The ‘postmodern turn’ in the social sciences

From the mid-1980s through to the mid-1990s, the idea of the postmodern seemed terribly important. Fierce debates raged over the relation of the modern to the postmodern, and whether postmodernism was a radical or conservative development. There were disagreements over which key thinkers could be labelled ‘postmodern’, and even over the hyphenation of the term: should we talk about the postmodern or post-modern? Twenty years on, one is left wondering what, exactly, was at stake in these debates, and what has happened to the idea of the postmodern, which has all but disappeared from the conceptual vocabulary of the social sciences. Was the postmodern the product of a brief historical moment (defined, above all, by the collapse of state socialism and the associated Marxist orthodoxy) that has long since passed, or did postmodernism, even if it was short-lived, change the basis of social science in ways that are still important today?

Susen is sympathetic to the latter of these positions. He writes that the purpose of this new book on the ‘postmodern turn’ is to demonstrate that:

The core of this book identifies five key areas in which postmodernism continues to have an impact on the social sciences, each of which are associated with a different although related ‘turn’: epistemology (‘the relativist turn’); research methodology (‘the interpretive turn’); sociology (‘the cultural turn’); historiography (‘the contingent turn’); and politics (‘the autonomous turn’) (see 39). Each of these turns are structured around three constitutive tensions. In the realm of epistemology these are ‘truth versus perspective’, ‘certainty versus uncertainty’ and ‘universality versus particularity’ (40). And for methodology: ‘explanation versus understanding’, ‘mechanics versus dialectics’ and ‘ideology versus discourse’ (65). Susen does not explore these tensions by attaching them to the work of particular thinkers, but by pursuing what he calls a ‘thematic’ rather than an ‘author-focused’ examination (see 232). While there are extensive quotes from different thinkers throughout the text, authors’ names are, for the most part, stripped out and placed in footnotes at the end of the book. This is a little frustrating as it means continually turning between the main body of the text to the footnotes and the bibliography (which together run to over 200 pages) in order to situate different bodies of work within the various ‘turns’ and ‘tensions’ in question. It is not altogether clear, however, why a thematic analysis cannot, at the same time, be authored-focused, and what is to be gained from separating the two.

This stylistic point aside, Susen makes a number of important arguments about the contribution of postmodern ideas to sociology and politics. He observes, first of all, that the idea of a postmodern sociology is paradoxical because postmodernism calls into question the very idea of ‘the social’. He writes: ‘If there is such a thing as a “postmodern sociology”, it can be defined as a post-traditional discipline in that it refuses to take the existence of “the social” for granted’ (91). He adds: ‘From a postmodern perspective, any kind of explanatory model that regards “the social” as the cornerstone of human existence should abandon its macrotheoretical ambitions’ (91). Susen argues that the cultural turn played a key role in the deconstruction of the social, not least because of its heightened concern for ‘the self’ (see 110–23). But there is also a socio-political backdrop to this development, for individualistic attacks on ‘society’ and ‘the social’ were central to forms of neoliberal governance that emerged from the 1980s onwards. While Susen does not address this political context in any detail, he does point to affinities between postmodernism and both liberal and neoliberal thought. He writes: ‘The neoliberal consolidation of consumerism, monetarism, and postindustrialism as well as the liberal defence of privatism, pragmatism, and pluralism find a happy home in the postmodern celebration of playfulness, eclecticism, and relativism’ (195, emphasis original). It would be interesting to pursue this claim further, not least because neoliberalism is concerned with individual economics freedoms and the refashioning of the state, something that is antithetical to most forms of postmodernism. Indeed, perhaps there are stronger affinities between postmodern and libertarian forms of thought?

In the final sections of the book, Susen outlines a number of possible criticisms of postmodernism, and points, in particular to the ‘normative limitations’ of the postmodern turn. It is not always clear what Susen's stance is on these limitations, which are said to include, among other things, the problems of textualism, ahistoricism, idealism, aestheticism, conservatism, nihilism and relativism (see 242–57). He does, however, advance a strong statement that concludes the main body of the book: ‘The normative integrity of postmodern thought is compromised to the extent that it fails to unearth and to criticize, than to accept and to legitimize, the principal sources of human disempowerment and mechanisms of social domination’ (257, emphasis original). This statement is left to stand rather than developed further into a full-blown argument about the failure of postmodern theory to address questions of social domination (whatever this may be) and formulate the basis of a different kind of social order. But the broader point Susen makes here is right, for the hostility of postmodernism to normative forms of reason is, no doubt, a key factor in its demise. Where this leaves the postmodern is far from clear. For while, as Susen argues, elements of postmodernism continue to haunt the social sciences today, there appear to be few good reasons for breathing new life into this concept by re-living or extending the cultural turn.