Page 191 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

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Against totalization
An antagonism to the ‘generalizing’ aspirations of all those pre-Post-erous
discourses which are associated with either the Enlightenment or
the western philosophical tradition—those discourses which set out to
address a transcendental Subject, to define an essential human nature, to
prescribe a global human destiny or to proscribe collective human goals.
This abandonment of the universalist claims underwriting all previous
(legitimate) forms of authority in the West involves, more specifically a
rejection of Hegelianism, marxism, any philosophy of history (more
‘developed’ or ‘linear’ than, say, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Eternal
Recurrence) and tends (incidentally?) towards the abandonment of all
‘sociological’ concepts, categories, modes of enquiry and methods.
Sociology is condemned either in its positivist guises (after Adorno,
Marcuse, etc.) as a manifestation of instrumental-bureaucratic rationality,
or more totally (after Foucault) as a form of surveillance/control always-
already complicit with existing power relations. In the latter case, no real
distinctions are made between positivist/non-positivist; qualitative/
quantitative; marxist/pluralist/ interpretive/functionalist, etc., sociologies:
all are seen as strategies embedded in institutions themselves irrefragably
implicated in and productive of particular configurations of power and
knowledge. In place of the totalizing intellectual Foucault offers us the
intellectual-as-partisan: producer of ‘socio-fictions’ which despite their
equivocal truth status may have ‘reality-effects’, and the intellectual-as-
facilitator-and-self-conscious-strategist (Foucault’s work with prisoners’
rights groups is often cited as exemplary here). All larger validity claims are
regarded with suspicion. Beneath the euphemistic masks of, for instance,
‘disinterested Reason’, ‘scientific marxism’, ‘objective’ statistics, ‘neutral’
description, ‘sympathetic’ ethnography or ‘reflexive’ ethnomethodology,
the Eye of the Post is likely to discern the same essential ‘Bestiary of
Powers’ (see especially, Jean Baudrillard (1983a) and Paul Virilio (1983)
for explicit denunciations of ‘sociology’). There is an especially marked
antipathy to sociological abstractions like ‘society’, ‘class’, ‘mass’, etc. (see
Lyotard (1986b)). The move against universalist or value-free knowledge
claims gathers momentum in the 1960s with the growth of phenomenology
but reaches its apogee in the late 1960s and 1970s under pressure from
‘external’ demands mediated through social and political movements,
rather than from epistemological debates narrowly defined within the
academy. In the late 1960s the challenge comes from the acid perspectivism
of the drug culture, from the post-’68 politics of subjectivity and utterance
(psychoanalysis, post-structuralism) and from the fusion of the personal
and the political in feminism, etc.