Book Review: The ‘Postmodern Turn’ in the Social Sciences

The light and heat generated by discussions of the postmodern may have largely dissipated, but, cutting edge or not, a set of postmodern axioms, or, more lightly, tendencies, seem still to appear as features of contemporary cultural production, methodology, and social and political reflection. The postmodern still matters, and there is, Susen’s work demonstrates, room for returning to it at length – although, by the end of the book, the reader might never feel the need to read another on the subject. Because Susen encompasses just about everything written on this topic, and goes beyond it in a massive and dense work of synthesis and systematization. With over a hundred pages of notes and bibliography, the work is surely pretty close to exhaustive, as well as occasionally exhausting, with a rigour that issues in lists within lists within lists, as key ideas are endlessly unpacked and sub-issues unfolded. This makes The ‘Postmodern Turn’ in the Social Sciences a rather forbidding book, in comparison with many of the breezier, more student-friendly overviews currently available, but, as noted, it feels, to me, like a conclusive overview.

Susen defines the postmodern turn

as a paradigmatic shift from the Enlightenment belief in the relative determinacy of both the natural world and the social world to the…post-Enlightenment belief in the radical indeterminacy of all material and symbolic forms of existence. (p. 1)

He approaches his subject matter by way of the idea of five presuppositional turns that have occurred in the social sciences over the last few decades – the relativist turn in epistemology, the interpretive turn in social research methodology, the cultural turn in sociology, the contingent turn in historiography, and the autonomous turn in politics. Thick, rigorous chapters are devoted to each of these turns, and each is structured in a helpfully parallel manner: a set of key oppositions are first set forth – for instance, in the epistemology chapter, truth versus perspective, certainty versus uncertainty, universality versus particularity; Susen then engages in a deep and systematic tussle with the reconstructive postmodern approaches to each of the topics – epistemology, methodology, sociology, and so on. Here, as mentioned, rigour and systematicity rule, a precision that is both admirable and, occasionally, tiring. So, in the chapter on sociology, for instance, three modern versus postmodern oppositions are initially canvassed – industrialism/postindustrialism, productivism/consumerism, economism/culturalism. Subsequently, in turning to the new postmodern sociology, Susen notes and discusses five fundamental meanings attributed to culture in the cultural turn, unfolding such discussions, in turn, by way of multiple points and lists. This is followed by an equally dense consideration of the central role of the self in contemporary sociology, which is divided into ten different parts – the contingency, multiplicity, fluidity, narrativity, corporeality, and so on, of the self. Finally, we get a well-organized, expansive meditation on the affinities between the postmodern and globalization.

I am perhaps making this sound overly predictable and pedestrian, and it isn’t at all. There is a vast amount of work and thought in this themes- and ideas-driven, rather than author-driven, work. And there are plenty of unexpected surprises: the various possibilities in classifying postmodern scholars – disciplinary background, ideological positioning, influence, generational belonging, say, in the introductory chapter; the close focus on discourse analysis, in the chapter on methodology and the interpretative turn; or the sections on the affinities and discontinuities between the postmodern and cosmopolitanism, and on transnational public spheres and post-sovereignty, within the politics and the autonomous turn chapter – all three chapters stood out, in this innovative regard. So did a fascinating little section in the chapter on historiography on a posited three historical phases leading to the development and influence of postmodern thought – early to mid-20th century, late 1960s–1980s, post-1989 – which could have been productively developed at greater length, I felt.

In his penultimate chapter, Susen turns to explore some major criticisms of the postmodern turn. Again, there’s not really any faulting the coverage here, and Susen deals with everything you’d hope to see, exploring analytical, paradigmatic, and (especially) normative critiques. And yet, there’s a sense, in my view, that he remains quite gentle, and that his sympathies go towards the postmodern rather than its critics. There’s a feel of this in the very modest concluding note, where Susen suggests that if

the normative issues arising from the above-stated critical reflections [textualism, ahistoricism, idealism, aestheticism, conservatism, nihilism, relativism, idenitarianism, theoreticism, oxymoronism] are confronted, the paradigmatic shifts advocated by supporters of the ‘postmodern turn’ may play a fruitful role in shaping the social sciences in the interest of their main object of study: humanity. (p. 281)

Is this too easy? Perhaps this might appear, to less postmodern-friendly types, as a slight lapse in the rigour that otherwise characterizes the work. Could stronger, more plausible cases have been made for resistance to the postmodern? The sense I had of this line from Susen was of a normative commitment to postmodern principles, above all else, which might, in the end, entail certain social scientific sacrifices that might not need to be made. Here, I thought particularly about the counter-criticisms of recent years of the postmodern ethical turn, of the fear of totalizing thought, of the emphasis on the totalitarian potential of modernity, of the goodness of a post-utopian spirit, and so on. Above all, isn’t it hard, as a social scientist, to feel fully comfortable about the claim of the ‘radical indeterminacy of all material and symbolic forms of existence’?