Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

POST-MODERNISM

created realities come to be the predetermined worlds which the latter inhabit. Discourses ‘imprint’ themselves on users’ minds and bodies so that their very beings become prison-houses. This means that human beings are not at the centre of history or in control of their lives, or even of their meanings, but are the ‘effects’ of discourses and particular positions within them. ‘Truths’ are meanings constructed in and by particular discourses, while the very notion of ‘human beings’ is ‘a simple fold in our knowledge’ (1972:115).This also means that there can be no such things as objective knowledge or independent reasoned judgement, or autonomous individual selves, or any world that is not constructed by historically specific cultural discourses. Being, as we are, positioned effects of the anonymous play of these systems of signs, we can have no real subjective inwardness, no imagination, no original perception, no creativity. At best, we are bricoleurs, skilfully operating amongst networks of signs which we did not invent and do not control. What we can mean is a contingent matter dependent upon relations and differences between signs in a linguistic matrix. There is no originality here, only an endless discursive play: of signs relating to other signs in a parodic circle. There can be no escape to reality or an absolute referentiality or a real presence—God or Man—only discursive ‘mimesis without origin or end’.

Finally, inasmuch as we live within (a plurality of) discourses which create socio-cultural worlds and give onto what and how we know about them, discourses are the source of knowledge, and also of great power. Or, as Foucault dubbed it, discourses are the seat of powerknowledge. Moreover, it is within power-knowledge that human beings come to consciousness. To be is to know oneself and the world in a particular way, which is to create oneself and the world in a particular way, which is to deny creating oneself and the world in other ways. Power-knowledge enables and at the same time eschews. There is no way around or outside the power-knowledge of discourse; no way of escaping its effects, but also no way of being except as one of its effects.

The reception of post-modern thinking

Differences of emphasis aside, there are clear overlaps between the above three visions: a going-beyond Marxian notions of power, relations of production and alienation; a sense of the anonymity and unreality of contemporary mass society; a feeling of ‘being spoken’ by languages of commodities and cultural artefacts; a sense of the impossibility of escaping back to a time of clear-cut orders and legitimacies; an awareness of a plurality of lives and worlds which can be known and related

298

POST-MODERNISM

together only through the power of particular, contingent ‘knowledgepractices’. As summed up pithily by Terry Eagleton (1981:137), such post-modern exponents concur in their:

modest disownment of theory, method and system; the revulsion from the dominative, totalizing and unequivocally denotative; the privileging of plurality and heterogeneity; the recurrent gestures of hesitation and indeterminacy; the devotion to gliding and process, slippage and movement; the distaste for the definitive.

Eagleton‘s description, nonetheless, is of something of which he, writing as a Marxist still, is highly critical. If the individual self of Enlightenment modernism—autonomous, active, free-willed, unified, self-identical—is emptied of psychical inferiority and ethical substance, and dissolved into a network of libidinal attachments—the ephemeral function of this or that act of consumption, media experience, sexual relationship, trend or fashion—then what of the political quietism and compromise that must issue forth from it? Fragmented by institutionalized public discourses such as language, technology and consumerism, into so many pieces of ‘reified technique, appetite, mechanical operation and matrix of desire’, post-modernism can only supply actors whose deepest ‘natures’ are cultural and de-politicized (Eagleton 1988:396; also cf. Jameson 1988:383). More broadly, Eagleton complains of what he sees as the untenable inconsistency, the false consciousness, of remorselessly centralizing the contingent and the marginalized, of dogmatically privileging what escapes over what does not (the duplicitous and the undecidable), and of constantly dissolving and fracturing dialectical oppositions (1981:138).

Giddens concurs (1990:46–7). Here is the infuriating illogicality of claiming a post-modern project and epoch in a history which, it is also claimed, has no single linearity, in a world which has no one shape and therefore can be addressed by no one totalizing notion or theory. Here is a cynical scepticism, an ironic detachment, fetishizing the fragmentariness and eclecticism of present humankind while still claiming to recognize something called ‘contemporary general culture’, and to be able to describe a universality of change in a unifying description.

Here, Abrams concludes (1988:273–5), is the hypocrisy of writers’ preaching indeterminacy of meaning, and multiplicity of interpretation in the conventional verbal form, whilst all the time dependent upon an obvious and univocal reading of their words, and assuming the normative

299

POST-MODERNISM

grammar of language to describe their points. Substantively, too, what is so new and what is so insightful in what the post-moderns have to say? There is nothing new to the West in exhibiting scepticism about extant truths; in fact, it is rather conventional. Meanwhile, is it true that metanarratives have lost their popularity or persuasiveness? What is popular culture after all but a grand narrative, and what are religious fundamentalism, market capitalism and laboratory science? Finally, what is the picture of the modernism of the Western Enlightenment being followed by post-modernism but a meta-narrative of historical epochs in evolution?

Anthropological reactions

Anthropology’s reception of post-modern thinking has been highly ambivalent, as has been mentioned. In many ways it is with an anthropologically informed awareness of socio-cultural contingency and diversity that post-modern thinking has been underpinned. Anthropological writing has been instrumental in illuminating paths beyond Western conceptions of essence, rationality, system, self, writing, language, and so on, while anthropological method (fieldwork and the dialogics of otherness) has provided the inspiration for imaging methodological progress beyond a narrowly defined scientific method. This has led to a welcoming of post-modernism in some anthropological quarters, some chagrin that the popularity of post-modern ideas has given rise to a host of new disciplines (Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Communication Studies) rather than simply an expansion of anthropology (cf. Nugent and Shore 1997), but also an acceptance that Lyotard, Baudrillard, Foucault and the like (Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, Rorty, Bhabha) have extended anthropological insights in provocative ways. In particular, the notion of a ‘literary turn’ in anthropology in the 1980s, and its ramifications is a signal of the positive reception to the above ideas, at least their usefulness for thinking against (cf. Rapport 1994a).

While the names of James Clifford, Stephen Tyler, Paul Rabinow, George Marcus, Marilyn Strathern, Vincent Crapanzano and Michael Taussig stand out as writers within anthropology whose work shows some sympathetic engagement with post-modern concerns, that of Ernest Gellner stands out as a vehement critic. For Gellner (e.g. 1993), there are three basic intellectual positions (three claims to ways of knowing) which compete for our attention and loyalty in the contemporary world. These are: fundamentalist religiosity, which believes itself to be in possession of a uniquely revealed truth; post-

300

POST-MODERNISM

modern relativism, which forswears the notion of unique truths and would treat each cultural and discursive vision as if true; and Enlightenment rationalism, which believes in a unique, scientific truth but never believes that we possess it definitively, only that through certain procedural rules we can continue to approach it. Gellner is a firm adherent of the last position and attacks the post-modern one (and the religious one) in some of the same terms that he maintains a long-standing opposition to a Wittgensteinian philosophy of language (1959). For, it is in part from Wittgensteinian notions that all concepts are social in nature, that speech-communities have terminal authority, and that all cultures make their own worlds, that post-modernism would conclude that everything is a text and there is no access to objective reality. Also that so-called facts and generalizations are the tools of colonial domination, that ranking kinds and ways of knowledge is wicked, and that the seemingly rational self is a product of contradictory, packaged, discursive meanings and is imprisoned in a hermeneutic circle. The popularity of these notions, Gellner surmises, derives from various failures in the social application of science this century (from the Holocaust and Hiroshima to ‘mad cow’ disease) and the science-like modelling of society (from Nazi Germany to Stalinist Russia), and from the difficulties of practising anthropology in a postcolonial world. These have precipitated an affirming (expiatory, sentimental and escapist) of cultural discourses as the only reality.

And yet, Gellner insists, knowledge beyond culture is possible; indeed, this is the central, most blatant, and by far the most important fact of our shared, and global, human condition today. Science, that is, represents a form of knowledge which is valid for all (its propositions and claims translatable without loss of efficacy into any socio-cultural milieu), a cognition which reaches beyond any one culture (so that new social orders spring up, sharing this new learning, in remarkably consensual ways), and an understanding of nature which leads to a universal technology for the transforming of human being. Like it or not, this is the world we live in, and the necessary starting-point of any adequate anthropology. Science represents a form of knowledge to which all cultures must and do come to terms.The world is neither one of balance nor of isolation—of culture ‘A’ having one version of reality, and culture ‘B’ having a distinct but equal one. Cognitive claims are inherently unequal—however equal people may inherently be. If post-modernism denies this, then it is a travesty:

cognitive relativism is nonsense, moral relativism is tragic. You cannot understand the human condition if you ignore

301

POST-MODERNISM

or deny its total transformation by the success of the scientific revolution…. Valid knowledge ignores and does not engender frontiers. One simply cannot understand our shared social condition unless one starts from the indisputable fact that genuine knowledge of nature is possible and has occurred, and has totally transformed the terms of reference in which human societies operate.

(Gellner 1995b:8)

Instead of pretending that knowledge of natural reality is inaccessible, anthropology should endeavour to answer why scientific modelling has proved so successful with regard to some domains and less so in others.

Post-modernism and anti-humanism

Gellner’s criticisms, like those of Eagleton, Giddens, Abrams and others, are well-taken. And yet there is something in the postmodernist project which would seem to accord with contemporary experience—hence, perhaps, its persuasiveness. The oxymoronics of post-modernism, its appreciation of chaos and excess, of multiplicity, contradiction and inconsistency, its difficulties with a systematization of knowledge, all ring true.

At the same time, however, a number of key exponents of postmodernism can surely be taken to task for their illiberalism, not to say anti-humanism. (The controversy surrounding the disinterring of sympathetic writings on the Nazis by Paul de Man—a major conduit of post-modern ideas in North America—and the refusal of other postmodernist figureheads to condemn them has brought this into sharp focus.) An opposition can well be mounted against the post-modern tendency to displace (‘dissolve’, ‘decentre’) individual agency and deconstruct subjective inwardness and imagination so that social life becomes the mere playing-out of unconscious systems of signification (cf. Foucault 1972:22).

Post-modernist thinking is right to draw attention to the difficulty, even the impossibility, of carrying through the nineteenth-century, scientistic project of making man-in-society a wholly understandable, hence controllable and directable, phenomenon. But then a critique of applying positivistic versions of systematizing science (pre-relativity theory and quantum mechanics) to the domains of human consciousness and the sociocultural is Nietzschean, and nothing so new. Indeed, if one wishes to argue that the essence of life must always elude definition, since its circumstances are haphazard, chaotic, contradictory, irrational, unpredictable,

302