Table Of ContentGreat Barrington Books
Bringing the old and new together
in the spirit of W. E. B. Du Bois
.--...An imprint edited by Charles Lemert .......
Titles Available
Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power, and People
by Avery F. Gordon (2004)
Going Down for Air: A Memoir in Search of a Subject
by Derek Sayer (2004)
The Souls of Black Folk
1 OOth Anniversary Edition
by W. E. B. Du Bois, with commentaries by Manning Marable, Charles
Lemert, and Cheryl Townsend Gilkes (2004)
Sociology After the Crisis, Updated Edition
by Charles Lemert (2004)
S11bject to 011rselves
by Anthony Elliot (2004)
The Protestant Ethic Turns 100: Essays on the Centenary of the Weber Thesis
edited byWilliam H. Swatos, Jr., and Lutz Kaelber (2005)
Seeing Sociologically: 111e Routine Grounds ofS ocial Action
by Harold Garfinkel, edited and introduced by Anne Rawls (2005)
Discourses on Liberation: An Anatomy of Critical Theory
by Kyung-Man Kim (2005)
Postmodernism ls Not What You Think, Second Edition
by Charles Lemert
Fortbcoming
Thinking the Unthinkable:
An Introduction to Social Theories
by Charles Lemert
Postmodernism Is Not
What You Think
Why Globalization
Threatens Modernity
Second Edition
by Charles Lemert
Paradigm Publishers
Boulder • London
100461011(
Ali rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any
media or form, including electronic, mechanical, phomcopy, recording, or informational
storage and retrieval systems, without the express written consent of the publisher.
Copyright © 2005 by Charles Lemert
Previous edition copyright C 1997 by Charles Lemert
Published in the United States by Paradigm Publishers, 3360Mitchell Lane Suite E,
Boulder, Colorado 80301 USA.
Paradigm Publishers is the trade name of Birkenkamp & Company, LLC,
Dean Birkenkamp, President and Puhlisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lemert, Charles C., 1937-
Postmodernism is not what you think: why globalizarion threatens modernity I
Charles Lemert.-2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-59451·152·7 (hc)-ISBN 1-59451·153-5 (pb) 1. Postmodernism-Social
aspects. 2. Sociology-Philosophy. 3. Globalizarion-Social aspects. 1. Title.
HM449.L45 2005
301'.0l-dc22
2005015680
Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the
standards of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed
Lihrary Materials.
Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.
09 08 07 06 os
1 2 3 4 5
To Noah and Anna Julia, and their generations, who must live
in the world mine has made; and to Matthew who decided to
leave it for some other.
Contents
Prefaœ to the Second Edition:
Why Globalization Threatens Modernity ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Part 1 Disturbances 1
1 Beasts, Frogs, Freaks, and Other Postmodern Things 3
2 Postmodernism ls Not What You Think 19
3 An Impossible Glossary of Social Reality 54
Part Il Beginnings 69
4 The Politics of Language: Rethinking Europe 71
5 Structuralism's Zero Signifier: Letters from Brazil 83
6 The Uses of French Structuralisms: Remembering Vietnam 101
Part Ill Questions 121
7 In the lmpcrial Silence, Will the Subaltem Ever Shut Up? 123
8 On an Ironie Globe, What Does lt Mean To Be Serious? 134
9 If Thcre Is a Global WE, Might We Ail Be Dispossesscd? 151
Notes 177
Index 187
About the Author 195
vil
Preface to the Second Edition:
Why Globalization Threatens M odernity
If you listen carefully you can hear the audible sigh. At fast the postmodern
ism thing is over, thank god. If you hear the sigh, then you are probably well
qualified to interpret it, if you will. If postmodernism is no more than theories
of a certain kind-if, that is, it is merely what some people think about the
world-then it was over before it bcgan. Yet, it is very well known that even
theories of certain kinds outlive their own endings because they ride on the
wave of some prior and more basic realities. Marxism and psychoanalysis
are dead but alive in this sense. As a theory of state formation, Marx's ideas
have failed miserably. As a theory of the conflicts internai to capitalism and
modernity itself, Marxism remains a powerful force-one so deep in the col
lective left historical consciousness that, as Foucault once said, one can hardly
think withour Marx. Likewise, as a theory of the royal road to recovery from
an original psychic trauma, the classical psychoanalysis of the early Freud is,
if not quitc dead, moribund. But as a theory of the potency of unconscious
desires in the play of daily life, psychoanalysis is more, not less, powerful than
it was in Freud's day. Postmodernism may well be that sort of thought-pass
ing, perhaps, in some ways; growing, just the same, in others.
So what difference does it make that those suffering chronic cases of
POMO phobia wish it were dead? Why should anyone care? In truth there
is no reason to hold on to the word, especially when the word postmodern
ism bas been so poorly applied in refcrence to the historical facts that gave
it fust-life. Even many of chose who have been its enthusiasts are implicated
in the distortions postmodernism has suffered. The problem here is the one
arising when people become emhusiasts as to factual matters before the facts
ix
x T Pre{ace to the Second Editio11
are in. Their excitement causes them, more or less willfully, to overlook the
tensions and differences in a wild mix of social theories-from structuralism
and its corollary, poststructuralism; through the postmodern moment itself
in the 1980s; to queer theory, which came into its own after 1990. Of these
the more charitable arc those who follow Anthony Giddens in suggesting
that postmodernism is a notion best applied to culture, but not to real, much
less, global realities.
Thcn thcre are chose who don't much like the postmodcrn, but consider it
bad manners to say so. Hence, one of the ways well-mannercd liberals take
relief at the purported end of postmodernism is by the sly embrace of glo
balization as the ne.xt-and to them more embraceable-theory of what has
gonc so wrong with modernity. The liberal cmbrace is always superficially
open to differences they would, deep clown, wish away. Just as the soft Left
loves the poor so long as the cost of the charity does not exceed the tax ben
efits of the food baskets they givc during the holidays, so too with disturbing
ideas. Libcral gentility is more prepared to accept the facts of globalization
because they seem to offer a fongible pay-off. Whatever globalization is, it
is vulnerable to being understood superficially as the technical pay-off of
telecommunications necworks that speed up the delivery of dividends to the
well-enough-off. Live in the virtual electronic world long enough and you
will find yourself trusting it for what it is not. Speedy worlds can be good, but
speed is not everything-and especially not for those left behind. However
fast the new worlds in the new millennium are becoming, there are realities
hard on the deserts and barrios where children beg for food and shelter. These
are the hard social facts that globalization has made more, not less, severe
than its admirers will admit.
Globalization, whatever it turns out to be, will be what it will be. What it
is now already is the certainty of a new set of realities, the fixedness of which,
though fluid, has become the hard deck of social things. There is no becter
witness to the reality of globalization than the fact that, since the years just
before and after 2000, to think of social things, we must think of them as
global realities. 9/11 is code for the border gates that cannot be locked.
To think about the modern world, or modernity itself, is to think Jess with
the mind than with the gut. The social faces of global realities came to us fust
in the gut-in the feelings that rise upas butterflies to create a storm over the
surface of mind and body. When the factory worker in the rusty southeast
ern corner of Ohio learns that the company for which shc and her mother's
mothers had given their lives is moving away, the butterflies flap their tiny
wings. She worries that she will not be able to feed her kids. She feels their
pangs of their hunger in the gut of her anxiety. Wherever afar her job is going
becomcs a thought only when the storms subside. Even if she has never left
the barren town of ber birth, she will corne to her global senses. At the least,
she is aware that not even the tradc union she might have rejected in ordcr
