New Media, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory After Postmodernism: Automodernity From Zizek to Laclau by Robert Samuels

Author:Robert Samuels [Samuels, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780230619814
Amazon: 0230619819
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2010-01-01T23:00:00+00:00

Part III

Postmodern Education, Social Movements, and Politics

Postmodern Education and Social Ethics after Automodernity

This chapter outlines a framework for progressive social movements, effective education, and postmodern ethics in the period of automodernity. As I have developed throughout this book, since we now live in a time where individual autonomy combined with technological and cultural automation represses social mediation, we need to find ways to reaffirm the social construction of human reality.1 This stress on social construction and progressive social movements stems from the argument that at the foundation of postmodernity, we find the recognition that people construct social relations, but these constructions are shaped by larger social, cultural, and historical forces. Thus, postmodern social theory requires a dialectical relation between human agency and social formations.2 Ultimately, we need a critical ethical theory that will help us to integrate diverse social movements, political institutions, and individual subjectivities.

It is also important to stress that the globalized spread of modern capitalism, science, and democracy threatens to produce a universalized culture of nonmeaning because these modern systems of disordering order have no inherent value or content.3 In turn, we need to be on guard against the temptation to return to premodern traditions that offer the lure of stability and identity but function to negate the central message of secular humanism, which is that people, and not some higher being or authority, construct social relations, and thus, people can change these relations. According to this postmodern argument, the turn to religious explanations only serves to mystify collective social actions, and it is the role of progressive intellectuals to offer an alterative model for individual and social meaning. Moreover, the “academic class” can help to coordinate diverse social movements and to provide knowledge concerning past collective actions, but this vital social task will have to fight the counterproductive results of most academic theories and criticisms.4

Unfortunately, many powerful and respected voices on the academic Left tend to engage in an “all or nothing” strategy that idealizes the need for a globalized fight against the global capitalist system and debases the diverse postmodern social movements that fail to take on a more totalizing position.5 Furthermore, many of these academic theorists profit personally from a university system that replicates some of the worst aspects of contemporary capitalism. Not only do superstar academics feed off of the exploitation of the nontenured academic labor force, but these same “engaged” radicals have not resisted the downgrading of higher education. In fact, as many radical faculty continue to promote their own work on the lecture circuit, they neglect the destructive restructuring of their home institutions. Making matters worse, radical theorists often prefer abstract and universalizing political statements to direct social action, and one of the effects of this movement away from concrete social change is that educational practices become alienating and globalizing.6 In other words, the move to the rhetoric of universality and totality represses the need to recognize particular postmodern social movements and the social construction of human relations.

The Problems with Progressive Education

In

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