Postmodernism or Modernism?: Social Theory Revisited

Abstract

Postmodernism, in social theory and in social practices, is understood usually as a categorical rejection of modernism. Postmodernism in this interpretation thus signals the death of humanism. Foucault (1977b) in this sense speaks, not just of the dismembered totality of the oeuvre, but of the ‘death of the author’. Structuralism had already meant the rejection of theories which featured the independence of the social actor or of ‘agency’. In France this took a largely philosophical turn, and heralded a break with the autonomous agency of existentialism and phenomenology of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Hippolyte. In its Anglo-Saxon, sociological reception, it meant the rejection of Max Weber’s action theory in favour of structural determination. For Freudians it suggested the dismissal of a similar domination of psychoanalysis by ego theory, and its replacement with the orthodox Freudian primacy of the id, whether or not the latter appeared in the colours of Lacan’s symbolic. In film theory it pointed to rejecting auteur notions in favour of a focus on structures of Barthesian or Lacanian signifiers. Post-structuralism and post-modernism radicalised this refusal of the human agent. Now no longer did even the text constitute the author, but both author and text were deconstructed into Derridan écriture. Humanism entails the existence of not just author and autonomous actor but also of ‘meaning’. And it was just this humanist warmth of meaningfulness that Baudrillard dissolved into the cold winter of his mediascapes.