Forum

Poststructuralism and postmodernism:

T h e desire for criticism

PATRICIA T. CLOUGH
Fordham University

At the same time that Michael Peter Smith's "Postmodernism, urban

ethnography, and the new social space of ethnic identity" celebrates
postmodernism, it also defuses the radical implications of poststruc-
tural and deconstructive criticism for empirical social science generally
and for sociology in particular. This occurs, I believe, because Smith
summarizes poststructuralism and deconstruction in terms of debates
within post-Althusserian Marxism, without fully grasping some impor-
tant aspects of these debates. Secondly, Smith draws empirical social
science into relationship with poststructuralism and deconstrucfive
criticism by way of the discourse of postmodern ethnography, without
noticing that the criticism in anthropology, of the textual construction
of ethnographic authority, ironically has ended up declaring ethnogra-
phy the only method of analysis suitable to postmodern culture and
identity - a pretension of postmodern ethnography that reveals its tan-
gential, if not contradictory relationship to poststructuralism and
deconstruction generally.

For Smith then, postmodern ethnography becomes the only way to

make up for the thoroughly discredited Marxist conception of base and
superstructure, postmodern ethnography displacing even Althusser's
more sophisticated conception of economy "in the last instance,' ~ As
Smith puts it, following Andrew Sayer, "political economy without eth-
nography" cannot make explicit the reasons for the intelligibility of
behavior. 2 Thus, Smith translates the poststructural deconstruction of
the Subject as a method of "studying the locality as the place where
local struggles, and alternative discourses on the meanings of 'global
conditions' are played o u t " ' 3 For Smith then, poststructuralism and
deconstruction suggest a method that yields an ethnographic public-
(iz)ation of multicultural subject identities. Although I share Smith's
concern for a fuller understanding of the relation of cultures, differ-

Theory and Society 21: 543-552, 1992.

© 1992 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
544

ence, and identity, and although I think him right to argue for an
analysis that refuses universalism, essentialism, and teleology, I also
think he fails to explore fully the challenge of poststructuralism and
deconstructive criticism and therefore to question whether postmodern
ethnography is a sufficient response to that challenge. I want to add to
Smith's essay then, by reinfusing the discussion of postmodernism with
the radical implications of poststructuralism and deconstruction for
empirical social science, sociology in particular.

Post-Marxism/poststructuralism

Although, in Smith's view, postmodern ethnography displaces Marx-

ism, refusing its reduction of the micro-politics of identity and culture
to the macro-politics of political economy, what postmodern ethnogra-
phy more profoundly displaces, I would suggest, is what Smith does not
explicitly discuss: psychoanalysis.4 After all, any account of the move-
ment of criticism from Marxism to poststructuralism must at least
make some reference to Althusserian Marxism, by which the Marxist
analysis of ideology was reformulated in relation to Lacanian psycho-
analysis. Indeed, Frederic Jameson's The Political Unconscious, which
tried to recuperate Althusserian Marxism for a literary criticism alrea-
dy strongly influenced by poststructuralism, did so by attempting to
contain the psychoanalytic unconscious within political, economic
interpretation, not an uncommon move in Marxist criticismP If then,
poststructuralism can be understood to have displaced Althusserian
Marxism, it is because poststructuralism breaks up the relationship of
Marxism and psychoanalysis, breaks with Marxism by pitting psycho-
analysis against the totalization and teleology of a Marxism analysis.
That is to say, not only does poststructuralism's privileging of deferral,
displacement, condensation, disavowal, foreclosure, and transgression
refer back to Freud's texts but the poststructural rereading of these
texts restores to psychoanalysis its capacity to be a profound criticism
of totalistic, biologistic, or essentialist interpretations. In this sense,
psychoanalysis models a way of rereading the subject and its seeming
mastery over the signifier as fantasmatic constructions of desire,
authorial desire. 6 It is in this sense that unconscious desire and sexual
difference have become central elements in a materialist analysis of
language, culture, and identity.7

Thus, while poststructuralism's engagement with psychoanalysis is a

critical one, the psychoanalytics of rereading language in terms of
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fantasmatic constructions of desire has become a defining characteris-

tic of poststructural analyses of the author(ity) or author(ization) of dis-
cursive knowledge. Indeed, throughout the seventies and the eighties, a
poststructural, psychoanalytically oriented semiotics has dominated
the analysis of mass media, film and television, as well as analyses of
colonial discourse, and of racist and ethnic discourses. ~ This critical
approach has also informed an analysis of science, suggesting that
science is itself a prime agency in the discursive deployment of persons,
perspectives, places, and events in relations of power/knowledge. 9 The
movement from Marxism to poststructuralism, I would argue, opens up
criticism to an analysis of the discursive production of the authority of
knowledge, including scientific knowledge, a production that disavows
a will to power and authorial desire. Especially important to these criti-
cal analyses then, is the understanding that discourse organizes its
authority by means of the construction of the "other" as a screen, upon
which disavowed authorial desire is projected or displaced, a matter to
which I return.

But in Smith's view, the critical approach that informs postmodern eth-
nography is not a deconstructive one. Rather than a practice of post-
strucmralism or deconstructive criticism, postmodern ethnography is,
as Smith describes it, something more like a politicized or better, oppo-
sitional ethnomethodology or phenomenology. Thus, in the end, post-
modern ethnography is ambivalent as a critique of Marxism. Not only
does postmodern ethnography make little use of processes central to
post-structural criticism, such as displacement, condensation, deferral,
and disavowal, not to mention unconscious desire itself, but more,
these processes are finally displaced in postmodern ethnography by an
analysis of the subject's actual experience, inflected though Gramscian
notions of hegemony and contestation2 °

In this sense, postmodern ethnography is confused in its relation to

poststructuralism and deconstruction, a confusion that becomes even
more visible when postmodern ethnography gives "priority°.. to the
plurality of the different over the duality of the other...,,;~1 when it sim-
ply rejects dualisms or oppositions. In poststructuralism, the decon-
struction of "the duality of the other" rather opens up the play of what
Derrida refers to as diff&ance, which has two senses simultaneously;
the first sense is:
to take recourse consciouslyor unconsciously,in the temporal and temporiz-
ing mediation of a detour that suspends the accomplishmentor fulfillmentof
"desire" or "will,"and equally effects this suspension in a mode that annuls
546

or t e m p e r s its own effect .... T h e other s e n s e . . , is the m o r e c o m m o n and

identifiable one: to be not identical....J2

The two senses of diff~rance suggest the impossibility of simply reject-

ing or destroying oppositions or dualism in the valorization of differ-
ence. Oppositions or dualisms can only be temporarily deconstructed
by means of critical interpretation that wedges itself between, deferring
the act of opposing and displacing the very resolution to sameness that
opposition means to accomplish. The two senses of diffOrance, then, are
informed with a poststructural reading of psychoanalytic processes;
that is, diffdrance points to the persistence of "othering" in writing and
identity, the persistence of the productivity of the unconscious in writ-
ing and identity, even in writing the differences of identity. Insensitive to
the play of diffdrance, postmodern ethnography risks allowing desire or
will just to find another space in which to operate, all too impatient to
explore more fully a criticism of the (ever) old space of their operation.

I am suggesting, then, that postmodern ethnography as Smith describes

it distracts from a deep criticism of ethnography, especially of the way
ethnography has provided empirical social science with its narrative
form(ula) of authority. Such a criticism, I have proposed elsewhere,
might make explicit the relationship of empirical social science -
observation and explanation - to the desire of realist narrativity, a nar-
rative desire that ethnography elaborates for empirical social science
generally. 13 While Smith also notices that postmodern ethnography
entails a criticism of realism, the criticism it proposes amounts to little
more than a recognition of realist narrativity as a composition of "dis-
cursive practices" that "structure that flow of the 'out there"" 14

The poststructural deconstruction of realism suggests that not only are

the processes of the production of "out there" disavowed in realist nar-
rativity but that the disavowal is a substitution in and of desire. Dis-
cussing the proposed transparency of realist narrativity, Homi Bhabha
argues:
Despite appearances, the text of transparency inscribes a double vision: the
field of the "true" e m e r g e s as a visible effect of k n o w l e d g e / p o w e r only after
the regulatory and displacing division of the true and the false. F r o m this
point of view, discursive " t r a n s p a r e n c y " . . . is also always a negative, pro-
cessed into visibility t h r o u g h the technologies of reversal, enlargement, light-
ing, editing, projection, not a source but a re-source of light. Such a bringing
into light is never a prevision; it is always a question of the provision of visi-
bility as a capacity, a strategy, an agency but also ... an elision of sight, dele-
gation, substitution.... 15
 547

The authority of realism then, is constituted through fantasmatic sub-

stitutions, projections, displacements, etc., which nonetheless appear as
empirical positivities, as the facticity of actual experience, as nothing
but the real. Indeed, Lennard Davis argues that realism constitutes a
certain form of reading and writing in which a "split-perception" is
required between actual experience-out-there and the narrative or dis-
cursive construction of it as such. 16 Thus, realist narrativity produces
the real in invisible relays between what nevertheless remains apparent-
ly opposed, such as fact and fiction, content and form, story and dis-
course. Each element of realist narrativity thereby has a double inscrip-
tion. On one hand, each element presents itself as simply part of actual
experience, as part of the story. On the other hand, the same element is
formally composed to establish itself as "truly" real, as an element of
discourse, the discourse of truth. 17 This seeming invisibility of the dou-
bleness of inscription, of the discursive or formal construction of the
real, opens up in realist narrativity, a space of unconscious processes, a
space of substitution, projection, and displacement. This is the space of
authorial desire. That is to say, in realism, the construction of authority
in the authorial figure is a fantasmic construction of a unified subject
identity that not only disavows the divisions of subjectivity but that also
manages the contradictions of the very split-perception or double
inscription by which realist narrativity constitutes empirical positivities
or the facticity of actual experience.

If, then, deconstructive criticism suggests that oppositions cannot sim-

ply be destroyed, it is because the unconscious processes productive of
the real and the subject cannot be destroyed; only their disavowal and
the particular configurations that disavowal allows can be deconstruct-
ed. Deconstructive criticism "will" not simply valorize "the plurality of
the different" over "the duality of the other;" it is rather, a critical prac-
tice of re-reading, re-reading in and of the transference and counter-
transference of desire. As Barbara Johnson explains it, deconstructive
criticism, like psychoanalysis, refers representation to "a knot" of
words, things and desire that can neither be definitively combined nor
indefinitely separated; deconstructive criticism then, is not an "inter-
pretation or an insight but an act. An act of untying the knot ... by
means of the repetition of the act of tying it." ~s

The poststructural deconstruction of realism, then, draws out the

unconscious processes of realist narrativity and turns them against con-
structions of authority, but also against empirical positivities and any
phenomenological analysis of actual experience. That is to say, the
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poststructural deconstruction of realism urges an awareness of the will

to power and authorial desire in empirical positivities but also in what
Smith describes for postmodern ethnography as "a quest on the part of
the researcher to recover.., the life-world of the subject," even though
that life-world is to be evocatively communicated as "a story produced
by mutual dialogue" 19 Thus, the poststructural deconstruction of real-
ism is not only a deconstructive criticism of a certain way of writing or
reading. It rather calls into question the very possibility of empirical
knowledge, as such, the very possibility of the subject's actual experi-
ence, as such. Afterall, what is proposed is that the persistence of desire
internally fractures the subject so that even the (self)identification of
subject and experience is already more a matter of displacement, pro-
jection, and introjection than an actuality.

But, for Smith, the poststructural deconstruction of the subject rather

opens up to a multicultural subjectivity, based on either "a multiplicity
of roles that people come to play in history ''2° or on emergent "'subject
positions' formed, to be sure, at the intersection of such structural cate-
gories as class, gender, race, ethnicity and sexual identity... "'21 The
deconstruction of the subject opens up to "new subject positions," ar-
ticulated in the resistance to global restructuring, that is, rearticulations
of the global at the local level. 22 For Smith, postmodern subjectivity
then, is "inextricably implicated in sociality, ''23 in the contradictions and
discontinuities of the social. The division of desire, the divisions in-
ternal to subjectivity are displaced onto the intersubjectively constituted
life-world of the subject, albeit a subject of contested cultural borders.

It is this subject, the subject of contested borders, which postmodern

ethnography articulates, thereby becoming what Smith describes as an
oppositional practice of making public that recombinant possibilities
that the multicultural subject embodies, for appropriating, accommo-
dating to, or resisting "the structural imperatives and cultural logics of
his or her own time and place "'24 But then, postmodern ethnography, I
would argue, remains ambivalent in its relations to realism; it refers its
descriptive practices to the subject's actual experience no matter how
insistently it characterizes the subject's experience in terms of decon-
structed/reconstructed social context. Hence, postmodern ethnography
also remains ambivalent in its relation to a realist social science that is
inextricably bound up with the construction of the subject's actual expe-
rience, a construction that not only underwrites a realist social science
but that also underwrites the global restructuring of political economy,
having become itself inseparable from "a will to scientificity."25
 549

The ambivalence of postmodern ethnography toward the realism of

empirical social science is registered by Smith: on one hand, he pre-
sents postmodern ethnography as not being "part of the discourse of a
separate language game called 'science,'" creating instead "a non-scien-
tific and hence non-'scientistic' social space; ''26 on the other hand,
Smith refers to postmodern ethnography as a proposal for "an interpre-
tive human science."27 The ambivalence of postmodern ethnography
toward the realism of empirical social science even locates itself in
Smith's treatment of the social space of "Latino" ethnic identity.

For Smith, Latino identity points to the "interplay of immediate and

mass-mediated communications, state structures and the commercial
market place, power and the sign in the emergence of ethnic identity."28
Latino identity dissolves the oppositions between global and local, be-
tween periphery and center, between assimilation and ethnic purity.
Thus, mass-mediated representations invent Latino identity; they are
its source. Yet, mass-mediated representations also depict Latino iden-
tity; they are its resource, a seeming mirror of the actual (borderland)
experiences of Latinos. All of this is to say that the mass-mediated
representations to which Smith refers are realist ones, albeit a realism
more typical of television or music video, what Smith refers to as post-
modern? 9 They are nonetheless constructs of identity that displace
desire through references to actual experience. Thus, Smith fails to
read mass-mediated texts for their strategies of power and desire or for
their relation to realism; he treats them instead as ethnographic data.

But, the Latino identity or the "mestiza" identity that Gloria Anzaldua
urges cannot refer only to the crossing of social, political, cultural and
economic borders. They must also be referred to itineraries of uncon-
scious (authorial) desire. For if processes of unconscious desire are not
recognized, there can be no understanding of the way constructions of
identity act out or work through what Anzaldua describes as "internal-
ized self-hatred" or the way constructions of identity refuse or accept
what she describes as an easy retreat to "the safety of difference"
behind ethnic, class, racial, and sexual borders? ° ff the processes of
unconscious desire are not recognized, the mestiza identity might be
misunderstood as a "truer" identity, the new revolutionary subject.
Thus, I can only imagine the construction of the mestiza identity as an
insertion of unconscious desire between subject and other, an insertion
by those who have been hitherto othered in dominant discourses of
knowledge/power - and this so to recognize that we read the subject
and the other, that we know ourselves and others only through
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itineraries of desire. Recognizing unconscious processes of desire then,

is to struggle against domination without the fantasms of a unified
authorial subject identity or the easy retreat behind borders of sexual,
racial, ethnic, and class differences.

A cultural criticism for and of postmodernity then, needs more than

the focus on actual experience that postmodern ethnography pro-
motes; more is needed than the collapsing of the opposition of social
science and art. Cultural criticism I would argue, needs to go beyond (a
simple valorization of) border transgression in order to grasp critically
the desiring semiosis of its own writing technologies. On one hand, cul-
tural criticism must differ with science and defer the will to scientificity.
It must continue to take science, social science, as objects of criticism,
as well as to trace the pretensions to scientificity in mass-mediated pro-
duction of culture, usually realist in form. On the other hand, cultural
criticism must go beyond reducing border transgressions in and of
identity to cultural logics or structural imperatives. If the poststructural
criticism of Marxism is to be heeded, a space between cultural logics
and subject identity must be critically inserted. This space, which I have
been refering to as the space of unconsious desire, of reading and writ-
ing, is uncritically or invisibly located in realism. Thus, an objective of a
poststructural cultural criticism is to make visible the itineraries of de-
sire in diagrams of power/knowledge. It is as such that poststructural-
ism poses its greatest challenge to social science, sociology in par-
ticular.

Notes

1. See Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Verso, 1977); Althusser, Lenin and Phi-
losophy (Monthly Review Press: London, 1971 ).
2. Michael Peter Smith, "Postmodernism, urban ethnography and the new social
space of ethnic identity," Theory and Society, this issue.
3. Smith, 497.
4. Smith argues that postmodern ethnographers reject "psychoanalytic explanations
of the wellsprings of human behavior," 496. But, on one hand, the poststructural
critique of psychoanalysis, beginning with Lacan's rereading of it, all but refuses
any idea of psychoanalysis as an explanation of human behavior. It is rather under-
stood as an analysis of the subject-in-language. On the other hand, there is some
awareness of the relationship of psychoanalytic processes and deconstructive criti-
cism among postmodern ethnographers, although I think Smith is generally correct
that psychoanalysis is either not systematically engaged in postmodern ethnog-
raphy or its engagement remains implicit. For example see, Michael Fischer, "Eth-
nicity, and the post-modern arts of memory," in J. Clifford and G. Marcus, editors,
 551

Writing Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 194-233, and

James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1988) 92-113.
5. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1981). Jacqueline Rose makes the argument that Marxists, Jameson included, treat
the unconscious in a reductive manner: "Each time the psychoanalytic description
of internal conflict and psychic division is referred to its social conditions, the latter
absorb the former, and the unconscious shifts - in that same moment - from the
site of division into the vision of an ideal unity to come. As if the tension between
the unconscious and the image to which we cling of ourselves as unified subjects
were split off from each other, and the second were idealized and then projected
forward into historical time." Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso,
1986) 9.
6. Kaja Silverman.argues that in invoking an authorial desire, the theorist would be
searching "not just for the author 'inside' the text, but for the text 'inside' the
author." The Acoustic Mirror, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) 216.
The theorist would be searching for the unconscious or fantasmatic scenes of
authorial desire. Thus, for Silverman, the fantasmatic generates "clugters of fan-
tasies," "related to psychic formations," that is "erotic tableaux or combinatoires in
which the subject is arrestingly positioned - whose function is, in fact, 'precisely to
display the subject in a given place. Its original cast of characters would seem to be
drawn from the familial reserve, but in the endless secondary productions to which
the fantasmatic gives rise, all actors but one are frequently recast. And even that
one constant player may assume different roles on different occasions" (216).
7. For early discussions of psychoanalysis, semiotics, feminism, Althusserian Marx-
ism, poststructuralism, and a materialist analysis of language, culture, and identity
see, Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism (London: Rout-
ledge & Kegan Paul, 1977); Annette Kuhn and Ann Marie Wolpe, editors, Femi-
nism and Materialism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).
8. See the journals Screen, October, Differences, Camera Obscura, Representations,
Enclitic, Discourse, Diacritic, and CriticalInquiry.
9. For an excellent discussion of poststructuralism, Marxism, Feminism, and contem-
porary criticism of science, including the "new sociology of science" see, Stanley
Aronowitz, Science and Power (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
10. To the extent that postmodern ethnography becomes a support in the construction
of ethnic identity by means of a politicized ethnomethodology, its epistemology is
something like feminist standpoint epistemology, as elaborated, for example, by
Dorothy Smith. See Patricia Clough, "On the Brink of Deconstrucfing Sociology: A
Critical Reading of Dorothy Smith's Standpoint Epistemology," The Sociological
Quarterly, forthcoming, Spring 1993.
11. Michael Peter Smith, 505.
12. Jacques Derrida, The Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982), 8.
13. In my The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (Newbury, Cat.:
Sage, 1992), I argue that the criticisms of ethnographic realism, especially in
anthropology, not only have insufficiently grasped the relation of desire and realist
narrativity, but they have not taken into account those realisms developed since the
novel, in the mass media, which also have their influence on ethnographic realism
throughout the twentieth century.
14. Smith, 498.
15. Homi Bhabha, "Signs taken for wonders: Questions of ambivalence and authority
552

under a tree outside Delhi, May 1817," in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., editor, 'Race,'
Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 171.
16. Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions, The Origins of the English Novel (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983).
17. There have been important criticisms of realism that have focused on the way real-
ism is made possible by a narrative composition in which characters appear as just
there, completely absorbed in their experience. The quality of making this absorp-
tion present is a requisite of realism and functions to give realist representations
their seeming trasparency, their actualness. Thus, the elements of realist narrativity,
while presenting themselves as just out there, artifully raise and answer the question
of the truth of actual experience. See especially, Michael Fried, Absorption and
Theatricality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
18. Barbara Johnson, "The frame of reference: Poe, Lacan and Derrida," Yale French
Studies 55/57: 457-505.
19. Smith, 507.
20. Ibid., 501.
21. Ibid., 501.
22. Ibid., 503.
23. Ibid., 501.
24. Ibid., 509.
25. Aronowitz, 300.
26. Smith, 507.
27. Ibid., 508.
28. Ibid., 517.
29. I have already suggested that there are various forms of realism that are character-
istic of the novel, cinema, television, or computerized simulation. Understanding
the differences in the relation of each realism to authorial desire has been a primary
project in recent cultural criticism.
30. Gloria Anzaldua, "En rapport, In opposition: Cobrando cuentas a Las nuestras,"
Making Face, Making Soul Haciendo Cams, Gloria Anzaldua, editor (San Francis-
co: Aunt Lute Foundation, 1990) 143.