Playing Games with Postmodernism

Playing games with postmodernism:contemporary social change, a radicalchange to identity? and to ‘belonging’?

Russell KellySoziologie, Uni-Trier, Germany

Is ‘ postmodernity’ anything more than something dreamed upby sociologists? Has the term any salience as a description of astage in the development of society after capitalism? Has thecultural phase, ‘modernity’, actually reached its end allowing‘post-‘?Here, the agrument is that ‘postmodernity’ and thuspostmodernism and postmodernists are products of a series ofmoves in a game played by sociologists. The purpose of thegame is to establish the centrality and importance to society ofthis group of authors who lay claim to features of‘postmodernity’ like ‘identity’ and ‘belonging’ and to their soleabilities to identify these for ‘society’. An account is offered ofthe moves, of the implementation and of the outcome. Theaccount is itself a critique of ‘theorising’ and appeals tosymbolic interactionists and ethnomethodologists, not to bedistracted and to focus on getting sociology’s work done.

This paper (1) is presented as a series of moves in agame, the sociological game. (Anderson, Hughes andSharrock, 1985) This approach is adopted fromWittgenstein’s notion of the language game where therules of language are learned, created and accrued as thelanguage is spoken. Draw an analogy with a group ofchildren playing with a ball in the street. As otherchildren join the game, new rules become necessary aboutteams, objectives and ways of winning. Lines are drawn todefine zones in the playing area requiring further rulesabout the lines and the areas and what may occur within

© Russell Kelly 20011

them. Rules as they are created and imposed can also bechallenged and re-interpreted. The rules of this game canfade and disappear and a new set of rules will be createdas a new set of children gather with a ball and start anew game. Sociology is presented not as a disciplinewith a fixed set of epistemological rules or standardsbut as just such a game. There is no set of Rules of theSociological Method as Durkheim (1895/1964), say, wouldargue. The rules for doing Sociology are constantlyrevised and reviewed in the doing of Sociology’s work.(Compare Becker, 1970, with Becker, 1998)

For Symbolic Interactionism, this is the endeavouringtradition of William James’ Pragmatism, passed on intothe teaching and lecturing, rather than publishing,styles of Georg Simmel, G. H. Mead, Everett C. Hughes,Herbert Blumer, Erving Goffman, Harvey Sacks, and on tothe present day conferences where demonstrations andMaster Classes sit comfortably alongside presentedpapers. Doing ethnographies, researching, sociologicaltheorising, theorising-while-researching have initiatednew rules and new moves in the sociological game. Theinteractions between researcher and subjects, orresearcher and researcher, have been and remain creativein constantly challenging and redefining the rules bywhich sociological research gets done. These challengesare posed not by the subject matter but by the subjects,by ordinary folk. In essence, symbolic interactionistsare just a particular category of ordinary folk doingsome extraordinary things. They are just as capable ofcreating their game-rules as any other category ofmember.

This paper is the second demonstration of sociologicalrule-creativity. The first argued that Simmel had beenmisappropriated into structuralist sociological theory ina process of interpretation-in-translation. (Kelly, 1999)Simmel was ‘glossed’ as the Stranger in the Academy to createa Jewish founding father for a post-war ConflictSociology. This second paper wonders at another patch inthe rule-making of the sociological tradition. It


presents the set of game moves, or intellectualmanoeuvres, in the creation of ‘postmodernity’ as areplacement for concepts like post-industrial or post-capitalist society. In order to achieve this outcome, theprocess of sociological theorising needed to acquire someof the core concepts from the Symbolic Interactionisttradition and enfolds them into a bid to create a new,post-modern sociology.

The creation required more than a name. This was morethan reworking the End of Ideology or confronting The ComingCrisis in Western Sociology. It was more than a rebalancing ofthe causal factors, a resetting of the economic versussocial versus cultural determinism. This was born out ofthe end of Marx, Weber and Durkheim, the founding fathers ofParsons’ Structure of Social Action. It was a classic ‘Who’sgoing to get there first?’ kind of scientific challenge –or ‘It’s my game, not yours. You don’t know the rules!I’ve got the ball. See if you can catch me.’ A newsocial theory was posited to ground the discovery ofthis new version of the World. (Rose, 1960)

This social, or sociological, theory in so far that itwas engaged in discovering that which it was creating –in effect, it was discovering itself - required a processof on-going social change to describe and explain.Attracting support, believers, followers, publishing andresearch contracts, required something new and a newexplanation of the new-found newness. The process ofsocial change to be described was defined by its impact,which, in turn, constitutes that change. The change was allaround. That it had occurred was apparent in the changesin people. That people had changed could only occurbecause major social change had occurred. Postmodernitywas constituted in the changes apparent in people whoseawareness of the change certified the change itself.Raising awareness or Consciousness raising became the watchwordsor slogans, the gathering points and clarion calls, forthe faithful to come to witness the Birth of Postmodernity.This was the name of the game.


The sociological locus, the game ball, of this change-game was ‘identity’. Each individual’s sense of self waschanged because of the very features that constituted thepostmodern. This new postmodern self had emerged out of aprior sense of identity and experienced this new Worldand, in this experiencing, created the World to beexperienced. The mass media, people by people seeking tocreate and innovate, became the source of increasinglyglobal sources of personal meaning and identification.Individual-to-individual communication and interactionwere increasingly being mediated through forms oftechnology, replacing face-to-face contact. Mechanisms ofinterpersonal socialisation and their associated socialinstitutions, like the family and family life, were beingreplaced by a greater and greater variety of peer groups,fighting to gain the individual’s affiliation. Throughthe theorising of its own enactment, identity becameitself, as agency was theoretically attributed to it.Persons become how they acted, or were reacted to, orinteracted with. The individual was empowered through theattribution of agency. If identity was the ball, thenagency became the play being played.

The location of change, the playing field, was the‘nation’ or ‘community’ to which identity belongs. In theincreasingly global society, little villages in far outof the way places became accessible. Indigenouspopulations who had been ‘primitive’, ‘underdeveloped’,were now ‘developing’ as the symbols of their identitytransformed them and as they, in turn, transformed theirsense of self and enacted agency. As the Coca Colabottle, the baseball cap and TV satellite dishes importednew senses of self and meaning into these remote places,so new possibilities for self, being, agency wereexposed. Belief systems that were represented asunchanged for centuries, with the sense of self, ofidentity, that went with them, could now be transformedinto forms of healing and therapy in Uptown New York, orin the London suburbs, or along the Parisian Left Bank,or into East Berlin. Identity’s belonging-to constitutes


that to which identity belongs. If ‘I’ engaged in themetropolitan, shamanic practices, or Zen, or reliving myRussian fairy tales, then this engagement, this doing,was a real, here and now, and it had been, to them at theplace of origin, then. ‘Nation’ and ‘community’ areconstituted in the agency of identity’s belonging. Gans’Urban Villages came into being as the urban villager re-lived, and so recreated village life. (Gans, 1962) In sodoing, connections to identities were sought outredefined and rediscovered as the Irish in England becamean ethnic minority, as Native Americans found their‘tribal’ origins, as Black Americans sought their roots,as the Beatles sought their Nirvahna.

In the claim to postmodernity, where identity andagency were engaged in their own creation, the game wasbegun. The game-moves are glossed, are presentedunquestioned, in a meta-move where whether there ischange is no longer the question if it ever was. The newquestion is one about the degree of impact of the change.How radical was the impact of change on identity? So howradical could identity’s impact be in constitutingpostmodernity? This raises questions about the relationof the present, the contemporary, Now, with the past,then, before. To see the impact of change required aredrawing of the past, a rewriting of history, todemonstrate that the ‘revolution’ had, in fact occurred,while most of the 1960s radicals were looking the otherway. The playing field was laid out and the losers, theopposition and how they might be opposed and overwhelmed,have been identified. The heresy lay in challenging themeta-move, in questioning the unquestionable. Not tobelieve in radical change while either still seekingrevolution or by denying its occurrence was, in itsdescription, presented as opposition, as defence. Offencewas engaged. The opposition were already in retreat.

Much of the game will be played by laying claim to theorigin, ownership and affiliation of concepts. Theresulting interdependence of concepts needs someclarification, some untangling. ‘Contemporary social


change’ needs to be deconstructed. To dissociate‘contemporary’ from ‘social change’ involves two moves inthe ‘sociological’: Move One involves seeking the latetwentieth century (post-1945?, post-1963? or, in England,post-1979?) as ‘contemporary’ relative to ‘post-industrial’ or in terms of ‘modernity-post-modernity’.Move Two involves defining ‘social change.’ But defining‘social change’ plays in Move Three, dealing with‘radical’. Move Four depends on ‘identity’ and begins asub-strategy to tie in the term, ‘belonging’, making wayfor Move Five. Move Five asks whether ‘identity’ and‘belonging’ are, in any sense, dependant upon or‘affected’ by whatever might be the outcome of Moves Oneto Three. Move Six scores the game with a ‘measure’ ofthe impact on identity of social change. This move hasthe power to nullify the game by denying relevance tothat version of the game, and thus the relevance of thetopic. Winning involves being able to set out the rulesby which the game is played.


Move One: How to understand “Contemporary”

Comparing definitions of “contemporary” may tell usmore about who is defining the term than about thepossible meanings that the term may have. Are we in thepost-modern era? What is “post-modernity”? Stones (1996)would posit an interesting version of an answer. His MoveOne is to argue that theorists like Giddens or Habermashave created “post-modernity”. The concept is areplacement of concepts in Parsons’ Structural-Functionalism like “capitalism” or “post-industrial”.Stones suggests that “post-modernity” is not a spatial-temporal phase in the development or progress of“society” but simply the consequence of a Move inontology-epistemology-theory. Put on differentsociological spectacles and the sociological “history” ofthe world looks different.

Postmodernism, like contemporary social theory, andwith a renewed vigour, directs us to the many, manyways and conditions of being there. It directs usto multiplicity, pluralism, variety, difference,contingency, indeterminacy and ambivalence. ... Itdirects us to a complexity that is specific tocontext. (Stones, 1996, p. 61)So “post-modernity” is not chronological in that it

follows on, in some sense, from the StructuralFunctionalist “capitalism” or “industrial society”. It is“contemporary” in the sense that it is the way “post-modernists” currently view “society” now and, in sodoing, re-defines the past by introducing new ways oflooking back. Giddens’ “structuration theory” relatestogether notions of “structure” and “agency” in anattempt to integrate the opposed positions of Structural-Functionalism and Symbolic Interactionism. The action inthe interaction becomes creative as agency gives rise tostructure (structuration). Structure, which cannot alwaysbe directly observed, can now be inferred from the agencynecessary to engage in the interaction. In that ‘I’ is


doing something from, or on behalf of, say, a hospital orpolice service, structures like ‘professions’, hospital,health care system must exist. The intentionality (of theagent), in this very neat move, is read into theinteraction. Giddens, thus does for “post-modernity”,what Talcott Parsons’ had done for post-industrialsociety or immediate post-war capitalism. (Mouzelis,1995, p. 118) The now was defined in the description ofthe immediate past. The prefix, ‘post’ does this workwith consummate ease. While “society-as-structure” is“constituted” (Giddens, 1984) in the day-to-dayactivities of social actors, “structure-as-context-and-contingency” is the “discourse” (Foucault, 1980) or“narrative” (Rorty, 1994) providing the “rules andresources” to “bracket” or “embed” the “praxis” of agency(rather than agent’s practices). Postmodernism as theaccount of postmodernity is called into being as thissocial and cultural theorising.

The various terms being used here are placed inquotation marks and make the script somewhat messy. Theyare, however, the terminology of “post-modernism”. Theshift from Structural-Functionalism to StructurationTheory and other post-modernist accounts required thisnew language of description to complete the obfuscationof the critique. It somehow enhances the “expertness” ofthe authors and the exclusivity of their professionaldiscussions. It clearly signals to followers and fellow-travellers the code-in-language for membership in theteam. It becomes and is itself a “discourse” for seeingthe World - a discourse about discourses.

However, in Structuration Theory, structural conceptscannot be construed as causal in the immediate sense thatthey intervene in the production of social life, althoughthey may contribute to causation as enablements orconstraints. This follows since, while structuralconditions may be necessary for the reproduction ofpractices, relations, systems, and collectivities, onlysocial agents retain the capacity to generate thesepractices, relations, etc., in and through their


doings. ... Hence in Structuration Theory there can be nosuch thing as an autonomous category of structuralanalysis. (Cohen, 1989, 235-6)

Such an analysis, presented as it is, as asociological analysis of the “contemporary”, posesdifficult problems. To structure the history of the worldin the way that Marx, Weber, Tönnies, Lenin or Parsonsmight have done, focusing on changes in social structuresor class (i.e. structural) revolutions, at least definedthe historical ‘objects’ to examine. The contemporary,post-modernists are looking for an abstract fusion ofagency and constituted structure, in the everyday doingsof ordinary folk. They are looking for a Now, but then, butin “contemporary-to-that-time” accounts which werewritten from a different analytic catalogue, a task thatwould seem somehow impossible, by definition (Kumar,1978, 45-63):

Deprived of that unmediated visibility ofhistoricism - looking to the legitimacy of pastgenerations as supplying cultural autonomy - thenation turns from being the symbol of modernityinto becoming the symptom of an ethnography of the‘contemporary’ within modern culture.(Bhabha, 1993,p. 147) So Move One is decided. Contemporary is Now - that is,

sociologists (and, here, Giddens is offered as anexample, not the exemplar) are subject to a sociologicaldiscourse or ‘paradigm’, (Kuhn, 1962) which is the waythey see the world from a current perspective. The‘paradigm shift’ from Structural-Functionalism/Marxism toStructuration, from structure to structure-agency, hasnot only reviewed sociological theories but hasabandoned, as inept, previous (modern) ‘narratives’ infavour of new (post-modern) ones. Old ways of dating‘contemporary’ - “after the Industrial Revolution of1750-1800”, “after the Enlightenment”, “after theinvention of the Steam Engine”, “after Darwin’s Origin of theSpecies”, “after automation, mass production or Henry T.


Ford”, “post gesellschaft”, “from Babbage and theComputer Age” and “since Mass Communication” - areabandoned in favour of the “meta-narrative” (Lyotard,1984) - how we look at ways of looking at the socialworld. “Contemporary” is not just Now but it is Now-as-we-talk-about-it-now. The interesting dilemma is the “we”,because “structure” can only be constituted by, and in,social praxis, in the day-to-day practices of everydayfolk.

But everyday folk talk, today, about “Spice Girls”,“Neighbours” and “Coronation Street”, about sport, familyand immediate concerns, only sociologists and para-sociologists discuss modernity, post-modernity and themeta-narrative. The “Spice Girls” are a music phenomenonand the focus of popular culture in producing CDs andassociated popular images like clothing, hair styles andthe like. Neighbours and Coronation Street are among the rangeof daily soap operas current to major TV channels inEngland, Australia, Canada, Germany and the USA. Theseinterests of ordinary folk are not being treatedironically or being ridiculed but are a contrast toironically present Giddens’ and others claims to speakfor them. Para-sociologists, in comparison, are the doyenof late-night, cultured, television and radio shows.Producers regularly pay some ex-sociologists, now mediapersonalities, to perform. In the UK, two notableexamples are Germaine Greer and Laurie Taylor. Ordinaryfolk, then, are not to be found talking or “interacting”postmodernity into being but sociologists, or at leastex-sociologists, are.

Move Two - Narrating Social Change

By definition, the term “social change” has a temporaland spatial component - from there, then, to here andNow. For most of sociology-as-account-of-the-then-world’shistory, the story had been devoted to identifyingdramatic social changes, locating their occurrence inhistorical epochs and seeking to explain their causes and


consequences. Marx’s “The history of all hithertoexisting society is the history of class struggles”(Feuer, 1969, p. 48) can be contrasted with Weber’s“capitalism and capitalistic enterprises, even with aconsiderable rationalization of capitalistic calculation,have existed in all civilized countries of the earth, sofar as economic documents permit us to judge.” (Weber,1904/1930, p. 19) or Tönnies, “The Gemeinschaft ischaracterized by the social will as concord, folkways,mores, and religion; the Gesellschaft by the social will asconvention, legislation, and public opinion. The conceptscorrespond to types of external social organization”(Tönnies, 1964, p. 71) or Parsons, “The core of society,as a system, is the patterned normative order throughwhich the life of a population is collectivelyorganized.” (Parsons, 1966, p. 10) Each version gives us‘social objects’ to look for, to identify and to observeacross time, or across epochs, as sources to explain‘social change’, at the least, the social change that isdescribed as “industrialization”. (Kumar, 1978, p. 59)This endeavour is essentially a sociological-historicalselecting of social ‘facts’ to support an over-archingtheoretical explanation. While arguments might be madeagainst this selection, or for that selection, againstthis theory versus that, this ‘discourse’ occupiedsociologists for more than a century. The problem wasthat the arguments were irresolvable because theepistemological positions taken to define what were‘facts’, what distinguished ‘theory’ from ‘ideology’ or‘political invective’, failed to resolve the academicdisputes. (Popper, 1957, Parsons, 1949, Benton, 1977,Mouzelis, 1995)

The Foucault-Giddens-Habermas nexus of post-modernists, in contrast, tend not to focus so much onsocial change, especially in their Now (that is, latest)works, favouring selections from history to contrast withand so to identify modern structures-in-praxis. The crisis oflegitimation (Habermas, 1973) or the panoptikon (Foucault,1977), the habitus (Bordieu, 1990) or the “reflexive


monitoring of action” (Giddens, 1994, p. 89) are accountsof life as it is experienced by Now-folk with origins tobe found and identified in experiences reported frompast. These accounts tell us little about the GreatTransformation (Kumar, 1978, pp. 45-63) or even about how topredict the Life (Rose, 1997a) that might be coming.

In parallel there is the search for “narrative” – fortellers of stories that can locate these structures-as-praxis in “contemporary-to-the-epoch” art works andliterary productions to offer accounts to support theaccounts of the processes of change. Barthes (1993), aleading light in the development of these “culturalstudies”, focussed on writings, advertisements and worksof art as texts-of-the-times. In doing so, he adapted thetradition originated by Simmel (1916).

Here I have a problem. What difference is therebetween the “selection” of particular “folk” documentsfrom a particular culture, located in space and time, todemonstrate the correctness of our sociological theory,versus the selection of sociological “facts” by theStructural-Functionalist? Why are the “Spice Girls” anymore or less relevant as selections-by-everyday-folk thanthe latest works of Lucien Freud or Ken Russell orIshiguro or Kerouac? The answer is that they are probablynot more relevant. Why, then, should Dickens or Engels,or Jane Austen, or Franz Kafka or Boris Pasternak, bethe most appropriate selections as narratives of theirtime? The answer is because the chosen narrative renderssupport to the theoretical account being offered.

Alongside the post-modernists, there are otherclaimants to the ground vacated by Structuralisttheorising which is why, probably, postmodernists feelthis need to offer this account, to make this move. Thereare many varieties of feminist who equally claim to have,if only by default, ‘understood’ the social change thatbrought about their Now. Battles against “patriarchy” areongoing. “Equality” that was, is not Now achieved but isredefined to be about more varied sources of inequality,patriarchy and oppression. The target, the past, is re-


reconstructed to underwrite the revised view of thepresent. Both accounts of social change are couched inthe same irresolvable disputes about social, economicand/or political forces. Both may identify agency to runalongside, or to be integral to, structure but the jointaccount is no more settled or clear than theirpredecessors. Although they share some concepts, theyconverse in ‘foreign languages, or ..

... Walter Benjamin describes as the‘foreignness of languages’. The ‘foreignness’ oflanguage is the nucleus of the untranslatable thatgoes beyond the transferral of subject matterbetween cultural texts or practices. The transferof meaning can never be total between systems ofmeaning, or within them, for ‘the language oftranslation envelops its contents like a royal robewith ample folds ...[it] signifies a more exaltedlanguage than its own and thus remains unsuited toits content, overpowering and alien.’ (Bhabha,1993, p. 163)So Move Two is the block, maintaining a clear field

for this account, for this speaking, for this language.Little progress has been made. Take your pick.Sociologists offer a variety of ways to account for Now,and whether it is different from then. No one seems todisagree that things have changed, or are changing. AsGarfinkel would have it, life is full of haeccity - just-thatness. (Garfinkel, 1991)

Move Three - Radical?

‘Radical’ claims the field, takes the turn. It is aself applied descriptor to inflate importance, to drawattention. What criteria might we have for ‘radical’? Thelists of theorists of Now, and of the structural accountsmentioned above, could all claim that their account isradically different to each other one, in some way.Otherwise, there would be little point in undertaking the


work involved in publishing them. Whether any accountdemonstrates a radically altered “identity” or“belonging” would seem to rest on distinguishing betweenthere being a sense that “identity” has radically changedor that the changes mooted have resulted in radicallychanged “identity.” To pose the question in this waymeans that Move Three is a feint, a non-move to open theway for Move Four.

Move Four - Whose “Identity”?

What is identity? Giddens (1988) argues quite stronglythat Erving Goffman should be counted as a major socialtheorist. Giddens also notes:

Human action does not incorporate chains ofaggregate interactions and reasons, but aconsistent - and, as Erving Goffman above all hasshown us, never-to-be-relaxed - monitoring ofbehaviour and its contexts. This is not the senseof reflexivity which is specifically connected withmodernity, although it is the necessary basis ofit. (Giddens, 1994, p. 89)

and Bordieu comments:and on the individual level, of all the strategiesof self-presentation, so well analysed by Goffman,designed to manipulate one’s self-image andespecially - something omitted by Goffman - theimage of one’s position in social space. (Bordieu,1990, p. 134)At the individual level of face-to-face interaction,

these two ‘Grand Theorists’ would seem content toabrogate “identity” to Goffman. Goffman’s concept of“identity” derives from the Pragmatism of James and Deweyas applied to the account of Self and Other in the workof George Herbert Mead (1934). The interactional exchangebetween I and Other forms the basis for each to hold aself-image or self-concept: Who am I? (Smith, 1996) This


emerging ‘self’, constantly negotiated and re-negotiatedwith others, integrated with ‘I,’ constitutes theperson’s “identity.” In a range of work, Goffmandemonstrates this process in an organizational orinstitutional setting, (1961/1968) as a personal problem(Stigma and spoiled identity) (1963/1968) or as aneveryday activity. (1959/1971) Identity is locatedwithin “the definition of the situation,” on “front andbackstage” (1967) or in “frames.” (1974)

Bhabha refers to this as the “performative” :Much more significantly, we are faced with thechallenge of reading, into the present a specificcultural performance, the traces of all thosediverse disciplinary discourses and institutions ofknowledge that constitute the condition andcontexts of culture. (Bhabha, 1993, p. 163)The identity-as-process is located within the

“discourse,” within the “narrative”, within culture. Thisraises the debate, as part of the Move here, betweenCharles Taylor and Richard Rorty. Is the “identity”purely contingent on the content of the discourse,narrative, or definition of the situation, or does beinghave some independence, some higher purpose to itself?

This point of argument is not quite as simple as itappears. Rorty (1991) presents an argument to augmentGiddens’ postmodernism in much the same way that RobertK. Merton augmented Talcott Parsons, with a kind of“theory of the middle range.” (Merton, 1957) Rorty arguesfor contingencies as being within the discourse in muchthe same way that Merton argued for contingencies beingfeatures of position in the social structure. Rorty’scontingencies with the self (reflexivity), albeit with agreater sense of “agency”, are resonant of Merton’s Modesof Adaptation. (Merton, 1938) Thus:

... Rorty maintains that there would be nothingmore to say about the self once its de factodesires, beliefs, hopes, etc. were fully accountedfor. There are however, constraints on what


particular desires and beliefs can be ascribed to aperson. ... Rorty holds that to ascribe aparticular desire or belief to a person is alwaysto ascribe it as part of an internally coherent andprima facie plausible set or web of desires andbeliefs. (Smith, 1996, p. 110) The greater sense of “agency” - that the self has some

part to play as “quasi-self” or “person analogue” (Rorty,1991) - results from a commitment to Dewey more directlythan to either Goffman or Mead. (Rorty, 1994, p. 170)Rorty’s argument, however, fills in the gap in Goffmanbetween “structure” and “self-agency”. The self-as-agencyreflects “structure-as-a-net-of-desires” while, by theself selecting from the “marginal and superficial”, itcontributes to constituting the “structure” about whichit reflects.

Charles Taylor’s version of “self-identity,” strivingfor a more “authentic self”, would give a greater powerof “agency” arguing for a capacity for “strongevaluation.” Unlike Rorty’s quasi-self, selecting amongthe marginal and superficial, Taylor wants a moralperson, capable of sustaining and making moral judgementsand moral commitments. This person makes choices.(Taylor, 1971, Smith, 1996) This is Taylor as moralphilosopher or moral theorist specifying a moral “ought”(Connerton, 1976, p. 102ff) rather than as socialtheorist or sociologist. Taylor’s sociological case, inmany ways, is better made in the “bottom up,” rather than“top down,” liberation of Harold Garfinkel and theEthnomethodologists except that they eschew with“indifference” any discussion of discourse, structuresand the like. (Garfinkel, 1952 and Garfinkel and Sacks,1970) Garfinkel’s “cultural dope”, no matter how hardRorty tries, or how frequently Giddens claims, is aspresent in their work as it was in work of Garfinkel’searly mentor, Talcott Parsons.

So Move Four deals with the effects of social changeon identity. Two possibilities for a radical effectemerge: Goffman-Giddens-Rorty’s position arguing that


changes to the “discourse”, “narrative” or “definition ofthe situation” present contingencies to the person-as-identity of such an order that it cannot be but altered,and that this is simply a more subtle, if not radicallydifferent, analysis than that of Parsons-Merton; orTaylor-Garfinkel where the person-as-person looks out atthe Life in different ways from that of the personslooking out before or in the past – before post-modernity.

Move Five: Identity as “belonging to”?

This Move is played out in a location, “nation” which,to avoid distraction, will be taken in lieu of“community”. It is the locus of “discourse”, “narrative”or “culture”. This, Bhabha argues, is where identityassociates with location, where ‘I’ belongs :

It is at this point in the narrative of nationaltime that the unisonant discourse produces itscollective identification of the people, not assome transcendental national identity, but in alanguage of doubleness that arises from theambivalent splitting of the pedagogical and theperformative. (Bhabha, 1993, p. 159)Here Bhabha refers to the division between (1)

culture-discourse-narrative, as “taught and learned”(pedagogical), national geschichte (history - or story-as-lived-and-told), and (2) the self-as-being-and-living(identity). But, he is arguing, in the “doubleness,” theyare “unisonant,” they are Now, as it is lived orexperienced. A person’s belonging to the Nation (and howthis resonates in Prime Minister Blair’s One-Nationpolitics) lies in being competent and accomplished in the“language of doubleness.” Thus:

A nation’s existence is, if you will pardon themetaphor, a daily plebiscite, just as anindividual’s existence is a perpetual affirmationof life.... The wish of nations is, all in all, the


sole legitimate criteria, the one to which one mustalways return. (Bhabha, p. 160)One’s belonging is simply one’s being, Now, and facing

the contingencies that that “being” presents. Move Fouris still open as to whether those contingencies arelooked for “top down” or identified “bottom up.” Theground of Symbolic Interactionism has been morecircumscribed (Goffman-ised) than dug up or buried.

Move Five throws up the question is “being-and-belonging-Now” radically altered from “being-and-belonging-Now”, then. This is a kind of claim thatsociology will be perpetual as new identities and theirassociated belongings will constantly need to beidentified, by sociologists like us, as sociology’s majorand central contribution to “society” in the past,present and future. (Giddens, 1984) Moves, One to Three,are now shown to be part of the same game-strategy.

Move Six - Has the game been won, or lost?

To review the ends of the moves gives:

Move One: Now-as-we-talk-about-it-nowMove Two: No-one seems to disagree that things have

changed, or arechanging. Life is full of haeccity - just-thatness.

Move Three: Has “identity” radically changed or have the changes accounted for

resulted in a radically changed “identity”?Move Four: Do changes to the “discourse”, “narrative”

or “definition of the situation” present contingencies to the person-as-identity of such an order that it cannot be but altered? Or where the person-as-person, the same ‘I’,looks out at the Life do they do so in different ways from that of the person looking out before, a century ago.

Move Five: One’s belonging is simply one’s being, Now,and facing the


contingencies that that “being” presents. Is “being-and-belonging-Now” radically altered from “being-and-belonging-Now”, then?

How has the game progressed? Is the final beingplayed? Has the old team conceded defeat? I am tempted toconclude with the question; “How can we know?” whichlooks like an epistemological question. The ontologicalchoices posed by Garfinkel, by Taylor, by Goffman, byGiddens, by Rorty, by Parsons are: What is being, Dasein?What is it to be? What is identity? Does ‘I’ have agency?What constitutes ‘structure’? Are these questions clearlyunderstood as the questions? If these debates areresolved, then the epistemological questions can beaddressed. Or, maybe not. Maybe the epistemologicaldebates are paramount. This was Georg Simmel’sfundamental position - Sociology is not able to resolveMetaphysical Questions, or, as Edward Rose would have it,“Big Questions”. (Rose, 1997b) It is simply amethodology. Many postmodernists pay fealty to theirrediscovery of Simmel, especially to his version of theNow of millennial (1900) Berlin in Die Großstadt und dasGeistesleben (1903) (2) but overlook his specifications fora Sociology in Soziologie (1908).

Bhabha offers his millennial, postmodernist view ofthe city:

... it is to the city that the migrants, theminorities, the diasporic come to change thehistory of the nation. ... it is the city whichprovides the space in which emergentidentifications and new social movements of thepeople are played out. It is there that, in ourtime, the perplexity of the living is most acutelyexperienced. (Bhabha, 1993, pp. 169-170)

and in so doing reinforces Move Five with thesociologists’ claims for permanent status and centralimportance in “emergent identifications and new socialmovements”. This is another way of claiming the Cup,


winning the trophy, doing the Now thing – these are yoursocial problems and only we can identify them for you.Solutions, moral positions, etc. are not our problem.Contrast Bhabha with Simmel (3) to assess this new statusfor Sociology :

Cities ... these are persons who may be recognizedby shields on their houses and who hold themselvesready at dinner hour in appropriate costumes sothey can be called upon on short notice in casethirteen persons find themselves at the table. ...The decisive fact here is that in the life of acity, struggle with nature for the means of life istransformed into a conflict with human beings andthe gain which is fought for is granted, not bynature, but by man. (Simmel, 1971, pp. 335-336)Bhabha is Now, Simmel was then. Nearly one hundred

years of chronological times separates them. Yet, arethese accounts radically different as accounts, bysociologists, of life in the City? in postmodernism? Theanswer seems to lie with the person “looking out” ofSimmel’s window, waiting for the arrival of the guestsfor dinner - or the sociologist “looking in” at thestruggle for survival. Either, Simmel was the firstPostmodernist, or, “postmodernity” was constituted by thesociologists, as they looked for some new game to play.Meanwhile, symbolic interactionists andethnomethodologists have got on with the ‘real’ work ofunderstanding the World as ordinary folk do.

Footnotes

1 – This paper was provoked and inspired in talking withWes Sharrock and D. Rod Watson, University of Manchester,and Greg Smith from Salford University.2 - Note Geistesleben is often translated, “Mental Life.”Geist is nearly impossible to render into one-word ofEnglish. I prefer something from Star Wars, the film, -“Feel the Force,” an injunction to commune with one’s


forebears, in this case, the Jedi Knights. This wouldgive a translation something like “Life-force” or the“force of living”.3 - Note that elsewhere I have challenged theappropriateness of the Wolff-Coser-Levine translations as‘structuralist’ glosses on his writing. For reasonsexplained by Walter Benjamin, among others, there willalways be a problem with translation Now against writingThen. In this case, any “errors” in translation would noteffect the point being made.

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Playing Games with Postmodernism

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