Perhaps it is necessary, to be a good sociologist, to combine some dispositions associated with youth, such as a certain force of rupture, of revolt, of social “innocence,” and others more commonly associated with old age, such as realism, and the capacity to confront the rough and disappointing realities of the social world.

I believe that sociology does exert a disenchanting effect, but this, in my eyes, marks a progress toward a form of scientific and political realism that is the absolute antithesis of naive utopianism. Scientific knowledge allows us to locate real points of application for responsible action; it enables us to avoid struggling where there is no freedom—which is often an alibi of bad faith—in such a manner as to dodge sites of genuine responsibility. While it is true that a certain kind of sociology, and perhaps particularly the one that I practice, can encourage sociologism as submission to the “inexorable laws” of society (and this even though its intention is exactly the opposite), I think that Marx’s alternative between utopianism and sociologism is somewhat misleading: there is room, between sociologistic resignation and utopian voluntarism, for what I would call a reasoned utopianism, that is, a rational and politically conscious use of the limits of freedom afforded by a true knowledge of social laws and especially of their historical conditions of validity. The political task of social science is to stand up against irresponsible voluntarism and fatalistic scientism, to help define a rational utopianism by using the knowledge of the probable to make the possible come true. Such a sociological, that is, realistic, utopianism is very unlikely among intellectuals. First because it looks petty bourgeois, it does not look radical enough. Extremes are always more chic, and the aesthetic dimension of political conduct matters a lot to intellectuals.

(Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 196-7)

I don’t immediately find this plausible. It seems very Aristotelian and not very dialectical, as if Bourdieu says, “let’s find the happy medium between voluntarism and resignation!” rather than what seems to me a more desirable politics, which would continuously, jarringly oscillate between unrealizable utopian dreams and a “realist” politics of compromise, a politics set in motion by the constant contradiction between actual and possible, a politics in which the circulation of utopian representations attempts to reshape the limits of practical possibility and vice versa.

But Bourdieu of course does not exactly advocate a massive, magical reshaping of political practice, in which everyone would be instantly assimilated to his version of reasoned utopianism. If anything, he would recognize, sociologically, that such an occasion is “very unlikely among intellectuals.” So perhaps Bourdieu is actually arguing not for the total vanquishing of voluntarism or fatalism, but rather that sociologists should assume a mediating position in the division of political labor, in which their role would be to contribute their knowledge of social possibility and probability to political projects.

That might be useful; but Bourdieu still seems concerned to distinguish “rational” from “aesthetic” politics in a way that seems implausible. Although it is certainly true that intellectuals often aestheticize politics, they aren’t the only ones who do so, and it’s unclear why “reason” and “aesthetics” should be opposites. Insofar as aesthetics is about the norms of form, and reason has form, all reason is already aestheticized, while one might conversely argue that aesthesis involves, if not reason, at least an inner logic. The closest thing to a statement on “reason” I’ve read comes in Bourdieu’s 1991 piece, “The Peculiar History of Scientific Reason.” There he claims roughly that the historical conditions of possibility of scientific knowledge depend on science being organized such that “logic is the mandatory form of social struggle” (23). He says little, however, about the content of this rationality, this logic. Is this rationality the sole possession of the Bourdieuian sociologist? If so, does only the Bourdieuian sociologist have access to reasoned politics?

Perhaps not, but only, for Bourdieu, to the degree that sociopolitical reflexivity can be generalized beyond the sociologists. “When you apply reflexive sociology to yourself,” Bourdieu goes on to say, “you open up the possibility of identifying true sites of freedom, and thus of building small-scale, modest, practical morals in keeping with the scope of human freedom which, in my opinion, is not that large” (199). So to a large extent Bourdieu aims less to advocate a positive political project than to combat the politics of self-deception, to combat the “irresponsible” struggles that obscure the pursuit of more plausible projects.

That seems to me a wise idea. But of course the trouble is, as I argued over at Nate’s blog last month, that politics are an epistemological nightmare, that it’s hard to know which struggles are plausible and which aren’t. Is Bourdieu really arguing that sociological research contains the answers to all questions of political plausibility? I find that very unlikely, because scholastic knowledge tends to be difficult to put in practice, precisely because it is the product of an objectifying escape from practice that, according to Bourdieu, constitutes the scholastic point of view. But then, a major empirical weakness of Bourdieuian research on universities lies in its neglect of the relations across social fields that happen when academic knowledge is imported and translated and applied outside the academy, in politics for instance.

Richard Wolin, in “America’s Tolerance for French Radicalism,” attempts to describe the complementary histories of French poststructuralism in France and America. Making no distinction between the American nation and American academic culture, he argues that american pluralism and “democracy’s historical strengths” made it possible to assimilate post-structuralism as “merely another framework to choose from amid the ever-expanding marketplace of ideas.” Let’s leave aside the claims that America is democratic and pluralistic through and through, and that our intellectual world forms a free marketplace. These platitudes need not detain us. What’s more interesting is the claim that the intellectual world is “ever-expanding.” Here we have a more complex spatio-temporal image of the intellectual world: to be ever-expanding is to be growing in space as it progresses through time.

This sounds like a coy analogy with the astronomers’ hypothesis of an ever-expanding universe. Yet while Wolin apparently imagines the expanding marketplace of ideas as an endless intellectual bounty, the astronomers have envisioned a world whose infinite expansion will end not in unlimited light, but in indefinite cold and darkness. We might ask Wolin, is an endless marketplace really anything but a stultifying dream? And there’s something more directly debilitating about Wolin’s spatial image of the intellectual world. He views intellectual exchange as fundamentally bounded by national borders, walled off into separate French and American worlds. This leads him to homogenize French and American intellectual spheres. While he equates America with liberal pluralism, he equates France with an unstable radical-authoritarianism. He can’t recognize the immense internal differentiation of the French intellectual field, the profound differences between Derrida’s and Foucault’s institutional careers, the separation of French philosophy into small avant-gardes, numerous sub-specialties, and many different institutional milieux. (Foucault, far from being forgotten in France, is now taught, contra Wolin, in French lycées.) And even as Wolin denounces the category of “post-structuralism” as an American invention, he employs it unwittingly himself, describing a homogeneous American response to poststructuralism unsettled only by a few “committed disciples.”

François Cusset, on the other hand, in “French Theory’s American Adventures,” takes a much more subtle view of theory’s spatial and historical situation. He asks about theory’s future, about the convergence of theory and activism, about the intellectual transformations that theory met as it crossed from France to America. He does see an inversion between the political fate of theory in France and in the U.S., but less ahistorically than does Wolin:

“What we are facing here is a symmetrically reversed situation: on the one hand, a society run by a new wave of conservatives, but whose intellectual field, limited to isolated campuses, enjoys a proliferation of radical discourses, minority theories, and bold textual innovations, with little effect on the rest of America’s public space; on the other hand, a country run by a new wave of liberals (François Mitterrand’s “socialists”), but whose broad intellectual field, occupying a central role in the public space, has just been taken over by a herd of young center-left humanists, with the result of sweeping away leftist and radical tendencies and replacing them with a universalist moral blackmail still on the front stage in today’s France.”

That is, while a conservative American government faces a segregated but lively subculture of campus leftism, a liberal French government is accompanied more harmoniously by a widespread culture of “center-left humanism” that actively suppresses more radical leftist discourse. Hence, in contrast to Wolin, for Cusset it’s America that’s more politically bipolar and France that’s more oppressively and homogeneously liberal. And Cusset foresees new possibilities for the spatiotemporal flow of poststructuralist theory:

“French society is now at a time when all those American intellectual currents, forbidden for import over the last three decades, can finally be put to use in making sense of an unprecedented situation. Indeed, universities and independent publishers are working hard these days to make cultural studies, minority theories, “pop” philosophy, gender analyses, and the postcolonial paradigm not only better known in France (the only major country where prominent theorists behind such currents had not yet been translated), but also critically reformulated to better address specifically French issues… [French theory authors,] their texts, and the endless interpretations they inspire (together forming one cultural continuum) can still help us fashion a future of struggles and world making — within but also beyond higher education, in the United States but also throughout the rest of the world.”

In other words, while Jeff Williams laments that theory is being reprinted and memorialized in the U.S., Cusset informs us that American cultural and theoretical critiques are now being imported into France with renewed intellectual vigor. (For example, Judith Butler’s 1990 classic, Gender Trouble, was recently published in France, in 2005.) Wolin, for his part, rejects “poststructuralism” as irredeemable irrationality even as he rather cheerfully characterizes it as one more competing product in the intellectual market, as if he’s uncertain whether to give it a philosophical thrashing or to compliment it on its market share. Cusset, on the other hand, says that we need to get beyond blithe reenactment or crude rejection of theory, taking a more critical historicist approach:

“If theory is to be of any use nowadays, the many tricks and games implied by its cultural metamorphoses should be taken seriously: by addressing the American identity of French theory, and even by pondering the strange feedback effect of a recent return of French theory to France.”

In other words, if we are to critically reappropriate theory, if we are to make use of it in the present or future, we must first analyze its history, examine its flows through time and space, and more generally, put spatiality and temporality at the center of our theoretical consciousness. Such an analysis, for Cusset, is necessary for making theory again relevant to social struggle and transformation. One might say that Cusset is advocating a dialectical and historical – maybe even Marxist – approach to theory as a historical phenomenon and an intellectual avenue for political change.

The prevalence of rhetorics of time and space in academic texts has intrigued me for some time (“here I’ll demonstrate that x…”; “we must begin anew”; “we must go back to Freud”; “we have transcended Freud”; I hear frequent talk of intellectual “moves” on an intellectual “terrain” of “positions”). These peculiar spatiotemporal strategies and rhetorics, curious in themselves, are also perhaps revealing of the fantasy structure of academic labor, in which immaterial, abstract intellectual activity is humanized and rationalized by way of familiar schemas of place and time. I suppose it goes without saying that such strategies often serve as conduits for academic power and debate and struggle: to call something passé, say, is most certainly to denigrate it. And it may be that academic construals of time and space have some more buried ideological function, deserving of further scrutiny.

But on a less abstract level, I wonder whether a critical reappropriation of 60s radical philosophy is really the best intellectual task we could set for ourselves. I often suspect that today we lack the sense of intellectual excitement that was present once, elsewhere. Perhaps it would be better to form new theories and intellectual collectivities, rejecting aspirations for thorough mastery of the intellectual past. We needn’t consign ourselves to the endless rereadings of Marx and Adorno that define a group like Chicago’s Platypus. Should we take the path advocated by Hiro Miyazaki, in which we generate intellectual hope for ourselves by re-enacting the hope of others on a new terrain? Or is the intellectual future something that we discover by undoing the world around us rather than trying to imitate it?

I find it useless, myself, for three reasons. For one thing, it’s too vague to be useful in academic work. It elides all the intellectual, disciplinary, and institutional differences between, say, Derrida and Foucault, or Deleuze and Lacan, or Rorty and Haraway. Second, it’s typically used as a term of abuse, a brand of shame that designates others rather than selves. No one I know self-identifies as a postmodernist (in the same way that there are no self-identified “hipsters”). And finally, it’s seeming like a rather obsolete category at the moment; its famous controversies are behind us and its leading figures are long tenured or deceased. (1971: Foucault debates Chomsky on human nature; Allan Bloom sparks the Canon Wars, and Paul de Man’s pro-Nazi writings surface; 1996: the Sokal Hoax; 1995-1998, the Bad Writing Contest.)

In anthropology, and I think also in literary studies, the famous debates of the past are over, and some of the famous figures are no longer so obsessively read. Dominic Boyer wrote five years ago that “Foucault’s pervasiveness is largely unparalleled in anthropology, almost to the point that, like oxygen, one takes his ethereal yet nourishing presence in everyday disciplinary life almost for granted.” Today, Foucault is almost never the center of attention in my intellectual circles. It is, if anything, a ripe moment for an in situ study of the decline of postmodernism as an intellectual category. This doesn’t mean that we are returning to the intellectual climate of 1945, obviously. Some of the famous “post-modern” texts remain widely read, and much of the characteristic vocabulary and style remains dominant. But times have changed, I thought.

So I was surprised to find that, when the New York Times had an essay contest for college students to discuss what’s wrong with college, the winning essay was about postmodernism. “The Posteverything Generation,” it’s called, by Nicholas Handler, a Yale undergraduate who “hopes to become a human rights lawyer.”

What I like about Handler’s essay is that it gives us, in an admittedly stylized and polished fashion, a little glimpse of his experience of “postmodernism.”

What do we really stand for? Like a true postmodern generation we refuse to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to present a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our public stage, or to define a specific philosophy. We are a story seemingly without direction or theme, structure or meaning–a generation defined negatively against what came before us… We are the generation of the Che Guevera tee-shirt.

Handler is particularly interested in the relationship between postmodernism and our generation’s politics. And here postmodernism serves as the figure of his ambivalence towards politics and towards his parents’ politics. He distances himself from the political tropes of the past, “radicalism” and “revolution.” He suggests that new political activities, like contributing to moveon.org or advocating alternative energy, have replaced sit-ins. (Never mind that his knowledge of the history of political action, or even of alternative energy, is impoverished and simplistic.) He hovers between the claim that his (our) generation has no politics (only anti-politics), and the claim that our form of politics is simply new and unrecognizable to our elders. He says:

How do we rebel against a generation that is expecting, anticipating, nostalgic for revolution? How do we rebel against parents that sometimes seem to want revolution more than we do? We don’t. We rebel by not rebelling.

But then he goes on to say:

Perhaps when our parents finally stop pointing out the things that we are not, the stories that we do not write, they will see the threads of our narrative begin to come together; they will see that behind our pastiche, the post generation speaks in a language that does make sense. We are writing a revolution. We are just putting it in our own words.

It’s interesting that Handler doesn’t want to end on a postmodern note; in the last analysis, there is order beneath our disorder, sense beneath our political pastiche of slacktivism and withdrawal. As if postmodernism is merely the ugly skin that conceals a good heart.

So what kind of experience of postmodernism does this reveal? Unlike other essays that I’ll examine in a later post, here the postmodern becomes a political idiom. In a kind of classical deconstructive move, categories like “politics” or “revolution” are employed even as they’re questioned, in something like Derrida’s writing under erasure. Fredric Jameson’s essay on postmodernism serves as the authoritative citation; Jameson is used as a source of critical insight, as analytic inspiration, but also as a model of contemporary group experience. (Handler, I should point out, views “postmodernism” as an intellectual current that’s distinct from things like “post-colonialism,” “gender theory,” and “structuralism”; this narrower use is probably more intellectually rigorous than my broader interpretation of the term, but also less helpful as a gloss of the term’s broader usage.)

And if Jameson is treated as an authority figure in this essay, what does that reveal? When Handler views the life and consciousness of our generation as “postmodern,” what is the upshot? Simply, perhaps, that everyday life is cast in academic terms. Handler himself is aware of this; indeed, he is surprised by this, as he says in his introduction:

I never expected to gain any new insight into the nature of my generation, or the changing landscape of American colleges, in Lit Theory. Lit Theory is supposed to be the class where you sit at the back of the room with every other jaded sophomore wearing skinny jeans, thick-framed glasses, an ironic tee-shirt and over-sized retro headphones, just waiting for lecture to be over so you can light up a Turkish Gold and walk to lunch while listening to Wilco. That’s pretty much the way I spent the course, too: through structuralism, formalism, gender theory, and post-colonialism, I was far too busy shuffling through my iPod to see what the patriarchal world order of capitalist oppression had to do with Ethan Frome. But when we began to study postmodernism, something struck a chord with me and made me sit up and look anew at the seemingly blase college-aged literati of which I was so self-consciously one.

Handler’s self-conscious and avowed self-consciousness is curious, and somewhat inconsistent with the postmodernism he espouses. If we are nothing but confused clusters of ideological forces, or products of semiotic circumstance, then consciousness would appear to be distraction at best, delusion at worst. But this is not only postmodernism; it is the junction of postmodernism with a much older Romantic ideology of self-formation. It is a postmodern bildungsroman; Handler “maintains a peculiar balance between the social and the personal and explores their interaction,” in Marianne Gottfried’s terms. For Handler, postmodernism allows him an escape from his jaded, ironic consumerism into something real. It’s what gives him “new insight into the nature of my generation.” Far from being a retreat into cynical skepticism, Handler casts postmodernism as the source of hope, and truth.

But our collective consciousness, Handler thinks, is “blase” consciousness, the cynicism that Zizek so often critiques as our dominant ideology. Handler is all too insightful, I fear, when he calls us “the generation of the Che Guevera tee-shirt,” a generation in which radical politics are commodified and sold, in which a movie about Che Guevara grosses $39 million. In Perlstein’s essay in the Times, he cites David Brooks’ category of the Organization Kid, someone who’s deep into “the bureaucracy that schedules students’ self-exploration,” someone who does social justice work through a campus club and has an eager deference to authority. To understand this generation’s politics, needless to say, you also have to understand the corporate and educational systems that limit and organize it.

Handler does not acknowledge that Lit Theory class, and postmodern discourse in particular, are also part of these institutions that “schedule students’ self-exploration,” part of the institutions of contemporary ideology. Handler is fascinating because he sees everyday life in postmodern, academic terms. But not everyone is privy to his purported insights; while Handler sits in class coming to private revelations, we as a group remain “a story seemingly without direction or theme, structure or meaning.” Tacitly, Handler views the postmodern condition as our generation’s curse, a condition that he, as a self-made intellectual, aims to describe and transcend. In the end, this comes less to an insightful political strategy than to a rhetorical technique of self-glorification. And postmodernism remains, in this case, one more idiom for distinguishing the individual from the collective. If there is a more adequate politics to be rediscovered in the classical texts of postmodernism (an oxymoronic category, I know), it remains to be articulated.