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Here is the summary of the pomo material from April 30. Some of it
is duplication from the other outlines.
WHY POMO?
--Chapter 9 looks at the historical trends in social theory
--It identifies three phases in the last half-century:
1) Functionalism (1940/1950s)
2) Marx/conflict theory & other alternatives
3) Last 20 years especially a challenge to how we theorize and
what's important to talk about
The premise: Contemporary society is different than the previous:
--rationality doesn't work
--diversity and complexity makes "totalizing theories" unconvincing
--mass media and centralization/globalization has shaped how we
look at things, distorting our vision, emphasizing ideology
--"science" is too rigid, and while useful, we need to look beyond it
--the nature of capitalism, which shaped modern society and our theories
about it for over a century, is changing, creating new questions
So, we need a new way to look at society with a new lens. This isn't
a rejection of reason, but digging beneath accepted frameworks that
we've used and changing the metaphors and images.
The intent is to REVITALIZE theory, not eliminate it. One area where
it's crept in is symbolic interactionism. Ethnography is an example
POSTMODERNIST ETHNOGRAPHY
Post modernist ethnography challenges the symbols by which we interpret and
act on our culture.
Postmodernism, a form of cultural critique that emphasizes the
arbitrary nature of cultural signs and their codes, has implicit and
explicit relevance for ethnographers.
Postmodernists tend to be "armchair radicals" in that their
critiques focus on changing ways of thinking rather than calling for
action based on these changes.
Postmodernism is a reaction against "cultural modernity" and a "destruction"
of the constraints of the present "maximum security society" that attempts to
gain control of an alternative future:
Postmodernism's starting point is a critique of the
Enlightenment as a failed rationalist project which has run its
time but which continues to encumber contemporary thought with
illusions of a rational route to knowledge, a faith in science
and in progress. The radical core of postmodernism lies in its
mission of shedding the illusions of the Enlightenment
Postmodernists claim that modernity is dead. Modernism's
characteristics include:
a) The belief in the power of reason and the
accumulation of scientific knowledge capable of contributing to
theoretical understanding;
b) belief in the value of centralized
control, technological enhancement, and mass communication;
c) an adherence to established norms of testing validity claims;
d) acceptance of the Kantian view of the possibility of establishing
universalistic value statements; and
e) the belief in the possibility
of progressive social change. In response, postmodernists offer an
ironic interpretation of the dominance of a master technocratic or
scientific language that intrudes into realms once considered private,
the politics of techno-society, and the sanctity of established civil
and state authority.
Postmodernism is characterized not so much by a single definition as
by a number of interrelated characteristics:
1) Dissent for dissent's sake (Lyotard, 1988)
2) stylistic promiscuity that mixes and matches metaphors and
symbols to obtain contrasting meanings
3) Playful parodying of standard meanings to show their irony
4) Ironic meanings are alternatives to the literal meaning of a symbol or
text that seem to convey a surprising or contradictory message.
5) Irony is a powerful wedge for splitting hidden meanings
from the obvious ones.
6) Postmodernist thought attempts to strip away the familiar social and
perceptual coordinates that comfortably anchor our common-sense meanings
and searches for new ways to make the unpresentable presentable by breaking
down the barriers that keep the profane out of everyday life
SYMBOLIC INTERACTION / ETHNOGRAPHY
Like postmodernists in general, postmodernist ethnographers
are characterized by theoretical skepticism toward language and
other communicative symbols in which no meaning is fully fixed or
exhaustively definable.
For ethnographers, this leads to the goal of
deciphering and overturning the master cultural narratives that convey
subtexts of dominant meanings that lay beneath the primary ones:
If postmodernism is about anything it is about the materiality of
language as a dynamic force in the ritual social transformation of
an indeterminate range of human possibilities into the restricted
moral economy of a given orer of things in time. Does this make
any sense to you as a reader? Whether it does or doesn't, I
assume is a matter of language. Language that keeps us at a
distance; or language that brings us together in a certain way,
while exiling (at least for the moment) other ways of
interpretively making sense of andor being in relation to each
other (Pfohl, 1991: 10).
Ethnographic Surrealism
Ehnographic surrealism depicts a society that
terrorizes, but lacks a language to express the pain. Others offer a
similar view in more conventional terms. Denzin (1990a, 1990b, 1988),
for example, challenges the cultural images created by movies and
other cultural media to decipher how the conservativism and violence
of contemporary society are symbolically recreated. He prods his
readers to look at the extraordinary in the mundane.
The works of
Manning (1992; 1991b, 1989, 1988) shift from analysis of t-shirt
graphics, cultural violence, and the ironic meaninglessness of the
most meaningful of events--death--in order to illustrate how subtle
forms of social oppression are reproduced.
The critical potential of postmodernism lies in its subversion of
conventional ways of thinking and its ability to force re-examination
of what we think is "real." A postmodernist-influenced ethnography
must confront the centrality of media-created realities and the
influence of information technologies that "store, transform, and
subtlely shape life chances in the post modern world, and the
relatively of perspectives"
Ironically, postmodernism carries a potentially nihilistic message of
distrust of Enlightenment belief in social progress and the
possibility of establishing universal values, which are central to
contemporary critical thinking.
But, as Manning (1991: personal communication) reminded me, the central ideas
of postmodernism should be confronted as a question about the
organizing precepts in visualizing a society where neither industrial
production nor nature constrain us as they once did. It is a vehicle
for the projection of future fantasies, and its strength is in
pointing out what we do not know.
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