ABSTRACT
If social order is a social construction, if the traditional and custom bound forms of social solidarity must give way for modernity to gain in progressive power, and if state imposed regimentation is unstable, what is the ultimate guarantee of social solidarity? Durkheim, as in all things, argued for a balance, a mean between riding the roller-coaster of progress (with the prospect of anomie) and seeking stability (with the prospect of stagnation and fatalism). The culture of the society must encourage individuality without so loading the dice in favour of self-interest over the interests of others, that no social solidarity is possible; while a society that encourages self-denial at the expense of self-assertion would not know freedom – it would not be modern. Cultural understandings are both resources and weapons. Traditionally, culture reinforced rather static powers of social structure. What happens when culture becomes relatively autonomous? Or, when the social structure is radically differentiated? Is the cultural fluidity and rapid change of current conditions – a feature commentators have traced to the impact of mass communication and new technologies of transport and imagery – responsible for a post-modernisation of culture posing new challenges and opportunities for social order?1 While a society or social location, that offers no hope for the future also offers no defences against social predation and crime, a society that changes with extreme rapidity and fluidity, may rob the population of normative expectations
and undercut predictability of social and individual events, thus removing important constraints on individual behaviour, and ensuing that the activities of individuals lose their signification. If criminology has sought to provide information and some guidance to our views on crime and punishment in modernity, the cultural challenge of post-modernism entails that they may lose whatever meaning they have and become lost in normative stupidity. Two contrasting positions – at least – are possible, cultural incoherence, stupidity and indifference – we can call this the position of MacIntyre (1981) – or a radical democratic possibility in the freeing of cultural messages from a settled social structure – we can call this Richard Rorty’s (1989) position. Rorty believes
Thus Rorty believes that post-modernism has made it possible to free ‘questions about pain from questions about the point of human life’. While Rorty points us to a progressive and optimistic reading of post-modernism, we do not know the answer to the question whether post-modernism is a celebration of the greater democratisation in life-forms of the social body, or increasing noise and ungovernability. Thus, while cultural unity has been split by the process of modernity and the advent of post-modernism, the allure of a reactionary fundamentalisation of society and culture, a splitting of society into the insiders and the outsiders, the moralists and the criminals, becomes strong; whether this is achieved by the openness of a social apartheid and repressive policing, or the market. But there may be no fundamental contradiction between modernity and postmodernism; hence understanding modernity may offer resources to sustain human interaction in post-modernism.
