Page 112 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

POST-STRUCTURALISM AND POSTMODERNISM

Post-structuralism and postmodernism

Post-structuralism has often been represented as in some sense peculiarly
“postmodern”. And there is indeed a certain “fit” between post-
structuralist theoretical relativism and the kind of social and cultural
pluralism which many commentators find distinctive of our
contemporary postmodern condition. The institutionalized claims to
authoritative cultural judgement characteristic of culturalism were
typically predicated on the prior assumption of white, Western, middle-
class masculinity. There is no theoretical space at all for the Islamic,
the female, the proletarian, even “the scientific”, in Leavis’s famous
claim that culture is necessarily singular: “We have no other; there is
only one, and there can be no substitute”. By contrast, a contemporary
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post-structuralist feminist philosopher can argue that: “Feminist anti-
humanism…implies the dismantling of a constricting commonness
and the open celebration of specificity”. 116
This assimilation of postmodernism to post-structuralism has become
almost routine amongst both protagonists and antagonists of each.
And yet the two are by no means synonymous. As Scott Lash rightly
insists, there is no necessary parallel between post-structuralism and
postmodernism, nor between critical theory and anti-postmodernism. 117
Much of the debate over postmodernity has in fact been conducted
within an explicitly historicist theoretical framework which derives
at least as much from the Central European, German-speaking variant
of Western Marxism, or its emigré American sub-variant, as from
any kind of post-structuralism. This is true, for example, of Daniel
Bell, Jürgen Habermas, Peter Burger, Andreas Huyssen, Fredric
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Jameson, and of Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér. It is also true, by
way of a strange kind of negative reaction formation, of Jean Baudrillard
and Jean-Francis Lyotard, both of whom are ex-Marxists. In Britain,
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much of the debate has been carried forward by writers associated
with the journal Theory, Culture and Society, which has taken as its
main theoretical reference points not the combination of French post-
structuralism with literary theory, but that of German culturalism
with sociology. Indeed, the major post-structuralist thinkers have
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been almost entirely absent from this debate, and much more so than
have those feminists whose supposed absence has excited much
(implicitly androcentric) comment. 121
In general, French post-structuralism has been far too preoccupied

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