ABSTRACT
In the course of this book so far we have examined a number of perspectives and problems in contemporary social theory. The theoretical perspectives surveyed – post-Marxism, structuralism, feminism – have been considered in terms of their different preoccupations in approaching the critique of society. And yet all of these social theories have been united by their concern to put into question a whole form of social life in order to entertain possible alternative futures. That is, the social theories reviewed in previous chapters display a certain totalizing bent, indebted as they are to the modernist assumption that the whole defi nition, constitution and transformation of society can be comprehensively mapped at the level of theory. The Frankfurt School had revealed that the culture industries are intricately interwoven with the organizing logics of advanced capitalism, manipulating personal life in terms of surplus repression and reorganizing public life in terms of intensifi ed consumerism. Structuralism had shown that the signs and structures that frame personal and social life, popular and high culture, are governed by the systemic processes of language. Feminism had probed the interlocking of sex and gender, and made its appeal to emancipation in the form of autonomous identity unencumbered by the oppressive weight of patriarchy.
