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Postmodernism and the Other Ziauddin Sardar. Pluto Press, London and Chicago, 1998, 346 pages, £14.99
Futures 31 (1999) 853–864 www.elsevier.com/locate/futures
Book reviews Postmodernism and the Other Ziauddin Sardar. Pluto Press, London and Chicago, 1998, 346 pages, £14.99 Postmodernism, argues Sardar, is “taking over the world we inhabit, the thoughts we think, the things we do, what we know and what we don’t know, what we have known and what we cannot know, what forms our nature and our being (p. 6)”. In summary, postmodernism is ubiquitous. Post Modernism and the Other, subtitled “The New Imperialism of Western Culture”, is a radical critique of postmodernism and its attendant forms of multiculturalism and post-colonial studies which Sardar maintains are imbricated in its structural web.1 Through the agencies of Western capitalism, Sardar argues, colonial empires possessed territories and modernism controlled the mind. Far from being its redress, postmodernism is its perverse continuation. Chameleon like, it disguises and consumes everything in its own imperious image. Pluralism and freedom, the self-sustaining myths of Western liberal democracies, are maintained and regurgitated, now in the name of postmodernity. This is a highly readable and provocative book. The strength of Sardar’s project is that he has at his finger tips, in the best tradition of Cultural Studies, an incredible range of imagery from which to draw his analyses and arguments (he has also written Cultural Studies for Beginners [1]). Seemingly effortlessly he moves from popular culture, The Prisoner, Blade Runner, to the poetry of Mohammed Iqbal, to Satanic Verses, Chaos Theory, mathematics, the architecture of Kuala Lumpur and Los Angeles, and to chain stores such as East India Company. A chapter devoted to Disney’s version of Pocahontos provides a salutary lesson on cultural appropriation in the age of simulation, a term he borrows from Jean Baudrillard (p. 28). He shows how Benetton advertising campaigns eradicate religious differences to promote the idea of one world united by sartorial trends (p. 264). New Age attitudes, along with the Body Shop, are condemned as neo-colonialist atrocities. Sardar describes the conundrums and difficulties of postmodernism as a regulating concept and demonstrates it as a form of institutional practice. He demands that we rethink the Other not just as a projection of the fantasies of the West but as the site of political struggle. This prospect offers alternatives to the gargantuan appetite of consumerism which reduces everything to empty and endlessly distorted surfaces, themselves a simulation of plurality. The themes of identity, authencity and the Self are at the epicentre of his project.
1
Henceforth page references are included in parenthesis in my text.
0016-3287/99/$ - see front matter. 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 0 1 6 - 3 2 8 7 ( 9 9 ) 0 0 0 4 0 - 3
854
Book reviews / Futures 31 (1999) 853–864
The text functions through a sequence of oppositions: postmodernism and the Other; secular cynicism and religion; pluralism and identity; corruption and authenticity. However, the particular structure of the argument enforces its limits. Sardar presents a homogenous view of postmodernism in which everything is a doomed victim of this repressive ideology. A further totalising trend in his thinking is to lump together key figures who have been identified as postmodernists and to represent them all as bearers of hostile secularism. So Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida are amongst the major protagonists whose work, Sardar argues, provides postmodernism with a relativist foundation. Sardar steadfastly avoids recognition of this paradox. Yet Sardar does share many of their preoccupations. He shares with Foucault questions concerning the Subject. Nevertheless, Foucault’s work is seized upon to exemplify postmodernism’s cynical disarray. For Sardar, Foucault reduces the role of the historian to an archaeologist of the past (p. 130). He is critical, as he puts it, of “the emphasis on discontinuity and difference in history” (p. 7). He argues that the culminative affect of Foucault’s work is to neutralise the Other and to subsume all non-western identities and histories in the grand Western narrative of secularism which becomes the history (p. 131). Moreover, he contends, in Foucault’s “heteropia” the Other becomes meaningless (p. 152). Sardar wishes to present a notion of the Self as “secure in identity” (p. 263) but this identification allows him to skirt around many questions concerning the Subject, power, consent and agency which afterall is central to both his own as well as to Foucault’s project. I am surprised at Sardar’s resistance. The work of Foucault has opened up the possibilities of rethinking subjectivity and the self in unnostalgic terms [2,3]. It allows us to develop a critique of Western individualism and logocentricity. However, some critics have described the effects of his work as rendering the subject impotent in the face of deterministic technologies. Edward Said argues that Foucault confuses the power of institutions to subjugate individuals with the fact that individual behaviour in society is frequently a matter of following rules and conventions which is not the same as submitting to power [4]. Steven Lukes claims that by regarding power exclusively as an impersonal structure, Foucault fails to grasp its meaning at all. Thereby he fails to explain how power is exercised by individuals who must bear responsibility for their actions [5]. Although these are not Sardar’s criticisms, they have a bearing on my own argument with Sardar’s text in so far as they alert us to some of the important stakes in Foucault’s thinking. Through reformulating questions about historical and political discourses, Foucault enables us to ask precisely those questions about the individual subject’s capacity to resist. Foucault himself has claimed that the theme of resistance can only be comprehended if it is established in concrete terms—who is engaged in struggle, what the struggle is about and how and where? [6]. In “Truth and Power”, Foucault suggests “one has to dispense with the constituent subject” to get rid of the inalienable subject itself, to arrive at an analysis which accounts for the subject within a historical framework. He seeks a form of history which accounts for the constitution of knowledge and discourse without reference to the subject per se which is as he puts it, “either transcendental in relation to a field of events or runs in empty same-
Book reviews / Futures 31 (1999) 853–864
855
ness throughout the course of history” [7]. His is a call for historical specificity and concrete examples. For Foucault, society is not an abstract concept but refers to a series of methods, techniques and practices which create particular forms of social bonds and cohesion. Foucault does not conceive of the modern state as monolithic or homogenous but, as Barry Smart suggests, “a matrix... which forms and shapes the subject via public institutions and private ventures” [8]. Foucault’s notion of hegemony helps explain how seemingly naturally occurring qualities are embodied in the psychic and physical reality or truth of a human subject. Hence, he argues that social cohesion is achieved not solely through force or coercion, but most effectively by way of practices, techniques and methods which infiltrate minds and bodies, and cultural practices which cultivate behaviour, beliefs, tastes, desires and needs. Foucault’s model of hegemony, and particularly if taken in fertile alliance with Antonio Gramsci’s earlier model of hegemonic power and consent, have been decisively applied in Subaltern Studies, as Sardar must know very well but ignores in this book. Power for Foucault can be understood as the creator of the processes of individuation and differentiation and it is the operation of power that constitutes the “object” which is also the “subject” of power. Thereby the experience of power, empowers and produces resistance. Foucault emphasises the productivity of power: power subjects and renders active. The object is also always the subject. Hence, there is always the possibility of reversal of and a resistance to that very power. I have gone on at some length about Foucault, not because I am in the business of defending him totally, but to emphasise the point that Sardar wilfully elides much in Foucault that could in fact prove a resource. Whilst Sardar demonstrates the pervasive power of postmodern discourses, he has neither a theory of resistance nor of hegemony. For him, “Cultures of resistance must be nurtured because they are the only humane answers to the pressing need for liveable options, sustaining choices for the people of the non-west” (p. 280). His thinking is trapped in a contradictory logic, which works perhaps inadvertently to suggest that resistance is impossible in so far as resistance itself is implicated in power relations: hence his critique of post-colonial studies. Sardar is more equivocal about Jean Baudrillard whose notion of simulation he effectively uses in his account of Pocahontos. Baudrillard has “the courage to take the argument about social construction of all reality to its logical conclusion” (p. 24). He is however less keen on Baudrillard’s assessment of the Gulf War and here sees Baudrillard as symptomatic of everything wrong with postmodernism and intellectuals. Sardar argues that there is no way of knowing from Baudrillard “what really happened” (p. 25) Again a closer reading of Baudrillard might indicate that his battle is against “stupidity” which, in Baudrillard’s words, alerts us to [the] professional and functional stupidity of those who pontificate in perpetual commentary on the event: all the Bouvards and Pe´cuchets for hire, the would-be raiders of the lost image, the CNN types and all the master singers of strategy and information who make us experience the emptiness of television as never before [9].
856
Book reviews / Futures 31 (1999) 853–864
His assault is on those who collude with the presumed realism of the media industry. Indeed Baudrillard’s denunciation of stupidity amounts to an ethical alternative to anti-war humanist rhetoric. The notorious assertion that the Gulf War itself was “virtual”, does not mean, for Baudrillard that military conflicts did not take place. Paul Patton points to the prescience of Baudrillard’s analysis which insists: apart from the massive damage and suffering inflicted upon Iraq, and the political and economic benefits at home, very little has changed. The Iraqi regime remains intact. The rights of Kuwait may have been restored, but in exchange for the rights of minorities in Iraq. A perfect semblance of victory for the Americans has been exchanged for the perfect semblance of defeat for Iraq. In short, the Gulf war did not take place[10]. Certainly Baudrillard’s work is playful and mischievous, which is not to say it is bad or “evil”. He is not, he claims, performing a metaphysics of destruction, a charge with which Sardar imputes to all postmodernists. For Baudrillard, “Le mal” is “irreducible”: it resists the dialectical opposition between “good” and “evil”. He is not interested in the annihilation of meaning, rather he is concerned with its disappearance. Again, like Foucault, here is another “postmodernist” who cannot and should not be simply dismissed as a collaborator in the furtherance of Western imperialism. Quite the contrary. Sardar is stern in his rebuff of doubt as an ethic in his critique of Salmon Rushie’s Satanic Verses: “It offers not dissent but the orthodoxy of doubt, the dogma of moral relativism and the creed of triumphant secularism” (p. 195). Relativism is the enemy here which again is to replicate the over simple binary trap of “friend or foe”. I may be accused by Sardar of being a biased Westerner, but it seems to me, that doubt is not always or necessarily the outright enemy of faith, rather its test, a recognition of experienced faith in the world, which all theologies of intellectual sophistication, certainly including Islam, accept as a difficult enrichment of faith, and which does inevitably result in “relativism”. Discussing science, Sardar, in spite of himself, is an advocate of relativism (p. 209). He shows that scientific method is value-laden, Eurocentric and that the “laws” of nature are not “discovered” but “manufactured”. Following Claude Alvares, he maintains that science resembles the “great proselytizing religions” which possess the ultimate truth (p. 211). He goes on to argue that there could be many universally valid and culturally distinctive sciences and Western science must recognise different ways of knowing and promote symbiosis with non-western sciences (p. 230). So we glimpse a genuine alternative to that of postmodernism or Other, the set-up which dominates and structures so much of Sardar’s text. A vivacious and provocative book, it certainly educated, entertained and infuriated me. It also made me wonder to whom it is addressed, if not to the usual suspects in the Western infected academies. The appropriation of post-colonial studies by the academy is surely an issue. One of the effects of Western liberalism is to depoliticise those very discourses which seek to challenge it. However, Sardar is unwilling to
Book reviews / Futures 31 (1999) 853–864
857
distinguish between postmodernism as an institutional practice and the work of those who practise it as a criticism. It is clear that respect for others is the challenge we all share. This is at stake in social and political as well as intellectual life. Today, the debacle taking place in former Yugoslavia unequivocally confirms that too many evils are being committed in the name of identity. While Sardar’s ethical stance is clear, his route is confused and alienating for a reader like me. I do not accept completely the gloss of postmodernism (who does?) but find within it a space from which to speak. This is not to eschew tradition. Indeed close textual and intertexual reading and a concern with hermeneutics are a feature of “postmodern” modes of thinking and as often pointed out, are akin to Judaic and Islam procedures and traditions. When postmodernism is associated with deconstruction—in the sense that Jacques Derrida has given to the term—it is also concerned with reconstruction. Its critical moves are to relinquish the stranglehold of binary thought and the hierarchical oppositions to which it inclines. We have all paid a high price for reason. There is much to lament about what has been done in modernity in the name of universal reason. However, the difficulty with reason is not with universality—the universal is after all no more than the proliferation of particulars—but rather as Gillian Rose explains, whether the “initial abstract universal (meaning or idea) comes to learn”; whether “something can happen to it; whether one abstractly universal individual enters into a substantial interaction with another abstractly universal individual” [11]. This is not to renounce rational thought whose dangerous twin is unreason but to return us to the question of the Other. For Sardar, the Other becomes a catch all for anything which is not of the West. The twists in his text leave us with the idea that there is just one postmodernism and there can be no resistant Other to its unifying gaze. So he reiterates the logic of identity and difference. A homogeneous postmodernism is indeed assimilation. Is it possible that Sardar is after all a postmodernist malgre´ lui? Juliet Steyn
References [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
Sardar Z. Cultural studies for beginners. Cambridge: Icon Books, 1998. Rabinow P, editor. The Foucault reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. Foucault M. Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Said E. Foucault and the imagination of power. In: Couzens Hoy D, editor. Foucault: a critical reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986:151. Steven Lukes’ critique is discussed by Couzens Hoy [p. 10]. Foucault M. Truth and power. In: Gordon C, editor. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Brighton: Harvester Press [p. 164]. Foucault M. Truth and power. In: Gordon C, editor. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Brighton: Harvester Press [p. 117]. Smart B. The politics of truth and the problem of hegemony. In: Couzens Hoy [p. 160]. Zurbrugg N, editor. Jean Baudrillard: art and artefact. London; Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: SAGE publications, 1997.
Book reviews Postmodernism and the Other Ziauddin Sardar. Pluto Press, London and Chicago, 1998, 346 pages, £14.99 Postmodernism, argues Sardar, is “taking over the world we inhabit, the thoughts we think, the things we do, what we know and what we don’t know, what we have known and what we cannot know, what forms our nature and our being (p. 6)”. In summary, postmodernism is ubiquitous. Post Modernism and the Other, subtitled “The New Imperialism of Western Culture”, is a radical critique of postmodernism and its attendant forms of multiculturalism and post-colonial studies which Sardar maintains are imbricated in its structural web.1 Through the agencies of Western capitalism, Sardar argues, colonial empires possessed territories and modernism controlled the mind. Far from being its redress, postmodernism is its perverse continuation. Chameleon like, it disguises and consumes everything in its own imperious image. Pluralism and freedom, the self-sustaining myths of Western liberal democracies, are maintained and regurgitated, now in the name of postmodernity. This is a highly readable and provocative book. The strength of Sardar’s project is that he has at his finger tips, in the best tradition of Cultural Studies, an incredible range of imagery from which to draw his analyses and arguments (he has also written Cultural Studies for Beginners [1]). Seemingly effortlessly he moves from popular culture, The Prisoner, Blade Runner, to the poetry of Mohammed Iqbal, to Satanic Verses, Chaos Theory, mathematics, the architecture of Kuala Lumpur and Los Angeles, and to chain stores such as East India Company. A chapter devoted to Disney’s version of Pocahontos provides a salutary lesson on cultural appropriation in the age of simulation, a term he borrows from Jean Baudrillard (p. 28). He shows how Benetton advertising campaigns eradicate religious differences to promote the idea of one world united by sartorial trends (p. 264). New Age attitudes, along with the Body Shop, are condemned as neo-colonialist atrocities. Sardar describes the conundrums and difficulties of postmodernism as a regulating concept and demonstrates it as a form of institutional practice. He demands that we rethink the Other not just as a projection of the fantasies of the West but as the site of political struggle. This prospect offers alternatives to the gargantuan appetite of consumerism which reduces everything to empty and endlessly distorted surfaces, themselves a simulation of plurality. The themes of identity, authencity and the Self are at the epicentre of his project.
1
Henceforth page references are included in parenthesis in my text.
0016-3287/99/$ - see front matter. 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 0 1 6 - 3 2 8 7 ( 9 9 ) 0 0 0 4 0 - 3
854
Book reviews / Futures 31 (1999) 853–864
The text functions through a sequence of oppositions: postmodernism and the Other; secular cynicism and religion; pluralism and identity; corruption and authenticity. However, the particular structure of the argument enforces its limits. Sardar presents a homogenous view of postmodernism in which everything is a doomed victim of this repressive ideology. A further totalising trend in his thinking is to lump together key figures who have been identified as postmodernists and to represent them all as bearers of hostile secularism. So Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida are amongst the major protagonists whose work, Sardar argues, provides postmodernism with a relativist foundation. Sardar steadfastly avoids recognition of this paradox. Yet Sardar does share many of their preoccupations. He shares with Foucault questions concerning the Subject. Nevertheless, Foucault’s work is seized upon to exemplify postmodernism’s cynical disarray. For Sardar, Foucault reduces the role of the historian to an archaeologist of the past (p. 130). He is critical, as he puts it, of “the emphasis on discontinuity and difference in history” (p. 7). He argues that the culminative affect of Foucault’s work is to neutralise the Other and to subsume all non-western identities and histories in the grand Western narrative of secularism which becomes the history (p. 131). Moreover, he contends, in Foucault’s “heteropia” the Other becomes meaningless (p. 152). Sardar wishes to present a notion of the Self as “secure in identity” (p. 263) but this identification allows him to skirt around many questions concerning the Subject, power, consent and agency which afterall is central to both his own as well as to Foucault’s project. I am surprised at Sardar’s resistance. The work of Foucault has opened up the possibilities of rethinking subjectivity and the self in unnostalgic terms [2,3]. It allows us to develop a critique of Western individualism and logocentricity. However, some critics have described the effects of his work as rendering the subject impotent in the face of deterministic technologies. Edward Said argues that Foucault confuses the power of institutions to subjugate individuals with the fact that individual behaviour in society is frequently a matter of following rules and conventions which is not the same as submitting to power [4]. Steven Lukes claims that by regarding power exclusively as an impersonal structure, Foucault fails to grasp its meaning at all. Thereby he fails to explain how power is exercised by individuals who must bear responsibility for their actions [5]. Although these are not Sardar’s criticisms, they have a bearing on my own argument with Sardar’s text in so far as they alert us to some of the important stakes in Foucault’s thinking. Through reformulating questions about historical and political discourses, Foucault enables us to ask precisely those questions about the individual subject’s capacity to resist. Foucault himself has claimed that the theme of resistance can only be comprehended if it is established in concrete terms—who is engaged in struggle, what the struggle is about and how and where? [6]. In “Truth and Power”, Foucault suggests “one has to dispense with the constituent subject” to get rid of the inalienable subject itself, to arrive at an analysis which accounts for the subject within a historical framework. He seeks a form of history which accounts for the constitution of knowledge and discourse without reference to the subject per se which is as he puts it, “either transcendental in relation to a field of events or runs in empty same-
Book reviews / Futures 31 (1999) 853–864
855
ness throughout the course of history” [7]. His is a call for historical specificity and concrete examples. For Foucault, society is not an abstract concept but refers to a series of methods, techniques and practices which create particular forms of social bonds and cohesion. Foucault does not conceive of the modern state as monolithic or homogenous but, as Barry Smart suggests, “a matrix... which forms and shapes the subject via public institutions and private ventures” [8]. Foucault’s notion of hegemony helps explain how seemingly naturally occurring qualities are embodied in the psychic and physical reality or truth of a human subject. Hence, he argues that social cohesion is achieved not solely through force or coercion, but most effectively by way of practices, techniques and methods which infiltrate minds and bodies, and cultural practices which cultivate behaviour, beliefs, tastes, desires and needs. Foucault’s model of hegemony, and particularly if taken in fertile alliance with Antonio Gramsci’s earlier model of hegemonic power and consent, have been decisively applied in Subaltern Studies, as Sardar must know very well but ignores in this book. Power for Foucault can be understood as the creator of the processes of individuation and differentiation and it is the operation of power that constitutes the “object” which is also the “subject” of power. Thereby the experience of power, empowers and produces resistance. Foucault emphasises the productivity of power: power subjects and renders active. The object is also always the subject. Hence, there is always the possibility of reversal of and a resistance to that very power. I have gone on at some length about Foucault, not because I am in the business of defending him totally, but to emphasise the point that Sardar wilfully elides much in Foucault that could in fact prove a resource. Whilst Sardar demonstrates the pervasive power of postmodern discourses, he has neither a theory of resistance nor of hegemony. For him, “Cultures of resistance must be nurtured because they are the only humane answers to the pressing need for liveable options, sustaining choices for the people of the non-west” (p. 280). His thinking is trapped in a contradictory logic, which works perhaps inadvertently to suggest that resistance is impossible in so far as resistance itself is implicated in power relations: hence his critique of post-colonial studies. Sardar is more equivocal about Jean Baudrillard whose notion of simulation he effectively uses in his account of Pocahontos. Baudrillard has “the courage to take the argument about social construction of all reality to its logical conclusion” (p. 24). He is however less keen on Baudrillard’s assessment of the Gulf War and here sees Baudrillard as symptomatic of everything wrong with postmodernism and intellectuals. Sardar argues that there is no way of knowing from Baudrillard “what really happened” (p. 25) Again a closer reading of Baudrillard might indicate that his battle is against “stupidity” which, in Baudrillard’s words, alerts us to [the] professional and functional stupidity of those who pontificate in perpetual commentary on the event: all the Bouvards and Pe´cuchets for hire, the would-be raiders of the lost image, the CNN types and all the master singers of strategy and information who make us experience the emptiness of television as never before [9].
856
Book reviews / Futures 31 (1999) 853–864
His assault is on those who collude with the presumed realism of the media industry. Indeed Baudrillard’s denunciation of stupidity amounts to an ethical alternative to anti-war humanist rhetoric. The notorious assertion that the Gulf War itself was “virtual”, does not mean, for Baudrillard that military conflicts did not take place. Paul Patton points to the prescience of Baudrillard’s analysis which insists: apart from the massive damage and suffering inflicted upon Iraq, and the political and economic benefits at home, very little has changed. The Iraqi regime remains intact. The rights of Kuwait may have been restored, but in exchange for the rights of minorities in Iraq. A perfect semblance of victory for the Americans has been exchanged for the perfect semblance of defeat for Iraq. In short, the Gulf war did not take place[10]. Certainly Baudrillard’s work is playful and mischievous, which is not to say it is bad or “evil”. He is not, he claims, performing a metaphysics of destruction, a charge with which Sardar imputes to all postmodernists. For Baudrillard, “Le mal” is “irreducible”: it resists the dialectical opposition between “good” and “evil”. He is not interested in the annihilation of meaning, rather he is concerned with its disappearance. Again, like Foucault, here is another “postmodernist” who cannot and should not be simply dismissed as a collaborator in the furtherance of Western imperialism. Quite the contrary. Sardar is stern in his rebuff of doubt as an ethic in his critique of Salmon Rushie’s Satanic Verses: “It offers not dissent but the orthodoxy of doubt, the dogma of moral relativism and the creed of triumphant secularism” (p. 195). Relativism is the enemy here which again is to replicate the over simple binary trap of “friend or foe”. I may be accused by Sardar of being a biased Westerner, but it seems to me, that doubt is not always or necessarily the outright enemy of faith, rather its test, a recognition of experienced faith in the world, which all theologies of intellectual sophistication, certainly including Islam, accept as a difficult enrichment of faith, and which does inevitably result in “relativism”. Discussing science, Sardar, in spite of himself, is an advocate of relativism (p. 209). He shows that scientific method is value-laden, Eurocentric and that the “laws” of nature are not “discovered” but “manufactured”. Following Claude Alvares, he maintains that science resembles the “great proselytizing religions” which possess the ultimate truth (p. 211). He goes on to argue that there could be many universally valid and culturally distinctive sciences and Western science must recognise different ways of knowing and promote symbiosis with non-western sciences (p. 230). So we glimpse a genuine alternative to that of postmodernism or Other, the set-up which dominates and structures so much of Sardar’s text. A vivacious and provocative book, it certainly educated, entertained and infuriated me. It also made me wonder to whom it is addressed, if not to the usual suspects in the Western infected academies. The appropriation of post-colonial studies by the academy is surely an issue. One of the effects of Western liberalism is to depoliticise those very discourses which seek to challenge it. However, Sardar is unwilling to
Book reviews / Futures 31 (1999) 853–864
857
distinguish between postmodernism as an institutional practice and the work of those who practise it as a criticism. It is clear that respect for others is the challenge we all share. This is at stake in social and political as well as intellectual life. Today, the debacle taking place in former Yugoslavia unequivocally confirms that too many evils are being committed in the name of identity. While Sardar’s ethical stance is clear, his route is confused and alienating for a reader like me. I do not accept completely the gloss of postmodernism (who does?) but find within it a space from which to speak. This is not to eschew tradition. Indeed close textual and intertexual reading and a concern with hermeneutics are a feature of “postmodern” modes of thinking and as often pointed out, are akin to Judaic and Islam procedures and traditions. When postmodernism is associated with deconstruction—in the sense that Jacques Derrida has given to the term—it is also concerned with reconstruction. Its critical moves are to relinquish the stranglehold of binary thought and the hierarchical oppositions to which it inclines. We have all paid a high price for reason. There is much to lament about what has been done in modernity in the name of universal reason. However, the difficulty with reason is not with universality—the universal is after all no more than the proliferation of particulars—but rather as Gillian Rose explains, whether the “initial abstract universal (meaning or idea) comes to learn”; whether “something can happen to it; whether one abstractly universal individual enters into a substantial interaction with another abstractly universal individual” [11]. This is not to renounce rational thought whose dangerous twin is unreason but to return us to the question of the Other. For Sardar, the Other becomes a catch all for anything which is not of the West. The twists in his text leave us with the idea that there is just one postmodernism and there can be no resistant Other to its unifying gaze. So he reiterates the logic of identity and difference. A homogeneous postmodernism is indeed assimilation. Is it possible that Sardar is after all a postmodernist malgre´ lui? Juliet Steyn
References [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
Sardar Z. Cultural studies for beginners. Cambridge: Icon Books, 1998. Rabinow P, editor. The Foucault reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. Foucault M. Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Said E. Foucault and the imagination of power. In: Couzens Hoy D, editor. Foucault: a critical reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986:151. Steven Lukes’ critique is discussed by Couzens Hoy [p. 10]. Foucault M. Truth and power. In: Gordon C, editor. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Brighton: Harvester Press [p. 164]. Foucault M. Truth and power. In: Gordon C, editor. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Brighton: Harvester Press [p. 117]. Smart B. The politics of truth and the problem of hegemony. In: Couzens Hoy [p. 160]. Zurbrugg N, editor. Jean Baudrillard: art and artefact. London; Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: SAGE publications, 1997.