between the two impulses. Bell proposes that “the extraordinary paradox” of

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modernity is that each impulse then became “highly conscious of the other, feared the

other and sought to destroy it” (17). “Radical in economics, the bourgeoisie became

conservative in morals and cultural taste” (17).

Interestingly, with a reaffirmation of bourgeois conservatism, modernity was

undergoing great transformation under capitalism, and more significantly, culture was

now becoming a leisure time activity such as watching television or a baseball match.

Bourgeois culture was dissolving the high-brow culture of the 19th

century. The

conservative reaction to this development can be considered as an expression of fear;

the fear of losing a traditional bastion that they always considered their own. Culture

was an area where the conservative could give expression to his religious beliefs

through rituals, festivals, and other practices. Therefore, the conservatives begin to

resist the change in perception of culture in modernism They condemn the culture of

capitalism as “hedonistic” (Bell 18) and attempt to retrieve some of the sedimented

aspects of religion in western cultural practice. Bell argues that there is a significant

change in the attitude of people towards culture. He suggests that rationality is now

giving way to imagination and “society now accepts this role for the imagination,

rather than seeing cultures, as in the past, as setting a norm and affirming a moral

philosophic tradition against which the new could be measured and (more often than

not) censured”(33).

Bell distinguishes between culture and society by suggesting that society

broadly refers to a “techno-economic order” (36) whereas, culture is “the realm of

sensibility, of emotion and moral temper, and of the intelligence, which seeks to order

these feelings” (36). Unlike the social theories of Marx or Weber that always

conceived society and its related branches as having an integrated structure with

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rational organization, Bell’s sociology is an attempt to look at society as segregated

into different “disjunctured realms” (33), with each of the realms functioning

autonomously and expressing themselves “not in the behavioral patterns of groups,

but in the behavior of individuals” (36). According to Bell, the social realm is

governed by a systemic logic, “an economic principle defined in terms of efficiency

and functional rationality,” (37) whereas, culture is “prodigal, promiscuous,

dominated by an anti-rational, anti-intellectual temper in which the self is taken as the

touchstone of cultural judgments, and the effect on the self is the measure of the

aesthetic worth of experience” (37). In other words, society is more systematic

whereas culture is subjective and lies outside the domain of rational judgments.

However, this argument has very few takers even within the cultural right. Cultural

conservatives are careful not to back such views while guarding themselves against

the onslaught of the cultural left.

The left has traditionally held the view that culture cannot be entirely delinked

from society and economics. Moreover, the idea that the bourgeois carries “a self-

constitutive mechanism” (Robbins 28) of subject realization can lead to some

confusion about his subject identity. Further, Bell’s assumption about the disjunction

of realms drew criticism from all quarters. Robbins suggests that “his sundering of the

economic, political and cultural realms was apparently so scandalous that Bell’s

critics in the debate do not even comment on it” (29). He also argues that such

attempts to disjoin the social assemblage to allow greater relative autonomy to

different realms have been made earlier by French Post-structuralists including Louis

Althusser who gave the idea of split and multiple subjectivities to the theory debate.

In his article “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Althusser proposes that

all subjects are ideologically constituted. He argues that “there is no ideology except

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by the subject and for subjects,” (“Ideological State Apparatuses”128) and therefore

conversely, “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete

subjects” (130). This proposition allows the possibility of multiple subjectivities.

Therefore Robbins suggests that Althusser can be taken as “a forerunner of Bell’s

case for relative autonomy” (Robbins 30). However, it is necessary to move beyond

Althusserian Marxism into what is now dubbed as left conservatism to understand the

left position in the debate, though the term conservatism with reference to the left is

largely unacceptable in leftist politics.

Nevertheless, the reaction of the left to the idea of multiple subject positions

on different realms has been critical and consistent. The left argues that theoretical

debates in the humanities have a common goal that seeks to take the subject beyond

the boundaries of the academy into the realm of the social where one plays the role of

an activist. This “true pedagogical mission of the humanities,” (Robbins 30) puts

certain restrictions on the subject who as an activist, ideally embodies “a transparent

unity of thought and action, public self and private self, culture and politics. The

activist has nothing to hide, she or he can stand in the interpellating eye of God

without turning or trembling” (30). Bell’s theory of differing subjectivities is rejected

by the left with the argument that such a notion “is not Althusserian but puritan”

(Robbins 30). Robbins appropriately points out that the tradition of thought that is

expressed in most of Bell’s formulation of culture which constantly accuses the left of

various sins, including the sin of being conservative in economics, has its roots not so

much in French Post structuralism as in “the humanistic, holier than thou tradition of

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Matthew Arnold and T.S Eliot” (Robbins 30). One can

conclude that cultural conservatism finds its base in humanism and not in

Althusserian Marxism.

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The left has always opposed the tradition of Anglo American humanism.

However, the politically weakened left, by joining the cultural debate beginning with

Raymond Williams’ first major intervention with his Culture and Society (1958), got

more and more muddled with its own political stand on cultural issues. As a result,

cultural Marxism got dragged deeper into the cultural politics of the liberal humanistic

right. Robbins’ critique of cultural conservatism comes as a clarification and also a

correction of the political left position on culture. The ideas of culture proposed by

Bell are not only the ideological standpoint of cultural theorists who wear the

“humanistic garb” of cultural guardians; it is also the view held by many “New York

intellectuals in general” (30). The cultural debate can now no longer proceed in an

apolitical context; on the contrary, it is deeply entrenched in cultural politics.

Cultural theorists often end up making generalizations by claiming that

everything can be culture. The precursor of such claims is nevertheless, Williams’

extraordinary generalization: “Culture is Ordinary” (1958). In this remarkable essay,

Williams suggests that “A culture has two aspects: the known meanings and

directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and meaning,

which are offered and tested” (93). In other words, culture “is always both traditional

and creative” (93). It can mean “a whole way of life – the common meanings,” and it

can also mean “the arts and learning – the special processes of discovery and creative

effort” (93). A moderate interpretation of such a generalization can perhaps “hold

simply that culture can never be properly sealed off from economics or politics”

(Robbins 32). Those who have argued against Bell believe that this could be the

reason why he could not sustain his argument about the disjunction of realms. And so,

as Robbins puts it, “When Habermas labels Bell a neo conservative, for example, it is

on the grounds that, after all, these realms are strategically connected”(32). According

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to Habermas, “Neo-conservatism shifts onto cultural modernism the uncomfortable

burdens of a more or less successful capitalist modernization of the economy and

society” (Modernity-An Incomplete Project 7). He argues that the neoconservative

does not attempt to uncover “the economic and social causes for the altered attitudes

towards work, consumption, achievement and leisure” (7). On the contrary, “the

neoconservative doctrine blurs the relationship between the welcomed process of

societal modernization on the one hand, and the lamented cultural development on the

other” (7).

One can conclude that the arguments of neoconservatives like Bell opens the

culture debate for free participation, even as they covertly protect capitalism itself

from radical critique. In fact, it is a clever political move to bring under one umbrella

as many neoconservatives as possible. Robbins suggests that “It is a move in a larger

political game, a game that encompasses all of these realms but depends on getting as

many players as possible to accept the illusion that these realms are separated”

(Robbins 32). According to him, this was the strategy adopted by the Republican

Party during the Reagan-Bush era, to bring into their side as many number of people

to speak on cultural matters like Christian family values, although many had divergent

views on capitalism and culture. They faced the dilemma of keeping two divergent

interests, that of capital and of family values under one roof. Sneering at such

paradoxes of the cultural right, Robbins remarks that “From the perspective of culture

it means that Republicans can support family values while encouraging social

conditions under which family values will be unlivable, conditions under which, as

Marx put it, everything solid melts into air” (Robbins 32).

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The culture debate now dominated by postmodernism is also sharply divided

along similar political lines of right and left. In the postmodern context, the cultural

left, reduced to a minority, has diverted its attention “from economic inequality to a

nostalgic cultural majoritarianism” (Robbins 34). This has created a unique situation

in cultural politics that extends beyond national boundaries into what Arjun

Appadurai calls “the global cultural economy”(Appadurai 324). The present situation

demands that the progressive left understands the political intentions of

neoconservatives like Bell who propose the disjunction of realms only to disjoin the

left. Such an understanding would lead to the idea that the realms of politics, culture

and economy are not only functionally non-autonomous, but “the causal relations

among them can move in more than one direction” (Robbins 35). Robbins suggests

that “even cultural phenomena that result in large parts from extremely undesirable

developments in economics, as cosmopolitanism, say, results from globalization may

be politically desirable in a number of ways” (35). Capitalism can produce several

new cultural processes that might invite criticism from both liberals and

conservatives. However, such a development may help in reiterating the radical

political position of the left. It is important to keep the focus on the material base of

productive relations even while critiquing culture because that will make possible a

political rather than a moral critique of capitalism.

By 1960’s, Western culture had undergone a series of transformations to

culminate in meaning as a form of entertainment and lifestyle produced by what

Adorno and Horkheimer referred to as “The Culture Industry.” To understand the

dynamics of cultural production in the age of media and information technology and

its implications for sociological theory, it is useful to bring into this debate the

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arguments of Fredric Jameson, Zygmunt Bauman, Jean Baudrillard and Mike

Featherstone.

In the introduction to his book Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late

Capitalism, Jameson suggests that if modernism used fragmented images as a mode

of representation, postmodernism uses only more images. He argues that “in

modernism…some residual zones of ‘nature’ or ‘being’, of the old, the older, the

archaic, still subsist; culture can still do something to that nature and work at

transforming that ‘referent’” (Jameson ix); but with postmodernism, “the

modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good”(ix). The postmodern

world is for him “a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which

‘culture’ has become a veritable ‘second nature’” (ix). The boundary between nature

and culture has disappeared. In an organized work society, leisure time activities

broadly constitute culture. Leisure is a time for entertainment, a time when the

physically sapped soul seeks gratification in consumption. Postmodernism actively

promotes the culture of consumption; “in postmodern culture, ‘culture’ has become a

product in its own right; the market has become a substitute for itself and fully as

much a commodity as any of the items it includes within itself” (Jameson x). If the

meaning of culture is reduced to acts of consumption then, one can argue that what

was once scoffed at as commodity fetishism in Marx’s formulation is now being

celebrated as a more acceptable form of inverted Marxism. Here, the proletariat freed

from the chains of an ageing class consciousness, stands in the market with a new

identity of a consumer, a new consumer consciousness and possibly with a Neo-

Marxist slogan: consumers of the world unite. According to Jameson,

“postmodernism is the sheer commodification of consumption as a process. The Life-

style of the superstate therefore stands in relationship to Marx’s fetishism of

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commodities as the most advanced monotheisms to primitive animisms or the most

rudimentary idol worship” (Jameson x).

Any theory of postmodernism will bear some relationship to the culture

industry concept of Adorno and Horkheimer, though the systems of production and

exchange may have undergone significant transformation. According to Adorno and

Horkheimer, the “Culture Industry” is able to strike a remarkable “unity of microcosm

and macrocosm” and is able to present people with “a model of their culture” (“The

Culture Industry” 121). Mass culture is able to produce a spectacular effect on people

because the producers of this culture have made it their monopoly. Adorno proposes

that “Under monopoly, all mass culture is identical and the lines of its artificial

framework begin to show through” (121). Further, “even the technical media are

relentlessly forced into uniformity,” (121) by the functional logic of consumption.

However, the people who are interested in running the culture industry never make a

mention or even accept the fact that “the basis on which technology acquires power

over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest”

(121).

Williams also has a similar argument on the mass communication technology.

He says “communication is not only transmission; it is also reception and response”

(Culture and Society 301). He does not dispute the “evident successes” (301) of mass

communication given the methods it uses in the larger context of the socio-economic

system. However, he argues that mass communication “has failed, and will continue

to fail when its transmissions encounter, not a confused uncertainty, but a considered

and formulated experience” (301). These supportive arguments prove that the culture

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industry formulates all experience to fit into the logic of consumption without

allowing the receptive subject any room for imagination and critical thinking.

Consumption is, after all, the most fundamental logic of industry and capital.

The culture industry is able to convince the consumer about this inherent logic with its

techniques of manipulation. Therefore Adorno argues that “The man with leisure has

to accept what the culture manufacturers offer him. Kant’s formalism still expected a

contribution from the individual, who was thought to relate the varied experiences of

the senses to fundamental concepts; but industry robs the individual of his function.

Its prime service to the customer is to do his schematizing for him” (“The Culture

Industry” 124). The commodification of culture is accompanied by a parallel process

of democratization. Once culture enters the marketplace and begins to advertise itself

there, it becomes easily accessible to all. In effect, it apparently removes the earlier

distinction between high and mass culture. This is a significant development, which,

according to Fredric Jameson is a fundamental feature of all postmodernisms,

“…namely, the effacement in them of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier

between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of

new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories, and contents of that very culture

industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern, from Leavis

and the American New Criticism all the way to Adorno and the Frankfurt school”(The

Cultural Turn 2). To take a stand on postmodernism would mean that one either

denounces or accepts the effacement of the boundary. Adorno and Horkheimer

denounced the processes of mass culture production that reduce culture to a

commodity. Through their critique of the culture industry they were only trying to

trace the historical movement of bourgeois modern art. In the process, they wanted to

expose the hidden practices or artifice of bourgeois art. Unlike the apolitical

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aphorisms of Jameson on postmodern art, the theory of Adorno and the Frankfurt

school was more a political statement on the status of early 20th

century European

culture.

Therefore, the question is whether such an effacement of the boundary

between high and mass culture, actually implies a similar effacement of the boundary

of class in society and politics. Surprisingly, Jameson is silent on this. He is reluctant

to adopt a political stance on postmodernism. By focusing much on the culture of

capitalism he loses sight of the actual political processes that help run the capitalist

machine. The process of consumption, in the course of its historical evolution

becomes what the Hungarian Marxist Lukacs calls “the reified structure of

consciousness” (Lukacs 110).The object as commodity that “confronts” everyone

directly “either as producer or consumer, is distorted in its objectivity by its

commodity character” (93). Featherstone proposes that “consumer culture is premised

upon the expansion of capitalist commodity production which has given rise to a vast

accumulation of material culture in the form of consumer goods and sites for purchase

and consumption” (Featherstone 13). The abundance of goods creates a culture of

excess which in turn, creates a subculture of consumption. This culture actively

promoted “leisure and consumption activities in contemporary Western societies”

(13). The newly acquired freedom to consume is regarded by some as a new equality

of consumers in the marketplace. However, the counter argument is that the greater

acceptance of the role of the market in deciding consumption and leisure activities of

individuals, can lead to “increasing the capacity for ideological manipulation and

seductive containment of the population from some alternative set of ‘better’ social

relations”(13).

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The possibility of ideological manipulation of whole populations by the

culture industry signals a threat to the structure of society and social relations.

Consumer culture can have serious sociological implications as it is now observed in

the advanced industrial societies of the West. In consumer society, individuals try to

define their social status through the material goods they possess. Social difference in

terms of such possessions becomes a measure of social status. Featherstone suggests

that “the satisfaction derived from goods relates to their socially structured access in a

zero sum game in which satisfaction and status depend upon displaying and sustaining

differences within conditions of inflation” (Featherstone 13). This is an important

point which implies that consumer goods help build social bonds or maintain

distinctions of class, for in the final analysis, the ability to consume or possess is

determined by one’s purchasing power –capital. Hence it can be argued that

consumption or possession of goods helps maintain social class difference.

Consumer culture creates an intense emotional desire for the commodity,

encouraging dreams of possession and the satiation of those dreams through

consumption. This is the psychological aspect of consumption which, as we all know,

is worked out so thoroughly in techniques of advertisement where the dreams and

desires of the consumer “become celebrated in consumer cultural imagery and

particular sites of consumption which variously generate direct bodily excitement and

aesthetic pleasures”( 13). The over emphasis on the culture of consumption in recent

times in Western societies is a new phase in the history of capitalism where, supply of

goods is in excess of the needs of consumption. According to Featherstone, this along

with “tendencies towards cultural disorder and de-classification (which some label as

postmodernism) is therefore bringing cultural questions to the fore and has wider

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implications for our conceptualization of the relationship between culture, economy

and society” (13).

New forms of capitalist accumulation created newer forms of capitalist

modernity. The culture of consumption in late modernism signaled a transformation

of the traditional notion of culture. It removed the notion of ‘use value’ of

commodities and vested all value in exchange. Therefore, Featherstone suggests that

“the accumulation of goods has resulted in the triumph of exchange value” (14). As

Adorno suggests in the culture industry “There is nothing left for the consumer to

classify. Producers have done it for him” (“The Culture Industry” 125). Consumer

culture effectively reduced all aspects of culture which, so far, were valued in

qualitative terms into quantities of exchange. Commodities “become free to take on a

wide range of cultural associations and illusions. Advertising, in particular is able to

exploit this and attach images of romance, exotica, desire, beauty, fulfillment,

communality, scientific progress and the good life to mundane consumer goods such

as soap, washing machines, motor cars and alcoholic drinks”(Featherstone 14).

A similar stress on the logic of commodities bearing influence on social codes

that establish human relationships, can be found in the writings of the French thinker

Jean Baudrillard, who makes a significant addition to the Marxist concept of

commodity, by introducing a new theory of signs. This theory draws “on semiology to

argue that consumption entails the active manipulation of signs” (15). Under this new

system, the commodity (signifier) joins the sign in a relationship of commodity-sign

to establish a completely different code system in advanced capitalist societies. In this

system of codes, “ the autonomy of the signifier, through, for example, the

manipulation of signs in the media and advertising, means that signs are able to float

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free from objects and are available for use in a multiplicity of associative

relations”(15).

Baudrillard’s most influential writings include Simulacra and Simulations and

it merits serious consideration in the debate on consumer culture.. In the essay titled

“The System of Objects”,he argues that the capitalist system of over production has

rendered the objects free from labour so that they now appear in their pure commodity

form before the consumer. They constitute a new sign system, a new meta language

where the line between the signifier and the signified has collapsed. Therefore, he

claims that with the advent of new media, advertising “is mass society, which with the

aid of an arbitrary and systematic sign, induces receptivity, mobilizes consciousness,

and reconstitutes itself in the very process as the collective. Through advertising, mass

society and consumer society continuously ratify themselves” (“The System”13).

Consumption became the dominant feature of Western Capitalist societies, in

the post-war period, especially after the 60’s where efforts of nation-states were

directed at reviving their war torn economies through massive public spending. A

shift towards consumerism therefore produced observable change in culture, and also

had serious implications for society. Featherstone observes that “the consumer society

becomes essentially cultural as social life becomes deregulated and social

relationships become more variable and less structured by stable norms”

(Featherstone 15). While it is generally believed that with growing consumerism, the

idea of society becomes more fluid the argument against it can be equally emphatic.

Marxists are quick to argue that the shift of focus from modes of production to modes

of consumption is a ploy of the postmodernists to create new aggregates that ideally

suits the capitalist system of over production. It can be argued that postmodern culture

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effectively conceals the contradictions inherent in the processes of its own production

and distribution. The act of consumption not only includes “purchase and judgment of

taste,” but also the “knowledge of new goods and their social and cultural

importance” (19). Moreover, since consumption is also linked to the symbolic

representation of lifestyle, the system of production gears itself up to meet the

increasing demand for “symbolic goods” (19). New groups yearning to consume such

symbolic goods which would assure them a higher social status emerged eager to

learn the modes of consumption and cultivate new lifestyle. These groups were

mostly “the new middle class, the new working class and the new rich or upper class,”

(19) for whom “the consumer culture magazines, newspapers, books, television and

radio programmes which stress self-improvement, self-development, personal

transformation”(19) became most relevant.

According to Featherstone, the promotion of such bourgeois ‘cultural taste’ for

consumption was done by the consumer, who, through his own ‘self conscious’ acts

was concerned to send the appropriate signals to others around him. They formed a

new class that easily accepted consumer ideology. They are the group that “Bourdieu

refers to as (1984) ‘the new cultural intermediaries’, those in media, design, fashion

and advertising, and ‘para’ intellectual information occupations, whose jobs entail

performing services and the production, marketing and dissemination of symbolic

goods”(19). With the increase in demand for such culturally symbolic commodities,

there was also a similar demand for “cultural specialists and intermediaries who have

the capacity to ransack various traditions and cultures to produce new symbolic

goods.”(19).Their numbers grew considerably and very soon they began to identify

themselves with artists and intellectuals with their peculiarly distinctive “habitus,

dispositions and lifestyle preferences” (19). They came to encroach upon the now

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“deterritorialized and demonopolized enclaves of intellectuals and artists,” (19) even

as they carried “the apparent contradictory interests of sustaining the prestige and

cultural capital of these enclaves while at the same time popularizing and making

them more accessible to wider audiences” (19). This effort of the cultural

intermediaries to popularize the earlier forms of high art by bringing them into the

bourgeois public sphere to create a aura of aestheticization is the first step towards

postmodern culture. The cultural intermediaries then become the entrepreneurs and

ambassadors of postmodernism.

One of the earliest uses of the term consume meant to destroy, to use up, to

waste, to exhaust; in this sense, it is also paradoxical that the logic of capitalist

economics of overproduction depends on the cultural instinct of the bourgeois to

consume and waste. This is seen by conservatives like Bell as leading to cultural

disorder. However, Featherstone has a more balanced approach to the problem of “the

persistence, displacements and transformation of the notion of culture as waste,

squandering and excess” (21). He argues that the same economic principle in

capitalism that encourages the surplus production of commodities also produces

“images and sites which endorse the pleasures of excess. Those images and sites also

favour blurring of the boundary between art and everyday life” (22).

The sites of cultural production which thrive on the unending desire for

consumption are television and advertising. In an effort to make consumption more

attractive consumer culture includes in it “elements of pre-industrial carnivalesque

tradition” (22). The carnivalesque gets transformed and displaced into “media images,

design, advertising, rock videos and the cinema” (22). These tendencies of

popularizing art in consumer societies gave birth to a form of commercial art that was

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more acceptable to artists and cultural intermediaries. They had now begun to value

the bourgeois practices of production and consumption. And this move towards

aestheticization of everyday life has a dual movement that “suggests the collapse of

some of the boundaries between art and everyday life and the erosion of the special

protected status of art as an enclaved commodity” (25). The “migration of art into

industrial design, advertising, and associated symbolic and image production

industries” (25) define the features of post-industrial society of Daniel Bell. A second

development within the arts which can be seen as an “internal avant gardist

dynamic”, (Featherstone 25) is the form of postmodern art exemplified in the pop art

of the 1960’s. The best exponent of this art is undoubtedly Andy Warhol, whose

famous work “Campbell’s Soup Cans”, is “an ironic playing back of consumer culture

on itself, and an anti-museum and academy stance in performance and body art”

(Featherstone 25)

Such developments in the culture of late twentieth century were indeed a result

of significant changes in the character of industrial societies. Rapid changes in the

basic features of modern industrial societies were accompanied by significant changes

in their operational modes owing to the introduction of new information and

communication technologies. These developments encouraged sociologists to look for

new terms to designate such societies. Terms like information society, media society,

knowledge society and consumer society came into circulation. . However, there are

others that suggest an epochal shift from a preceding form of society, hinting that “a

preceding state of affairs is drawing to a close” (Giddens 2). These include post-

modernity, postmodernism, post-industrial society, and so forth. According to

Giddens, “Some of the debates about these matters concentrate mainly upon

institutional transformations, particularly those which propose that we are moving

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from a system based upon the manufacture of material goods to one concerned

centrally with information”(2).

Nevertheless, such arguments about epochal transformation ended in

controversies by focusing much on “issues of philosophy and epistemology” (2).

Giddens’s point has reference to the theoretical contribution of postmodern

philosophers like Jean Francois Lyotard. Lyotard uses a new rhetoric to label the

social theories of the enlightenment as meta-narratives. These meta-narratives as

Jameson suggests in the foreword to Lyotard’s book The Postmodern Condition: A

Report on Knowledge, “are those that suggest that something beyond capitalism is

possible, something radically different, and they also ‘legitimate’ the praxis whereby

political militants seek to bring that radically different future social order into being”

(“Foreword” xix). However, this view is different from Lyotard’s own view on the

emergence of a postmodern society and the breaking up of grand narratives. Against

the thinking of some who argued that the breaking up of the earlier grand narratives

“implies the dissolution of the social bond and the disintegration of social aggregates

into a mass of individual atoms thrown into the absurdity of Brownian motion”

(Lyotard 15), Lyotard argues that “Nothing of the kind is happening: This point of

view it seems to me, is haunted by the paradisaic representation of a lost ‘organic’

society” (15). For Lyotard, the modernist concept of an organized society is as much

flawed as the search for unity in enlightenment philosophy. Giddens also suggests that

“‘society’ is of course an ambiguous notion, referring both to ‘social association’ in a

generic way and to a distinct system of social relations” (Giddens 12). The second

usage figures quite commonly in both Marxist and non-Marxist perspectives though,

some “Marxist authors may sometimes favour the term social formation over that of

‘society’” (12). However, the concept of society as a bounded system is the same in

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both perspectives. Even while there is a general agreement that the notion of society

forms the core of sociological study, there have been complications arising in recent

times, not only with the concept of society, but also with the theoretical formulations

used in the study of society.

The first major problem that Giddens points out is that “Even where they do

not explicitly say so, authors who regard sociology as the study of “societies” have in

mind the societies associated with modernity,”(13) thereby implying that the concept

of society emerged with modernity. The second problem relates to some theoretical

interpretations that are closely connected to the notion of society, as for example

provided by Talcott Parsons. “According to Parsons, the preeminent objective of

sociology is to resolve the ‘problem of order’”. The problem of order is central to the

boundedness of social systems” (Giddens 14). Giddens however, disagrees with this

proposition arguing that it is difficult to think how social systems can bind “time-

space distanciation” (14). In his view, sociological study that was obsessed with

notions of bound systems was always tied to modernist concepts of order and

centrality.

He argues that the idea of modern society that emerged under the influence of

Marx, Durkheim and Weber was inextricably bound to the instrumental rationality of

modern state institutions. In an attempt to build a rationale to show why the concept

of modernity failed, Giddens links modernity with the institutional forms that

determined Western social life in the 18th

and 19th

centuries. “Modern institutions

seem to have taken over large areas of social life and drained them of the meaningful

content they once had” (116). In his view, society became the object of study used by

sociologists to build modern institutions. He argues that sociology is and will continue

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to be bound up with the project of modernity. In other words, such sociology cannot

comprehend the changes in contemporary Western societies since it cannot accept the

idea of unbounded systems. Therefore, Giddens tries to argue that sociology must

now shed its residual thought connected with modernity since; the latter has now

come to an end. According to Featherstone, Giddens “does so to point away from the

economic reductionism that he sees as a pervasive legacy of nineteenth century

thought” (Featherstone 28). This can be understood as the first crucial turn in

sociology that attempts to reject previous methods of the discipline, in a move to

favour the inclusion of cultural theories in sociological method. A careful analysis of

the shift in methodology is necessary to see whether this turn is, in effect, a new

postmodern project of sociology.

Classical theories of sociology always maintained a distinction between

economics, politics and society. But, the postmodernists tend to collapse these

boundaries and try to bring culture to the centre stage. Modernity and modernism

were two different concepts - the former being “largely political and ideological,” and

the latter “largely cultural or aesthetic” (Kumar 101). But, the same principle does not

seem to apply to post-modernity and post-modernism. Quite often, they are used

interchangeably and therefore, it is possible that much confusion arises with the

concept of post-modernism. However, it is useful to keep the distinction between

them since the prefix “-post” has its referent in modernism. And therefore, from the

analogy with modernism, one can say that the same principle should apply to the

concept of post-modernism also.

Nineteenth century sociology analyzed society as differentiated into different

realms, but insisted upon “the interconnection of realms” (Kumar 102). Marx’s base-

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superstructure model exemplifies such an interconnection. And, as Kumar rightly

points out; through this model, Marx linked “politics, religion and culture to the

economic life of society” (102). The postmodernists further the idea of social

differentiation to an extreme where it would be possible to regard “the ‘sub-systems’

as relatively autonomous” (102). In fact, sociologists like Herbert Spencer and Talcott

Parsons believed that it was “one of the achievements of modernity so to differentiate

society that different principles might apply in the different realms” (102). They

probably never imagined that in future, this differentiation would be so extended as to

declare autonomy complete autonomy of realms.

Talcott Parsons is interested in developing a theory of sociology based on the

principle of action. He tries to give a psychological explanation for the motivational

factors behind individual actions, but suggests that only those actions that serve the

common interest of a collective can be accommodated in any theory of social system.

According to Parsons, “a social system” has “the three properties of collective goals,

shared goals and of being a single system of interaction with boundaries defined by

incumbency in the roles constituting the system” (Parsons 192). He suggests that the

development of sociological concepts and the formation of systems are made up of

human actions. The elaboration of action “occurs in three configurations” (7). The

first is the “system of personality” and the second, “the social system” which is the

result of a “process of interaction” of a “plurality of actors in a common situation” (7).

Both these systems are internally “differentiated and integrated” (7). And, the last is

the “system of culture” which has “its own forms and problems of integration” which

cannot be easily reduced to “either personality or social systems or both together” (7).

Therefore, Parsons argues that culture cannot be considered to be “in itself organized

as a system of action” (7) though it exists as “a body of artifacts and as systems of

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symbols” (7). As a system, it functions “on a different plane from personalities and

social systems” (7). Even though culture is seen embodied in “the orientation systems

of concrete actors,” it cannot be considered as a “set of theoretical principles for

ordering action as such” (41).

Parsons develops his argument carefully to preserve the distinctive boundaries

between individual personality, social system and the cultural system. Moreover, by

implicating social theory in a referential frame of action, Parsons seems to be inclined

to put an end to the old battle between theory and empiricism. This renders the old

theories of reductionism redundant. It also implies that social and cultural systems

must be kept analytically distinct, however empirically intertwined they may be.

Parsons appears to be a firm believer in the interpenetration of and mutual interaction

between the different spheres Nevertheless, he is keener on developing a methodology

for explaining the boundaries of distinction and the circumstances in which the

spheres interact. And, this presupposes that we look at social systems as open systems

though, it may be theoretically ideal to look at them as closed systems, for the sake of

convenience. However, one should not forget that the concept of open systems comes

with the condition that boundaries have to be maintained.

Therefore, in his view, the relations between the three configurations are as

paradoxical as the relations between differentiation and integration. He concludes that

there can be no “‘sociology’ which is precultural or independent of culture, whether it

be conceived as ‘applied psychology’ or as Durkheimian ‘theory of social facts’”

(Parsons 239). The corollary is also true because “culture cannot stand in isolation, as

something self-sufficient and self-developing” (239). Parsons, writing his theory in

1950’s and 60’s must have been aware of the tensions that were already beginning to

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show between disciplines of culture, economics, society and politics. Therefore, with

a full understanding of contestations of disciplinary boundaries, he suggests that the

“conception of the relations of the three system-levels” (139) has indeed become

problematic. He admits that in current discussions of these problems, “there has been

a tendency for the proponents of each of the three disciplines concerned to attempt to

close their own systems and to declare their theoretical independence of the others”

(239) and become exclusive domains.

The postmodernists do the same by claiming complete autonomy for the

cultural sphere. They invert the model of 19th

century sociology to suggest that

modern society could achieve its freedom and flexibility only because of “this

differentiation and separation of spheres” (Giddens 102). Postmodern theory not only

claims autonomy of the realms, but also insists that they function according to

different axial principles. However, as Featherstone suggests, a shift in focus towards

the cultural dynamic need not necessarily be “taken just on the level of a paradigm

shift or the victory of a superior set of methodologies, which is often how they have

been presented to academic audiences”(Featherstone 30). Therefore, one can say that

it is not necessary to reject, in toto, the earlier methodologies of sociology by linking

them with modernity. The institutional and disciplinary structures of modernity

cannot be done away with so easily.

With the circulation of theories like post-structuralism, deconstruction and

postmodernism in humanities, new agendas began to replace existing agendas and

sometimes even threatened to “render the existing agendas obsolete” (30). Thus

sociological theory came to face a methodological crisis that needed to be addressed

urgently. As Featherstone points out, “The sociological theorists who had until

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recently some sense of a firm set of central issues and debates, which in their most

ambitious form could aspire to provide a foundation for sociology to ground the other

subjects in the social sciences, now had to take a step backward” (30). The idea of

postmodern culture was promoted in a way that appeared as if it sought the

annihilation of society. The postmodernists claimed that society ended with the end of

modernity.

The continually changing feature of cultural products gives individuals the

idea that culture is “a pool of constantly moving, unconnected fragments”(Bauman

31). This view of a new postmodern cultural experience has now permeated the

general world view that the postmodern world is a “self constituting and a self

propelling process, determined by nothing but its own momentum, subject to no

overall plan” (35). Such claims about the autonomy of culture and its ability to

constitute itself through its own specific logic, gives one the impression that

postmodern culture and postmodern society are independent categories. However, one

would discover that the postmodernists claim greater autonomy for culture only to

sublimate the social in the cultural. The wide-ranging use of the term postmodernism

to encompass almost all fields in the humanities including philosophy, economics and

politics implies that “industrial societies have undergone transformation so

fundamental and wide-ranging as to deserve a new name” (Kumar 112). But, many

theorists wish to reserve the term postmodern unhyphenated to refer exclusively to

culture. Kumar tries to examine the relation between postmodern culture and post-

industrial society in his book From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society (1995). He

argues that all theorists who consider a relationship between them “see a convergence

or complementarity” (113) which suggests that the distinctive boundary between the

two is quite narrow and in some instances doesn’t exist. In fact, the postmodern

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cultural discourse becomes so vast and all encompassing that it “dissolves the social

in itself” (114).

Therefore, postmodernism poses serious challenge to sociological analysis by

erasing the categorical boundary between the cultural and the social. Kumar rightly

suggests that the content of postmodern theory is actually derived from “a particular

understanding of contemporary society,” and though culture and society are

“apparently treated separately; in reality they are collapsed into each other” (114). He

proves this point by citing the example of Lyotard and Jameson. Kumar argues that

Lyotard’s account of the “changing character of knowledge” (114) in advanced

industrial societies of the West “is explicitly premised on a view of society in which

‘knowledge has become the principle force of production’ and the ‘computerization of

society’ is taken as the underlying reality” (114). According to Kumar, knowledge

for Lyotard “is not simply a cultural extrusion of post-industrial society; it is an aspect

precisely of the knowledge society” (114). He sees a similar approach in Jameson’s

effort to associate postmodern culture with late capitalism “rather than with post-

industrialism” (115). Kumar suggests that postmodernism, for Jameson, “is not the

cultural dominant of a whole new social order,” on the other hand, “it is yet another

systematic modification of capitalism itself.” (115).

Jameson, draws a relation between late capitalism, postmodernism and media

society. In his book The Cultural Turn (1998), he argues that “commodity production

and in particular our clothing, furniture, buildings and other artifacts are now

intimately tied in with styling changes that derive from artistic experimentation”(The

Cultural Turn 19) marks the transition from modernism to postmodernism. For

Jameson, commodities produced with greater artistic appeal represent a new aesthetic.

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Commodities symbolize the new culture. He also suggests that “our advertising, for

example, is fed by modernism in all the arts” (19). In other words, the artistic appeal

of advertisements is also another aspect of postmodern art. An important aspect of

postmodernism according to Jameson is the institutionalization of high modernism.

He argues that “the classics of high modernism,” that were earlier considered to be

subversive art, “are now part of the so-called canon and are taught in schools and

universities” (19). If such changes indicate a transition into cultural postmodernism,

the same can be looked at from another angle and described “in terms of periods of

recent social life” (19). Jameson argues that both Marxists and non-Marxists now

believe that at some point of time following the World War II, Western society

underwent significant transformation to give birth to “a new kind of society” (19).

This was “variously described as post-industrial society, multinational capitalism,

consumer society, media society and so forth.” (19). For him, “New types of

consumption and planned obsolescence” (19) are some of the chief characteristics of

such a society.

Borrowing the concept of “Late Capitalism” from the Belgian born Marxist

economist Ernest Mandel, Jameson explains why he prefers to use the term to

designate the contemporary period as such. He points out in The Cultural Logic of

Late Capitalism (1991) that Mandel underscores “three fundamental moments”

(Jameson 35) in the development of capitalism: “These are market capitalism, the

monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own, wrongly called post-

industrial, but what might better be termed multinational capital” (35). This stage of

capitalism, according to Jameson, is the “purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a

prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas” (36). Jameson’s

logic of late capitalism is based on the premise that there has been an unbridled

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expansion of activities of MNC’s that use post-Fordist methods of flexible

accumulation. This method does not believe in locating production at home; on the

other hand, the actual sites of production are distributed wide across the globe in

different countries. This makes the scene of production invisible and inaccessible to

the consumer who begins to look at the commodity in its purest form. The commodity

appears in its alienated form; alienated from the processes of its making and also from

labour. As a result, commodity becomes the purest form of capital. Jameson’s logic

overlooks the important function that production and labour play in any stage of

capitalism. This is the major flaw in his logic.

By focusing much on the cultural aspects of late capitalist society, Jameson

fails to make a deeper study of the sociological idea of the post-industrial made

famous by Daniel Bell. He falls into the trap set by multinational capitalists who

argue that with developments in communicational technology, Western societies are

now transformed from production to consumer societies. For Jameson, postmodern

culture is commodity culture. Jameson’s equivalence of capitalism with

postmodernism suggests an equivalence between culture and economics. If one

identifies culture with economics then he makes the fatal mistake of reducing the hard

realities of capital into a form of cultural phenomena. The various forms of exchange

that determine crucial material practices in capitalism are unfortunately overlooked.

This allows the collapsing of the boundary between culture, economics and society.

Therefore, Kumar rightly points out that “Culture can now hardly be regarded as the

‘reflex and concomitant’ of society and the economic system. The boundaries have

been collapsed” (Kumar 115).

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If one collapses the superstructural into the base then he is left with neither of

them. This is the paradox of Jameson’s logic. Such logic does not suggest the failure

of Marxism; on the contrary, it indicates the failure of Marxists like Jameson. They

dilute the political character of economics by adducing it to culture. Jameson’s

suggestion in his introduction to The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism that

postmodern culture should be taken “in the sense of what cleaves almost too close to

the skin of the economic to be stripped off and inspected in its own right,”

(“Introduction” xv) stands testimony to the argument of Kumar. When culture cleaves

close to the economic then it becomes its second nature. They collaborate with each

other to produce and reproduce each other. But, Jameson includes consumption in the

cultural logic and leaves out the process of production. It reveals the hypocrisy of

Jameson who, like many new-left thinkers attempt a cultural critique of capitalism but

refuse to make a political critique of culture. Jameson strives hard to establish links

between the economic logic of late capitalism and its cultural corollary. But having

established those links he is unable to go further to develop a political critique of

postmodernism. By foregrounding culture, he shows “the same tendency towards the

inflation of culture that is so marked a characteristic of all post-modernist writing”

(Kumar 116).

The shift from modernism to postmodernism is also a philosophical shift from

discourses of centering to those of decentering. As Charles C. Lemert points out in his

essay “Post-structuralism and sociology,” the act of decentering was always a political

strategy: “post-structuralism introduced an intellectual politics based on the now

famous concept of decentering” (Lemert 265). He suggests that decentering “is less a

philosophy….than a practice,” and therefore, one should take it as a method adopted

by post-structuralism although it bears “an unsettling approach to writing” (265).

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Lemert suggests that “the postmodernist rejection of enlightenment theories of

knowledge,” can very well be associated with Derrida and Foucault’s “original attacks

on centered philosophies” (165). According to him, the act of decentering is also a

political act that broadly adopts an oppositional strategy against “all traditional and

modern social forms, philosophy included” (265). Therefore, it is the political practice

of postmodernism that sociology must understand and grapple with rather than

attempt to develop a new sociological theory to explain it.

Bauman suggest that with the advent of the postmodern world view, there was

a “widespread feeling of unease and erosion of confidence” (Intimations of

Postmodernity 39). Even before the actual nature of the so-called postmodern change

became clear, sociologists began to react against previous sociological method and

thought of a complete revision. This was an unnecessary step taken to achieve a new

liberal consensus, apparently under duress from cultural theorists to revise the

methodology of sociology. Unfortunately, in their panic response to the unexpected

questions that were raised about methodology, they forgot to ask the more serious

question of whether there was any link “between the new spirit of theoretical and

strategical restlessness and the changing social reality” (40). Moreover, the call to

revise the practice of sociology “was expressed in universalist terms,” (40) and the

“overarching demand” for a rejection of “the orthodox consensus” was a precondition

to join the “new consensus” (40). The old consensus was supposed to be rejected on

the grounds that it was “wrong from the start, a sad case of error, of self-deception, or

ideological surrender” (40).

The engagement of sociologists in such efforts to discredit the old model, in

order to replace it with a ‘new paradigm’, “led to the constitution of what one would

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best call a postmodern sociology (as distinct from the sociology of postmodernity)”

(40). Bauman further suggests that “postmodern sociology received its original boost

from Garfinkel’s techniques conceived to expose the endemic fragility and brittleness

of social reality” (40). Later it adopted the contemplative theories of social action of

Alfred Schultz and shortly afterwards “it turned to Wittgenstein and Gadamer for

philosophical inspiration and the certificate of academic respectability” (40). The idea

of language games that was so effectively put to use by Lyotard “to justify the

elimination of all ‘tougher’, extra-conversational constituents of social reality”, came

from Wittgenstein, whereas, Gadamer gave a vision “of the life-world as a

communally produced and traditionally validated assembly of meanings, and the

courage to abandon the search for universal, supra-local, objective (i.e. referring to

none of the communally confined experiences) truth”(Bauman 40). The paradox of

postmodern sociology was that, the postmodern world “lent animus and momentum to

postmodern sociology” (41) instead of postmodern sociology giving a theoretical

explanation for the divergent practices found in the postmodern world. Curiously,

postmodern sociology also denies any relationship with “a specific stage in the history

of social life,” (41) and interestingly “this sociology which took impetus from

dissatisfaction with visions born of universalistic aspiration of the western, capitalist

form of life, conceives of itself in universalistic, extemporal and exspatial terms” (41).

This happens to be the most crucial paradox of postmodern sociology.

These contradictions in postmodern sociology show that it was a failed effort

to develop a new sociology. It was a hasty reaction to the theory of postmodern

culture. This is why Bauman argues that “postmodern sociology does not have the

concept of postmodernity” (41). It cannot develop or legitimate such a concept

because that would mean a complete transformation of sociological theory itself. A

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“radical restructuration” (41) of sociological theory would not spell its own doom but

also spell doom for the society whose practical existence it tries to “analyze and

legitimate” (41). Moreover, its uncalled for preoccupation with the idea of a

postmodern culture that was thrust onto it by conservative cultural theorists makes it a

“conceptually weak paradigm” that cannot carry the burden of its own “pedagogical

principles” (41) with it. Bauman suggests: “It is precisely because it is so well adapted

to the postmodern cultural setting – that postmodern sociology (its tendency to argue

the non-universality of truth in universalistic terms notwithstanding) cannot conceive

of itself as an event in history”(41). Its response to the postmodern condition comes in

an oblique way and thoroughly coded “through the isomorphism of its own structure,

through commutation between its structure and the structure of that extra-sociological

reality of which it is part.”(41)

The postmodern strategy of destabilization was intended to remove all fixed

ideas of society in order to create new spaces for individual actors to perform their

roles suitably in specific contexts. Some postmodernists argued that society,

understood through 19th century definitions as a collective of “bonds and relations

between individuals and events,” of political, economic and moral character, had

begun to “lose its self evidence” (Rose 328). Such a society was always considered to

be a “bounded territory” governed by its own laws, and sociology was a field of

knowledge that “ratified the existence of this territory” (328). However, with the

advent of postmodernism, sociology is evidently “undergoing some kind of a crisis”

(328). The crisis is mainly due to the proliferation of ideas of ‘the end of the social’

put forward by theorists like Baudrillard who argued that the social was always an

imaginary which never existed.

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Baudrillard’s argument in his book In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities

(1983), largely draws on the idea that society conceived of as an aggregate governed

by an organized state does not exist any longer. On the other hand, in a media

suffused society, the social is produced as “the orbital, interstitial, nuclear, tissual

network of control and security, which invests us on all sides, and produces us, all of

us, as a silent majority” ( In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities 68). Baudrillard

suggests that it is a sociality that operates not according to law and state control, but

on modes of surveillance. “It is a hyperreal, imperceptible sociality” (68). According

to Baudrillard, the media have effectively neutralized the social by reproducing it in

its own image. He suggests that “all media…act in two directions: outwardly they

produce more of the social, inwardly they neutralize social relations and the social

itself” (79-80). From this perspective, the theory of “the death of the social is simple:

the social dies from an extension of use value” (90). Marx had emphasized ‘use

value’ only counter the power of exchange value in the hope of rescuing the social

from the economic. The media, however, produces a hyperreal social using an

inverted logic, an inverted dialectic. Marx had “dreamed of the economic being

reabsorbed into a (transfigured) social; what is happening to us is the social being

reabsorbed into a (banalized) political economy: administration pure and simple”

(90). As Nicholas Rose rightly suggests, Baudrillard proposes the ‘end of the social’

in the belief that “the sociality of the contract, of the relation of state to civil society,

of the dialectic of the social and the individual has been destroyed by the

fragmentations of the media, information, computer simulation and the rise of the

simulacrum” (Rose 328-329).

According to Baudrillard, simulation functions as a set of signs manipulated

by the media for consumption of the masses. And, these “well orchestrated” signs

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begin to function as if they are “entirely dedicated exclusively to their own recurrence

as signs and no longer to their “real” goal at all” (“Simulacra and Simulations” 182).

By substituting the image for the real, the simulational signs begin to act “as hyperreal

events, no longer having any particular contents or aims;” on the contrary, they are

“indefinitely refracted by each other” (182). He argues that simulation is able to create

a new space where power eventually breaks apart; it creates “a weightless nebula no

longer obeying the law of gravitation of the real” (182). Therefore, it becomes

imperative for power to develop its own strategies to reestablish the relations between

the image and reality. It needs to show that the image, after all, is only a

representation of social reality, although it conceals to a great extent, the processes of

production of that reality. And therefore, according to him, power is obliged to

“reinject realness and referentiality everywhere, in order to convince us of the reality

of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production” (182).

Baudrillard suggests that society engages itself in an endless process of “production

and overproduction,” in an effort to restore “the real which escapes it” (183).

Baudrillard’s argument appears like a damning condemnation of the capitalist

process of production; however, his attack is aimed at the structures of power that

centres all values in exchange value. He argues that the system of exchange has given

birth to a new affluent society where consumption is the governing principle. In

consumer society, social integration becomes rather impossible since it functions with

the logic of satisfying individual desires and needs. Nevertheless, consumption can

still be a “powerful element in social control,” (“Consumer Society” 56) that atomizes

“individual consumers’ (56). According to Baudrillard, in consumer society there is

“the unlimited promotion of individual consumption” but simultaneously there is also

a “desperate call to collective responsibility and social morality” (56). This is the

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basic contradiction in the system of overproduction. Baudrillard argues that one

cannot expect the capitalist system to assist the formation of social aggregates; the

system can only promote consumer interests. In his view, consumers are individuals

who represent nothing, in fact, they cannot represent anything in particular because

every consumer “stands alone next to millions of solitary individuals, he is at the

mercy of all other interests” (57). The notion of solidarity of individuals on which the

modern state came into being in the 19th

century is now outdated. Consumer ideology

creates the same sense of alienation in individual consumers as did the ideology of

production in labour in the 19th

century. Baudrillard suggests that with the

intensification of consumer identity, the relation between the political state and civil

society needs to be redefined. He argues that society was always an imagined territory

over which the state, so far, exercised immense control. The commodity-market has

now relegated the state to a secondary position and therefore the social is no longer a

viable aggregate.

Baudrillard’s argument focuses largely on consumption as the defining aspect

of the culture of capitalism. The argument presupposes some systemic changes in the

organization of capitalism that may be responsible for consumer culture. Scott Lash

and John Urry, in their book The End of Organized Capitalism (1987), suggest that

these general transformations in culture are the result of larger “disorganization of

capitalist societies.” (285). They partly attribute the “disorganization” to “the rise of

the service class” (285) in advanced industrial societies. Further, they point out that

the reduction of culture to acts of consumption shows that the social identity of a

particular class of people whose culture is determined through such acts is now deeply

fractured. They identify this class as the service class for whom consumption becomes

a leisure time activity. However, “the fractions of the service class are crucial in

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establishing a transformed cultural hegemony in disorganized capitalism” (285). This

shows that the culture of consumption is an inevitable corollary of disorganized

capitalism. Its goal is certainly not the integration of needs since it would imply the

integration of the social also.

Lash and Urry agree with much of Baudrillard’s proposition of the media

image acting as the referent in postmodern culture but prefer to make certain serious

exceptions. They argue that Baudrillard’s contention that domination can occur only

when there is a “single and univocal meaning or signified to the signifiers,” (289) is

completely flawed. They suggest that “Baudrillard’s argument is that the masses

reject signifiers attached to media images” (289). Baudrillard sees the rejection of the

signifiers as the resistance of the masses in contemporary consumer societies; it is

resistance directed at “established power, as well as the signifieds which the left has

promoted (such as the people, the proletariat)” (289). Lash and Urry argue that they

have no problem in accepting the idea that “post-industrial domination” takes place

through “communications in the sphere of production,” (298) or the idea that what is

produced “in the media, a large part of the service sector, in parts of the public

sector,” consists of “communications and information” (289). However, they strongly

disagree with “the principle of cultural resistance in consumer society” (290) arguing

that this principle “is in fact more often than not its principle of domination” (290).

Hence, what appears as consumer resistance to signifieds of domination and

subordination is a principle of domination of media images. It is important to

understand that the media is yet another form of capitalist reproduction.

The principle of domination functions not through the “attachment of

meanings to images by cultural producers, but by the “particular strategies of

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dominant social groups to refuse to attach meanings to such images” (290.) This is

their first argument against Baudrillard’s theory. The second is that there is nothing

“necessarily disruptive, much less subversive, about masses who implode meaning

and their subjectivities into flat hyper reality” (290). Moreover, in all explanations of

social movements, “resistance is conditional upon coherent forms of identity, or more

precisely collective identity” (290). Therefore, it hardly matters if subjectivity is

imploded in an endless chain of signifiers in “lifelike Baudrillardian networks of

communication,” for in the final analysis, “collective identities are constituted around

ultimate sets of meanings” (290-291). Baudrillard’s logic of the hyper real world

dissolving meanings and subject identities does not carry much weight. It pales before

the forceful logic of Lash and Urry. One can conclude that the logic of postmodern

culture need not necessarily entail a postmodern society. Moreover, since the

modernist state has not entirely withered away, a reconfiguration of the social is

uncalled for. Social policy initiatives are still part of every national government. It

means that the social constitutes itself more or less along the same rationale of

collective identity of socio-economic class.

Pescosolido and Rubin in their influential article “The Web of Group

Affiliations Revisited,” argue similarly against the need to reconsider social

organization in the wake of postmodernism. At the turn of the century, the millennial

hopes of many in the Christian world were of the Second Coming and Apocalypse.

However, these were the dominant beliefs of the theologians and their

neoconservative supporters. But, it now appears as if the turn of the century has

betrayed those millennial hopes. However, in the intellectual sphere of the social

sciences, scholars have claimed the end of history, end of philosophy, end of

individualism, and also the end of the social. Such claims have often been made by

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post-structuralists, but Pescosolido and Rubin ask “whether these social shifts are

sufficiently different in character to have produced a new social form, one suitably

widespread and anchored to become visible” (Pescosolido and Rubin 52). While they

agree with the postmodernists’ claim that “we have entered an era of ambiguity,” they

reject their claim that the resultant social change constitutes a new society. They argue

that the postmodernists’ “embrace of the resulting “chaos” as a new social form is

misguided” (52). In their view, the chaos is only a reflection of the “societal

transition” that is underway but, ironically, the postmodernists mistake it for a new

enduring social structure or even a hybrid of modern society” (52).

They contend that what many contemporary western societies are witnessing

today culturally and historically “bears a striking similarity to the place on the cultural

and historical map that created sociology at the end of the last century” (52). They

refer to “rising suicide rates, the growing prominence of protestant countries and the

subsequent demise of Catholicism’s hold on the Western world,” (52) as some of the

striking parallels between the two histories. They justify the approach of Durkheim,

Marx, Weber and Simmel because they did not “embrace the change and ambiguity

they surveyed;” on the contrary, “they struggled to describe new, systematic,

overarching patterns of work, religion and social interaction and linked these patterns

to the fortunes and tragedies of individual lives” (53). They proclaim that like these

social thinkers, they too believe that one of the major tasks of sociology at the turn of

the century is to “struggle to understand the new institutional and personal structures

that characterize contemporary social forms” (53). Sociology’s new burden is much

the same as the old one though the challenges may be bigger. Hence, Pescosolido and

Rubin suggest that it is important for sociology to understand and theorize the

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transitions, rather than “abdicate to other disciplines the task of making sense of

emergent societal transitions and structures” (53).

They also propose that the current transitions that have apparently resulted in

“personal, social and institutional chaos” compel sociologists to develop an agenda to

understand the character of society by what it is and not by what it is not” (53). By

positing this argument they propose that postmodernism does exactly this. It defines

itself in terms of everything that modernity is not. Pescosolido and Rubin rightly

argue that postmodernism cannot offer a positive analysis of society owing to its

negativism. One of the most important and interesting aspects of postmodernism is its

enthusiasm to capture “the spirit of social change” and to highlight “the limitations of

contemporary social research” (60). However, its biggest failure lies in its inability “to

offer an equally compelling set of imaginaries and agendas in response” (60) to the

social change. The call to reconceptualize sociological research does not come from

postmodernists alone. And, more importantly, postmodernism fails to explain in

theory as to “what follows the postmodern transition in terms of new social structures

with their attending opportunities and limitations” (60). Postmodernism is too

ambitious and therefore tries to remove all limits. Hidden in its vaulting ambition to

exceed limits is its desire to institutionalize change. This, however, is sociologically

impossible. Sociology would expect postmodernism to first describe and explain the

domain of discourse. Sociology is deemed to show with new descriptions and

interpretations “what social arrangements are, not simply what they are not” (60).

Pescosolido and Rubin express doubts whether “postmodernism has the

epistemological orientation to do this” (60). If there are new social structures

emerging in contemporary times, then it is the business of sociology to understand

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new formations. And “the search for the social foundations of the new social

arrangements remains an important aspect of understanding social life” (61).

The search for foundations of new social arrangements is one of the main

concerns of contemporary sociology. However, there is another school of thought that

believes that sociology is no longer the study of order but of change and movement.

This is the primary conflict between sociologists who prefer closed systems and those

who argue for open systems. Even a postmodern sociologist like Alain Touraine, in

his article “Is Sociology still the Study of Society?” admits that “a sociology of action

and change casts doubt on all interpretations which describe social life in terms of a

system of an organism capable of self-regulation and striving for equilibrium”

(Touraine 178). Such sociology, according to Touraine, would not only undermine the

“roles of institution and socialization,” but also put forth a dangerous demand that

“the very idea of society should be eliminated” (178). Given the fact that the state in

every democratic country still functions as the foremost social institution, it will be

difficult to accept the idea that sociology is now “the study of social relations and –

increasingly – social change,” (178) alone. There is a need to strike a balance between

the study of change and stabilities. Change need not necessarily mean chaos; on the

other hand, we need to consider “our increased ability to transform our existence,”

(178) to adapt to change.

Bauman has a long list of prescription for developing a proper sociology.

However, in the given condition where subjects are granted greater autonomy; it will

be extremely difficult to define the field in which they would experiment their actions

responsibly. With greater freedom there is greater responsibility on individuals to

respond appropriately to collective desires and ambitions. The highly individualized

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setting of postmodernism may afford a larger space for agency but it may also cancel

the sense of dependency that was always a corollary of social action. Moreover, the

domain circumscribed by postmodernism is extremely vague and fluid; it is “as

emergent as those of the actions and their meanings that form it” (“A Sociological

Theory of Postmodernity” 152). The postmodern domain is neither a totality nor an

aggregate; on the contrary, it seeks a free discursive space for itself without any

boundaries.

There is no overall organization or coordinating systems that can map this

domain. In such a context, it is impossible to imagine any sociological method that

will delineate the principles and actions that constitute what Bauman prefers to term

“the habitat” (152). Habitat is a term used to refer to the environment, ecology and

geographical territory that particular species of animals live in and adapt themselves

to naturally. The human species, however, is one single species occupying a much

larger space. Moreover, humans organize themselves into groups based on complex

mechanisms and variable denominators that go beyond territorial space. Therefore, it

is always important to identify the discursive boundaries and the common coordinates

of sociality that can be broadly applied to different societies than focus much upon

pluralities and indeterminacies. Such a move to shift focus to micro level differences

may lead sociology back to the study of ethics and morality.

That would mean reverting to the beginning of modern sociology which would

be a retrograde step. Instead sociology could come out of its insularity to engage itself

with major political and social conflicts of our times. At the same time, its new goal

would be to find out if postmodern culture seeks to reorganize society on a different

set of principles. However, postmodernists like Steven Siedman for example, continue

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to insist on “the notion of a self with multiple identities and group affiliations…with

multiple possibilities of empowerment,” (“The End of Sociological Theory” 136)

which goes to prove that they have no interest in any form of aggregates or

foundations. Therefore, sociology would do well to treat postmodern culture as

another change effected by technological development rather than looking at it as a

major social transformation. Such a step would be a forward movement towards

understanding cultural transformations. Sociology could perhaps develop appropriate

methods to study the cultural impact of high technologies, globalization and flows of

mass cultural products. This would provide new opportunities to sociological theory

to reenter public discourse in significant way. It would also help sociology to win

back its political space that was encroached by media-oriented cultural theorists.