Some Postmodern Reflections on Social Psychology

Abstract

This paper tentatively identifies a conceptual axis that, despite their fundamental differences, is common to both cognitivist social psychology and social constructionist social psychology. Drawing upon recent theorizations of the nature of the postmodern condition, the following conceptual axis is posited: accelerated turnover (instability)- transgression-consumption of spectacle. This emphasizes, for example, the possibility of change for individuals and social collectivities. In contrast, it is suggested that operating within cognitive and social constructionist social psychologies is the conceptual axis: stabilization-clarification-practicality. If social constructionism's lauded potential for critique is not to be thwarted, then it is important that the issues raised by the former axis are taken fully into account.

Between the Shark Tank and the Deep Blue Sea: Incidents from a History of the Durban Aquarium

“…Again, it is probably coincidental that professor Desmond Clarence, president of the South African Association for Marine Biological Research, was also able to play 'a leading role in the positive attempts by influential components of the community of Natal-KwaZulu to resolve their political differences, as Chairman of the Indaba' (SAAMBR, 1988, p. 2) At the same time, however, the aquarium is firmly part of the postrnodern world -the world, in Michael's (1991) terms, of instability, transgression and consumption of spectacle. Where the predation taboo and the consequent human intrusion (in having to feed the fish) is the terrible lie at the heart of the aquarium as a modern institution, as a postmodern institution it is able to celebrate the transgression of the boundary between observer and experiment.…”

“…Thus already coded into the conditions which led to its existence is the primary tension within which the Aquarium operates, namely that between science and spectacle, or, following Michael (1991), between modem (stabilization-clarification-practicality) and postmodern (instability-transgression-consumption of spectacle). The aquarium as a modern institution exists as a resource for the project of scientifically mapping out the marine biology of South Africa's east coast, to the practical end of guiding the sustainable exploitation of marine organisms in service of the capitalist economy.…”

A genealogy of postmodern subjects: Discourse analysis and late capitalism

“…Mike Michael wrote of the postmodern individual as the “de-centred self”; internalizing the essence of a postmodern cultural environment in which the self became fragmented and dispersed (1992). He compared the common influence of postmodern culture and philosophies on discourse analysis and cognitive psychology (1991), and considered the implications for the possibilities of social action among postmodern individuals who dwell within relativism and uncertainty and who focus on continual self-constitution rather than the material contexts of their external world (1994). Kenneth Gergen theorized in his well-known work The Saturated Self (1991) that the postmodern subject is saturated with information, relationships, and images which lead to the self suffering what he called the “multiphrenic condition”—an infusion of multiple unlimited identities and perspectives on the self and the external world, where reality and selves are thrown into uncertainty, fluidity, and flux.…”