T11 Book Reviews 2

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REVIEWS

Dominic Sachsenmaier and Jens Riedel (eds) with Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Reflections on Multiple Modernities: European, Chinese and Other Interpretations (Brill, 2002) So I am in two minds. I think we are condemned to modernization. If we are going to be modern, try to be more quick and pacific about it. On the other hand, I say ‘condemned to modernize,’ because seeing the U.S., Europe, and Japan I think modernization is not a benediction. It can be a kind of airconditioned hell. Octavio Paz (1994)

The idea that modernity is a uniform condition to which all humanity does or should aspire has been subject to serious challenge since at least the 1960s, though the critique became more sustained in the 1980s. From this period, the main burden of the challenge fell to postmodernists, for whom the modern was seen to have exhausted its potential, displaced by the flux and ephemera of contemporary consumer culture. More recently, the challenge has been taken up by those advocating a pluralization and relativization of the concept of modernity, while still appealing to it as a basic reference point, the absence of which is seen as rendering much postmodernist thought superficial or incoherent. Although the contributors to Reflections on Multiple Modernities do not speak with one voice, it is this general approach that unifies their work. As the editors tell us in their introduction, the development of the notion of multiple modernities was a response to a homogenized and homogenizing model of modernity, which views it in terms of what Charles Taylor has called the ‘Enlightenment package’. Just as Romanticism had from the late 18th century rejected the universalism and rationalism of that package, so too does the multiple modernities approach reject a univocal and universalist view of modernity. According to that view, modernity can be defined in terms of the marriage of the Enlightenment ideals of progress, political equality and scientific reason with the institutional configuration characteristic of post-medieval Europe, and later North America and Japan. Secular, centralized states, bureaucratic forms of administration, democratic governance, industrial capitalism, and science linked to technological Thesis Eleven, Number 77, May 2004: 121–140 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd DOI: 10.1177/0725513604042661

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innovation are usually taken to be the hallmarks of modern as opposed to traditional societies. To the extent that social formations exhibit these institutions, and the Enlightenment ideals with which they are coupled, they can be said to be modern. Here modernization is routinely conceived of as a linear process that tends towards a predetermined result, with various stages along the path to realizing that result, through which all modernizing societies must pass. Apart from its crude teleology, the problem with this view of modernity – in both its Rostowian and Marxian variants – is that reality does not conform to the model. Different configurations of modern institutions, and different paths to and through modernity, have rendered the unitary model of modernity and modernization defunct. But what is to replace it? In attempting to provide answers to this question, the 14 essays in Reflections on Multiple Modernities take their cue from the pioneering work of Shmuel Eisenstadt, himself a key figure in the development of a unitary model of modernity and modernization back in the 1960s. His essay here summarizes the key observations of the multiple modernities problematic, setting the tone for much of what follows. His central claim is that the institutional and cultural patterning of modern societies always preserve within them civilizational legacies which embody different cultural standards and practices from the Enlightenment package described earlier. While he acknowledges the importance of the ‘western pioneers’ of modernity, he argues that resistance to and differential reception of western modernity by non-western societies and civilizations helped constitute alternative modernities. Consequently, he emphasizes that western patterns of modernity are not the only authentic ones, and therefore that modernization is not coterminous with westernization. Indeed, within the ‘West’ itself we can identify fundamental differences in the institutional and cultural frameworks of Western European modernity on the one hand, and North and South American patterns on the other. Even within these broad categories there is a great deal of local and national variation. Moreover, while the West has been the epicentre and originator of much of the social, political and economic transformations that we typically associate with modernity, it has also been transformed and indeed partly constituted by its encounters with non-western societies and civilizations. This point is elaborated in greater detail in Dominic Sachsenmaier’s essay ‘Multiple Modernities – The Concept and its Potential’. Sachsenmaier rightly suggests that the relationship between modernization and westernization is a deeply ambivalent one, with colonized populations frequently pursuing what they perceived to be the fruits of western modernity while simultaneously resisting and being suspicious of its consequences for indigenous culture. The product of this ambivalence was the emergence of ‘tradition’ as the necessary and mutually constitutive counterpart to modernity. In this sense, tradition was and is very much an invention of modernity.

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This point is illustrated by Sachsenmaier’s and later Mark Juergensmeyer’s discussions of contemporary Islamist movements, global antimodernisms and other defensive traditionalisms. Both authors convincingly argue that while these are discursively constructed as traditional – by proponents and opponents alike – they are in fact profoundly modern. Antimodern modernisms attempt to overcome the ambivalence and fragmentation wrought by modernity by drawing ever more rigid lines of demarcation between the collective self and the other. The drawing of such lines expresses an ongoing ‘quest for authenticity’ amidst the ambiguity and anxieties of a modern world in a constant state of change. These boundary demarcations represent the symbolic membrane separating the pure from the impure, which is so often the text of and the pretext for ethnic and religiously-inspired violence that is proliferating globally. Hence, there is a very real sense in which modernity begets violence sanctioned by tradition, with violent traditionalisms now being globally-oriented. The issue of the globalization of particularism is taken up in Bruce Mazlish’s essay ‘Globalization: The Most Recent Form of Modernity’, and Prasenjit Duara’s ‘Civilizations and Nations in a Globalizing World’. Mazlish’s essay, despite its promising title, is disappointing, amounting to an extended assertion of the claim implicit in its title. Duara’s paper is more interesting, containing some thoughtful insights into the relationship between civilizations, nations and global modernity. He traces the genealogy of the term ‘civilization’ since the 18th century, suggesting that there has long existed a basic tension between a normative, univocal conception (Civilization with a capital C) and an ethnographic, plural conception, with both senses having had periods of greater or lesser intellectual popularity over the last two centuries. Duara argues that both senses of the term have been critical for modern nationalism and nation-building. On the one hand, Civilization has served an authorizing and legitimizing function for western, imperialist nations in their conquest of peoples defined principally by their lack of Civilization. It was this lack which, in the rationalizing eyes of European colonialists, disqualified these peoples from nationhood and thus sovereignty. On the other hand, civilization served as a badge of authenticity for those nationalist movements struggling for independence from European colonizers. The plethora of new nations that emerged with the break-up of empires after both world wars reached back into the pasts of civilizations that were said to have nurtured the nations that were now supposedly awakening. National histories posited an historical straight line from classical civilizations to the emergent national subject. In this way, national particularism was linked to a transcendental moral universalism, and civilization became the ultimate rationale for national sovereignty. It also became the basis for multiple modernities, which are discussed in more specific detail in the later parts of the book focusing on East Asia and Europe. The sociologist and sinologist Ambrose King, for instance, presents the

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case for an alternative East Asian modernity, based upon vestigial expressions of Chinese civilization. While conceding that much about East Asia’s modernization is, to some extent, westernization, he emphasizes the nonindividualistic nature of East Asia’s modernity and the active ‘reinvention and reincorporation’ of non-western civilizational patterns. Fred Wakeman Jr. continues this theme in a thought-provoking contribution on Chinese modernity. He suggests that since its encounters with European powers in the 19th century, China’s intellectuals and most of its leading political figures have sought to modernize while upholding some notion of Chinese cultural exceptionalism, as the basis on which to pursue a distinctive path to modernity. He traces this tendency to political developments after the Opium Wars. Defenders of China’s Confucian tradition redeployed the NeoConfucian distinction between substance (ti) and function (yong) in their efforts to modernize while preserving China’s cultural heritage. It was envisaged that western instrumental, technological advantages (the function) could be employed to defend Chinese culture (the substance). The problem with this position is that western, instrumental methods and technologies cannot so easily be quarantined from a supposedly self-contained cultural sphere. Wakeman gives the example of Chinese deployment of western artillery in the 19th century. Western gunnery presupposed learning western mathematics, necessitating changes in the existing curriculum, which was still based on the Chinese Imperial examination system and Confucian classics. As a result, the Imperial examination system was eroded and finally abolished in 1905. This had the unintended consequence of severing the ideological connection between the Imperial centre and local authorities, which contributed to provincial reform and revolution in 1911. Wakeman observes similar developments later in the century, first with Mao’s reinterpretation of Marxism-Leninism along Chinese nationalistic lines, and later with Deng Xiaoping’s formulation of ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ – a new expression of the ti-yong distinction. It has led, in Wakeman’s view, to a distinctive Chinese modernity characterized by a weak public sphere, a strong state, feeble individual rights and a high degree of government regulation and intervention. In addition, Chinese modernity displays ‘fervent chip-on-the-shoulder nationalism’, deep divisions between rural and urban China, and unprecedented economic growth coupled with widespread alienation, anomie and political estrangement. In short, Chinese modernity displays some of the features of its western counterpart, but in most respects is an altogether different model, which Wakeman expects to stay that way. The essays on European modernity collected here draw out the contrast with the East Asian model. The social historian Hartmut Kaelble provides an impressive, albeit contestable, overview of changes in European selfunderstanding over the course of the 20th century. He argues that there has been a shift from a view of Europe as superior to all other civilizations

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(prevalent in the decades before the First World War), to one where Europe is now seen as one civilization among many. Whether this is true or not, and the picture certainly seems far more variegated than Kaelble indicates, this comes close to the multiple modernities paradigm. Kaelble claims that this is the reason why the latter has a resonance in Europe today that it could not have had 100 or even 50 years ago. On the one hand, the shift in selfunderstanding can be explained, Kaelble submits, by the weakening of Europe’s global geo-political position, and by its transformation from being the world’s most important source of emigration to being one of the most important destinations for immigration. This has massively increased ordinary Europeans’ experiences of other cultures. On the other hand, the new selfunderstanding is a consequence of Europe’s social and cultural particularities, including the nuclear family, industrial labour, and its class milieu, as well as the specificity of its welfare states, cities and consumerism. Taken together, these features distinguish Europe from the rest of the world and define its modernity, though not as the archetype of modernity as was often assumed by previous generations of thinkers. The essays in the final section rounding out the collection are concerned with the implications of the multiple modernities perspective for economics and business. Whatever their value for marketers and entrepreneurs looking for a competitive edge in culturally distinct international markets, they have little to offer social scientists by way of serious insights. One gets the impression that their inclusion was more for the sponsors of the project – the Boston Consulting Group’s Strategy Institute – than for a scholarly audience attracted to the promising notion of multiple modernities. This disappointment aside, the essays in Reflections on Multiple Modernities offer a useful overview of some of the key issues raised by the pluralization of the concept of modernity. The only caveat I would add is that while the multiple modernities paradigm is an advance on its unitary and homogenizing predecessor, it is often unclear as to what is the common denominator of the individual instantiations of modernity. As Jurgen Kocka, one of the contributors to the book, comments, the defining core of the concept of modernity risks becoming ‘rather thin or vague’ when pluralized. None of the essays, Kocka’s included, addresses this problem head on. Hence, whether or not all modernities are necessarily condemned to be Octavio Paz’s ‘air-conditioned hell’ remains to be seen. Reviewed by Lloyd Cox School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University email: [email protected]

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Leonardo Avritzer, Democracy and the Public Sphere in Latin America (Princeton University Press, 2002) Leonardo Avritzer’s account of a vibrant self-generated public sphere in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico forcefully argues that the recent deepening of democracy in Latin American countries has, by and large, depended on the emergence of non-elite publics. Taking issue with elite-focused democratic theories, Avritzer provides a lucid counterpoint to mainstream analyses dealing with the most recent wave of democratization in Latin America. He argues that elite-focused theories miss the democratizing impact of massbased collective action articulated in the public sphere. According to Avritzer, these new non-elite publics hold the solution to Latin America’s partial democratization in as much as they ‘transfer democratic potentials that emerge at the societal level to the political arena through participatory designs’. Such a transfer, he claims, turns ‘informal’ publics into ‘participatory’, problemsolving publics able to bridge the gap between democratic societal practices and a recalcitrant formal political sphere that resists full democratization. In short, Avritzer delivers an extremely inspiring account rich in historical and sociological detail illustrating the emergence of social movements and voluntary associations participating in Latin America’s public sphere. Avritzer points out that an independent non-elite civil society emerged relatively late in Latin America. Recapitulating the emergence of human rights movements in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, Avritzer documents the astonishing growth of voluntary associations during the 1970s and 1980s under the protective umbrella of the progressive Catholic Church. Amplified by the Church and international NGOs, many of the nascent movements began to publicly denounce the abuses of the military regimes. Others, such as urban social movements in Brazil and Mexico, demanded better urban services and infrastructure. This leads Avritzer to a detailed discussion of two more recent movements that seek to transform the formal political sphere. His Brazilian case study focuses on the emergence of the widely acclaimed participatory budgets currently implemented in more than 140 municipalities, including São Paulo. The case of the Alianza Cívica features a campaign aimed at building accountability into Mexico’s electoral and fiscal procedures. Avritzer demonstrates how public pressure and negotiations between the alliance and the politicians resulted in the construction of an independently supervised electoral process. However, Avritzer concedes that this democratic thrust is seriously undermined by pockets of authoritarianism. For instance, in Argentina and Brazil, demands for a ‘just’ judicial response to human rights abuses are effectively blocked by groups such as the cara pintadas (a group of Argentinian military officers opposing the human rights trials of the mid-1980s) and other vested interests. And a diffused and at times institutionalized authoritarian culture tends to undermine basic political and juridical processes. Moreover,

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a formal political sphere re-clientelized following the restoration of civilian democracy tends to obstruct calls for greater accountability, as secret slush funds are a basic consensus-forming ingredient in a political environment defined by low party loyalty and weak institutions. Although such reactionary forces are able to temporarily suspend demands for greater accountability, Avritzer demonstrates that societal actors hold some capacity to limit the use and abuse of state power and have made significant progress in reforming Latin American democracies. In particular, his insightful analysis of the participatory budget initiative in Brazil, further elaborated in a recent volume edited by Evelina Dagnino, provides an excellent overview of a more equitable dynamics of municipal democracy in Porto Alegre and Bel Horizonte. However, for Avritzer, the role of societal actors is clearly limited as ‘they cannot impose sanctions at either the political or legal level’. Hence, he shares one of Habermas’s premises regarding the role of a self-regulated public sphere: ‘Discourses do not govern. They generate a communicative power that cannot take the place of administration but can only influence.’ On a theoretical level, Avritzer’s account questions the pessimism that permeates elite democratic as well as critical theory approaches to popular democratic culture and mass-based democratic society. Building his case against elite-focused democratic theories, Avritzer first turns to Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and the early Frankfurt School whose rejection of 19th-century romanticism and the belief in the sovereignty of ‘the people’ gave way to a theory of democratic elitism. This resolved the problems about mass democracy that had been raised by these thinkers by limiting democratic participation and by placing decision-making in the hands of supposedly rational elites. In the case of Latin America, Avritzer claims, the main propositions of elite democratic theory as outlined by Schumpeter and Downs, for instance, did not hold. Democracies reverted to authoritarianism because inter-elite competition led to an unprecedented broadening of the notion of popular sovereignty. This posed a challenge to anti-democratically-inclined elites that caused a descent into authoritarianism in an attempt to thwart the outcome of election results. In contrast, mass-mobilization did not undermine democracy but tried to secure the rules of the game. Turning his attention to theories of democratic breakdown and transition, Avritzer retorts that most of these theories ‘see the emergence of new public spheres as provisional and to an extent elite managed’. Avritzer’s search for an alternative approach guides him to conceptualizations of the public sphere. In the public sphere he finds a rational epistemological basis that ‘no longer rests on identifying virtuous or vicious actors’, as is the case in much of civil society and social movement theory, ‘but on the creation of a plural space in which actors present themselves in public and establish fields of conflict with the state’. Surprisingly, Avritzer picks up the threads for a mass-focused democratic theory of the public

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sphere with Habermas. Utilizing Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere as the foundation of his conceptualization, Avritzer focuses on the egalitarian aspects of the embryonic public spheres in 17th- and 18thcentury British and French bourgeois society, ignoring the class implications of Habermas’s focus on the ‘reading society’. Moreover, Avritzer ignores Habermas’s pessimistic reading of the 20th century, where a fragmentation of the bourgeois public occurs as the result of a commodification and massification of the public sphere. Clearly, Avritzer derives much of his insights from Habermas’s later work when he claims that Habermas, ‘instead of entering the debate between elitist and participatory version of democratic theory . . . finds a third path, which involves a different way of reconnecting reason and will, one in which reason results from public debate in a sphere located between the market and the state’. In this way, Avritzer is able to distil an ideal public sphere in which a sense of common humanity prevails and the better argument can assert itself against social hierarchy and status. Yet Avritzer does this without seriously addressing the impediments to the emergence of a lifeworld-based, self-regulated, critical, horizontally-interlinked public sphere as, for instance, outlined by Habermas in the Strucutral Transformation or in his later work. The question is whether the autonomy of societal actors facilitated by the social-welfare state in conjunction with the expansion of formal schooling raised by Habermas in Further Reflections on the Public Sphere is indeed the key ingredient in Latin America’s lifeworld-based public sphere. Cohen and Arato’s insistence on constitutionally enshrined rights to freedom of assembly and speech as basic preconditions for a vibrant civil society seems secondary to Avritzer’s story. Yet Avritzer’s account suggests that somehow, this new lifeworld-based public sphere managed to successfully compete with Habermas’s manipulative, power-infused public sphere that is aimed at producing uncritical consent. However, an answer to such questions must be sought outside the pages of Democracy and the Public Sphere. Rebecca Neaera Abers’ Inventing Local Democracy: Grassroots Politics in Brazil, focusing on the same participatory budget process in Porto Alegre, comes to mind. Abers maintains that a synergetic ‘scaling up’ of social conflicts, a concept she borrows from Peter Evans, involving a multiplicity of regional, national, as well as international non-governmental as well as governmental actors is vital to the emergence of a vibrant civil society. Avritzer’s attempt to envisage a public sphere predominantly populated by social movements tends to miss these wider connections. According to Avritzer, ‘transforming the public space into a dialogic and interactive space and introducing social movements as its main occupants can help us to construct a concept of democratic publics’. Indeed, infusing Habermas’s lifeworld-based public sphere with potentially offensive social movement exorcises its bourgeois connotations, albeit on a conceptual level. To a

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similar end, Avritzer outlines four main points alongside Habermasian speech act theory that define what he calls ‘participatory publics’. First, participatory publics operate at the public level through the mechanism of face-to-face deliberation constitutionally anchored in the right for free expression and assembly elevating new issues onto the political agenda. Second, social movements and voluntary associations address contentious issues by introducing alternative practices at the public level, such as non-clientelistic forms of claiming public goods. Third, they preserve a space for administrative complexity while challenging the exclusive access of technicians to decisionmaking forums. Fourth, the deliberation of these publics is bound up with the search for institutional forms capable of addressing the issues raised at the public level. These points clearly delineate Avritzer’s commitment to a social movement paradigm influenced and expanded by civil society theory and, in particular, by contributions from Robert Putnam, Jean Cohen, Andrew Arato and others. Rather than examining the wider context of this public sphere, for instance, its media, technologies, and infrastructure that make possible the emergence of non-elite publics, Avritzer focuses on the selective institutionalization of deliberative processes within civil society. With this he aims to link novel community-based communicative practices to a renovated model of constitutional democracy but without giving up the notion of local autonomy. We are back on Habermasian territory. Yet by limiting his public sphere to the discursive circuits of those movements and associations that in his view play a decisive role in the democratization of Latin America, Avritzer creates a number of problems. For instance, by conceiving the public sphere as the communicative practices internal to civic associations, advantages that were claimed by approaching democracy from the vantage point of the public sphere have evaporated. And the danger of mob rule looms large. As a result, we not only have to re-introduce the moral distinction between virtuous and vicious actors, but have to contend with an equally problematic differentiation between antiinstitutional and state-cooperative mass-mobilization. From my point of view, the difficulties associated with these dichotomies could have been reduced – or perhaps only converted – by turning to Habermas’s concept of a modernizing lifeworld (Lebenswelt – the realm of cultural and social interaction) taken up by Cohen and Arato. By drawing on Habermas’s concept of a ‘modernizing lifeworld’, a process that opens up the lifeworld’s sacred traditions, norms, and authority to the processes of communication, Cohen and Arato are able to deliver ‘civil society’ from its potentially regressive ‘Other’ without having to employ a problematic moral dichotomy. Moreover, in Avritzer’s account, authoritarian practices form a frighteningly effective counterpoint to the public demands of civic associations. In fact, a sober assessment of authoritarian continuities indicates that Avritzer’s public sphere is too narrowly conceived. This is especially the case in the light of Avritzer’s admission that without the support of elected

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officials, experiments such as the participatory budget would hardly have had a chance. Bearing these significant constraints in mind, it could be of advantage to cast the public sphere wider and admit publics that are constituted by weaker ties. I am thinking of publics associated with community radio stations, professional associations, elite advocacy groups, but also webbased logs (blogs), for instance. For it seems unlikely that a public opinion that exclusively issues from grassroots-based movements or voluntary associations holds sufficient purchase to neutralize the authoritarian inclination of power brokers. Clearly, if the deepening of democracy depends on the election of sympathetic politicians, the opinion of the wider public (Oeffentlichkeit) does indeed matter and should not be excluded. Yet such ‘informal publics’, as Avritzer calls them, are located outside the conceptual boundaries of a social-movement-based public sphere. In this sense, Avritzer’s ‘participative publics’ have to be situated within a wider public sphere in which commercial and political interests wield a decisive influence. Yet if Avritzer’s ‘participative publics’ have to compete with a mass media whose ownership is extremely concentrated, and whose journalism is far from independent, Habermas’s pessimism with regard to the role of the public sphere in late modernity needs to be addressed. Avritzer’s account demonstrates that under certain unspecified circumstances new participatory publics capable of making a significant contribution to the reformation and strengthening of democratic structures can emerge. Indeed, their utopian craving for a fairer society is strong enough to crack open institutionalized anti-democratic structures that pervade the formal political sphere in Latin America. Although Avritzer’s account focuses more on social movements than on Latin America’s public sphere, its case studies prompt us to suspend any Adorno-inspired pessimism, if only for a moment. Reviewed by Goetz F. Ottmann School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University email: [email protected]

Kwang-Ki Kim, Order and Agency in Modernity: Talcott Parsons, Erving Goffman, and Harold Garfinkel (State University of New York, 2003) Never judge a book by its cover is a saying that could very well stand as one of the few eternal truths despite its worn-out, dated and by now endlessly quoted status in the social sciences and elsewhere. In the case of Kwang-Ki Kim’s new book Order and Agency in Modernity, however, this saying is once again revitalized and shows its rightful persistence. Despite being presented as a small book with a somewhat anonymous cover, Kim’s

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book is nevertheless full of fascinating insights, interesting conclusions and cross-references regarding some of the most central social thinkers of the last century – Parsons, Goffman and Garfinkel – a century otherwise full to the brim of brilliant thinkers, analysts, commentators and critics of our discipline, of our human predicament, and of our modern condition. One could legitimately claim that order and agency stand as the twin towers of modernist thinking and this, therefore, is also not surprisingly Kim’s contention throughout his book. These two academic concepts, supposedly covering phenomena ‘out there’ in the real social world, rose to prominence throughout the 20th century’s social thought either as forces potentially preserving society or subservient forces potentially threatening this preservation. This duality between order and agency is classical in sociology and is closely related to what Zygmunt Bauman in another context termed respectively the structure and the praxis dimension within cultures, the stabilizing and the creative aspect of human endeavour. To deal with this duality is also the errand of Kim’s book, although he limits his discussion to the three aforementioned distinct thinkers. Thus, the explicitly stated aim of the study is to ‘counter-balance the predominant concern with structural aspects of modernity, to recapture the importance of a cultural or phenomenological understanding of modernity, and to revisit the grounds for ambivalence that come with any deeper understanding of modernity’ (p. 5). This cultural and phenomenological understanding of modernity that Kim sustains throughout the book is, as mentioned, formed on the basis of a discussion of, respectively, order and agency, as the title suggests, but also as a lengthy clarification of the relationship between abstraction and pluralization as social dynamics and developmental traits. The three chosen exponents of a particular modern stance in sociology leaning towards a cultural understanding and appreciation of order and agency are Talcott Parsons, Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel: one presenting classical structural functionalism, another a hybrid between symbolic interactionism and Durkheimian sociology with his focus on ‘the interaction order’, and the last scholar being also a hybrid between Parsonian inspiration and the sociologies of everyday life in his ethnomethodological tradition. Together these three stoic scholars spanning a period of more than half a century provided sociology with some of its vintage theoretical perspectives, models and concepts as well as some of the most illuminating empirically inspired studies of order and agency. The first chapter dealing with the nature of modern society is, to the best of my knowledge, one of the most compressed and yet poignant presentations of the ‘modern sensibility’, as Kim terms it, found in contemporary sociology. Without many digressions or excursions, Kim is capable of pinpointing and capturing the very essence of modern social life, its causes, transformations and consequences, equally on the level of institutions, interaction and individual identity. The main emphasis is on discontinuity,

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discomfort, contingency and alienation, and the reason for this is that Kim characterizes modernity primarily through the eyes of some of the most renowned cultural pessimists within sociology, such as Simmel, Berger, Fromm and Zijderveld. However, Kim is not a sinister pessimist, and throughout the book he points to possible ways of transcending the inherent problems in modernity. This is done by looking to three theorists who were not acknowledged for their expressed pessimism but for their analytical and somewhat distanced observations on central aspects of the modern world. In his presentation of the work of Parsons and his attempt to dig up the cultural aspects implicit or explicit in this, Kim is making the case for a new, nuanced and somewhat positive understanding of Parsons despite the many criticisms voiced against his theoretical universe. Kim’s understanding implies and indicates the more flexible and less rigid aspects of society, values, culture, norms etc., than is usually the case among critics, and he apparently seeks to provide corrigenda to many of the critically biased assaults raised against Parsons’ social theory as being reactionary and a vanguard of the status quo. Social order for Parsons is not presupposed as an empirical phenomenon but is expected to be represented in theories about reality – theories that ‘draw a desirable picture of the world’. Moreover, agency is not locked in the iron cages of standardized roles and functional expectations but assumes a certain level of freedom found in, for example, anonymity. This freedom is embedded in modern institutional society where not only alienation constitutes the order of the day, but also freedom, flexibility and unpredictability. Indeed, this appears as a very positive evaluation of Parsons’ contribution to an understanding of the cultural realm of modernity. The presentation of the writings of Erving Goffman, unfortunately, leaves much to be desired, primarily because Kim refrains from giving interpretative primacy to any of the various existing traditions within writings on Goffman’s sociology. By doing this, he makes it impossible, I believe, to locate Goffman more solidly in an explicitly modernist tradition where actors are either Machiavellian or moral and societies appear as either sacred or profane. Thus, he professes not a lack of sensitivity towards the multi-faceted and nuanced views of Goffman and his interpreters but an inability firmly to determine on what grounds he labels the concern of Goffman’s sociology particularly modern. Although I do not disagree that something relating particularly to modernity (as opposed to traditional society) is evident in Goffman’s work, I believe that Kim in his eagerness to illustrate Goffman’s modern embeddedness somewhat confuses the analytical aspects of Goffman’s work on, for example, interaction rituals, with historical facts about phases in social and historical development. A demonstration and interpretation of Goffman’s views on self and society has to form the basis for any sound evaluation of his particular modern stance. Moreover, where the picture presented of Parsons was primarily optimistic and positive,

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regarding a reinterpretation of the supposed solidity of order in his writings, the picture presented of Goffman is, on the contrary, generally sinister, sombre and pessimistic. Kim especially exaggerates the instability of order in Goffman’s work instead of looking at the marvellous persistence and reliability of order that it actually also displays. Nevertheless, Kim offers an interesting and indeed novel analysis of Goffman’s writings in the light of the themes of social order and agency. Finally, the summation of the perspective of Garfinkel is also illuminating with regard to modernity despite the fact the Kim acknowledges and admits that ethnomethodologists abhor the notion of abstract theorizing included within, for example, formal analysis and formal theories on historical development. The order of ethnomethodologists is constantly produced in the everyday practices of members of the ordinary, immortal society, to use Garfinkel’s own powerful terminology. Through a discussion of the concepts and real life phenomena of order, rules, norms, structure and last but not least agency within ethnomethodology, Kim argues that this tradition is best seen as relying on assumptions about order and agency that are specifically accentuated in modernity, for example ambiguity, uncertainty and radical changes. Moreover, ethnomethodology seeks to normalize the apparent lack of encompassing basic or normative rules and norms and to specify the relativity, contextuality and flexibility as well as the undermining of order, structure and rules that is taking place in the era of modernity – an era by many other observers actually described as being obsessed with rigid rules, regulations, norms and structures. One can, however, have certain reservations about the specifically modern stance in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis that Kim is trying to persuade the reader to accept. Order and Agency in Modernity is concluded with a brief – too brief for my taste and for the purposes of the book – comparison of the three theoretical perspectives. Here Kim could have gone into much more concrete detail but, be that as it may, his concluding remarks clearly indicate that he ends up where he started – a self-fulfilling and somewhat unsurprising prophecy of the modern mentality of the three writers. He states that ‘these three bodies of theory can be read as reflecting modern social conditions, and actually open up to such a reading, revealing new dimensions and depth’ (p. 107). This leaves me with some ultimate questions: first, why exactly these three bodies of theory and, second, can they not be read as something other than exactly expressions of modernity? On these issues, Kim seems curiously quiet, and I believe this is due to a widespread confusion throughout the book regarding the obvious and explicit modern statements of these theorists and their potential implicit modern orientations. Because modernity is so generally and loosely defined, every writer from the 20th century could, not surprisingly, be said to contain certain modern elements. Despite these criticisms, the book is definitely worth consulting. What Kim achieves is to point out the specifically modern stances in these three

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theories. By looking at them through the prism of modernity, order and agency, he is capable of extracting new insights that can enhance the appreciation of the respective theories as well as their common points of reference. Despite almost overburdening the book with references and (key) quotations (half the book is actually dedicated to notes and references), Kim is instrumental in inscribing Parsons, Goffman and Garfinkel in an explicitly modern framework that makes it quite clear to the reader why the relationship between these three thinkers and modernity, order, agency, abstraction and pluralism is of vital importance. As an endnote, I believe that the type of theoretical comparison provided in Order and Agency in Modernity is a fruitful way to analyse and appreciate academic work more fully. It provides readers, whether familiar or unacquainted with the theoretical works under discussion in the first place, with a point of common reference often lacking in the endless stream of ever-new studies, empirical observations, theoretical trends, fads and inventions that sociology appears to be so full of these days. Order and Agency in Modernity is, as a consequence, one of those rare books that with its original perspective and perceptive analysis provides sociology with something genuinely novel. Reviewed by Michael Hviid Jacobsen University of Aalborg, Denmark email: [email protected]

Fred Myers, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (Duke University Press, 2002) For a long time now, calls have been made for a body of work that critically engages with the amorphous and challenging category – ‘Aboriginal Art’. Recently we have seen publication of several outstanding books in the field. For example, the exemplary catalogue Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius (2000); the encyclopaedic reference work The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture (2000); and the introductory survey Aboriginal Art by Wally Caruana, (revised 2003). All of these works have their individual merits, but none could rightly be called a work of art history or art criticism, as the categories are currently understood; neither could Fred Myers’ Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Indeed, owing to the great diversity in styles, themes and ideas, constructing working methodologies needed for rigorous criticism, and the sheer volume of knowledge required to come close to circumscribing related historical processes, this probably is an impossible task for one volume. Despite this, at 400-odd pages, Painting Culture represents a substantial foray into the complex network of ideas, places, people and

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events that together constitute the world of Aboriginal art. It is certainly unique as a sustained critical view of the representation of a particular Aboriginal art (Pintupi painting), from its origin at Papunya and Yayayi in the early 1970s to its inclusion in the cultural festival leading up to the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Criticism tends to be directed more toward how the paintings have been received (by government bodies, gallery owners and dealers) rather than stylistic development or other aesthetic concerns addressed by the works themselves. In his critique of the market, Myers is unafraid to name prominent persons currently working in the art world in Australia and the USA; some may not like what they read (see Nicholas Rothwell’s review in the Weekend Australian, 3–4 May 2003). Falling roughly into three parts, Painting Culture firstly establishes its purpose, scope and methodology, highlighting the importance of making the activity of representation itself an object of study. Early on Myers states that he is ‘attempting to make a different sort of contribution than those that have dominated consideration of the art – an anthropological contribution based on many years of fieldwork and association with the painters, as well as limited ethnography of the exhibition scenes’ (p. 15). Indeed, Myers’ account of a specific lived experience (his own) in these first few chapters is one of the strengths of this work, his contact with and knowledge of the painters providing rare insight into one of the most interesting, dynamic and least understood moments in Australian history. Readers may be familiar with Myers’ previous work, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics (1986), and the associated critique by Eric Michaels (1987), ‘The Last of the Nomads, the Last of the Ethnographies or “All Anthropologists are Liars” ’ (Mankind 17[1]: 34–46). Painting Culture draws on Myers’ previous publication as well as addressing its perceived shortcomings by keenly attending to his own position (spatially and temporally) in relation to his subjects. Myers began writing Painting Culture in 1988, a time which represents ‘a dramatic intensification in the representation of Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal identity’ through the activities of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, and this historical and political context vividly marks his approach to writing. Currently Chair of Anthropology at New York University, Professor Myers lived with Pintupi people at Yayayi, Northern Territory, from 1973 to 1975. The ‘acrylic painting movement’, as it is often termed, began two years prior to his arrival, at Papunya, 42 km east of Yayayi and roughly 250 km west of Alice Springs, although it was still at a pivotal point in its development when Myers was undertaking fieldwork. Myers reflects on the time when he began as a 25year-old PhD student, unsure of what or whom he was studying, with degrees of regret and uncertainty. Commenting on his own blindness to the importance of the art movement taking place around him, Myers asks: ‘With what voice can I discuss . . . my understandings or misunderstandings of acrylic painting in 1973 or 1974, from the perspective of a current writing? I

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did not know Aboriginal painting then as what I perceive it to be now – a sign of an emerging Australian national identity not quite yet brought into social being’ (p. 9). Compunction aside, Myers attempts a comprehensive and detailed study of the development of two important Pintupi painters, Yanyatjarri Tjakamarra and Wuta Wuta Tjangala – comparing the work of the latter, all too briefly, with that of his friend and brother-in-law, Charlie Tjaruru Tjungurrayi. Referring back to his limited notes of the time, Myers offers little interpretation or criticism of the artwork but describes many paintings, with anthropological precision, utilizing the rough sketches he made of them, noting their relation to geographic features and associated Dreaming. As this work is repeated from an early chapter in Howard Morphy and Margo SmithBoles’ Art from the Land (1999), this seems a missed opportunity to expand and develop an important topic. Exactly how much of this new book has been drawn from previously published material is not indicated. Framing, methodology, qualification and positioning are prevailing themes in these opening chapters, drawing predominantly from the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and flecked with Myers’ personal reminiscences of his time at Yayayi (one of the first outstations established in the early 1970s). Despite identifying the need for careful and detailed studies of the development of particular painters, his work ultimately falls short of delivering this kind of response by moving all too quickly onto discussion of ‘the Papunya Tula scene’. Papunya Tula is the name of the company incorporated in 1972 by indigenous artists residing at the government settlement formed to house Anmatyerre, Arrernte, Warlpiri, Luritja and Pintupi people brought in from the desert in the late 1950s and 1960s. The second, loosely imposed, section of Painting Culture analyses the growth and development of the market of Aboriginal art both in Australia and overseas beginning with the early days at Papunya. Several extant publications cover this early period from a number of different perspectives. See especially: Geoff Bardon’s Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert (1979) and Judith Ryan’s Mythscapes (1990). Myers seeks to add his own ethnographic and historical approach by concentrating largely on exchanges between painters and a succession of art advisors (a title given to persons employed by the company and government to facilitate the sale of paintings, organize supplies, and a range of other duties). When writing of the many difficulties that beset the early art advisors, Myers states: ‘the need for “love” or attachment from the Aboriginal . . . is both the sine qua non of a white person’s legitimacy and the Achilles’ heel of advising’ (p. 181). Acknowledging the complexities of economies of exchange, this seems a strangely personal observation, one which might equally apply to Myers’ own relationships with his subjects. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 cover periods of roughly 10 years and, in each, certain tropes or tendencies are isolated: 1972–1981 ‘a time of little demand’;

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1981–1989 ‘the boom years’; and 1989–2000 ‘the privatisation period’. Myers brings several different strategies and dealings into focus in this ‘art-world ethnology’, while a great deal of the information he covers is not new – see Altman and Taylor, Marketing Aboriginal Art in the 1990s (1990). Myers argues that during the boom years artwork gained in prestige and monetary value through substantial purchases by Australian cultural institutions. ‘There is . . . a revealing link between economic rationalization and the cultural reevaluation of Aboriginal art, a linkage whose compromise formations make the artistic success of acrylic paintings a significant national symbol’ (p. 205). Whilst most are familiar with the concept of acrylic painting as forms of activism, objectifying political aspirations and identities of Indigenous artists, Myers argues that the Whitlam Labor government’s acquisition of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles in September 1973 ‘opened up a new aesthetic space (abstraction) that came to be filled with Aboriginal art’ (p. 204). At one level, Myers displaces the power he recognizes in Aboriginal artworks and makes the sensibilities and imaginings of the Whitlamite ‘professional managerial class’ the dominant factor in the work’s success. This is largely based on Myers’ acceptance of Bourdieu’s theory that ‘the field of cultural production is the area par excellence of clashes between the dominant fractions of the dominant class’ (p. 203) and seemingly pays little heed to the political aspirations of the makers of the art. Comprising a third section of the book, the international touring exhibition Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia, produced by the Asia Society Gallery in New York and the South Australian Museum in 1988, is examined in fine detail in chapters 8, 9, and 10. Such a concentrated exposition of one show, however important, sits oddly out of proportion with the rest of the history covered in Painting Culture. Myers’ justification is that exhibitions are not actualizations of pre-existing discourses but are social practices actively involved in discursive production. Dreamings was one of the largest exhibitions of Aboriginal art to tour internationally, and Myers sees it as ‘an objectification and transformation of Aboriginal culture’ (p. 277). As a contributor to and participant in the multitudinous events that framed this exhibition, Myers might be a little biased as to its importance but is able to provide a close and nuanced reading of the inner workings and complex processes involved in the preparation of this show. His insight, coupled with a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the critical reception of the Dreamings exhibition in major publications and periodicals, makes this section one of the most scholarly and interesting of the entire book. In summary, Painting Culture is thought provoking and considered in its analysis of the complex workings of a portion of the artworld; it is not a work of art history or art criticism but, Myers claims, it is ‘a new anthropology of art that treats the category of art in a critical fashion’ (p. 7). In this respect, it is ultimately unsettling: anthropologists rattling around in the closets of art history! Debates have long raged between anthropologists and

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artists/curators concerning the ‘correct’ approach to Aboriginal art, but art historians have been loath to wade into the battle. Rapprochement has recently been suggested via an anthropologically informed art history (see Howard Morphy, Humanities Research 8[1], 2001, pp. 37–50). Again, this is not what Myers has produced. For all the faults Myers sees with the art world, its networks of dealers and the market regulation (or lack thereof), his concerns lie with questions of ‘how’ rather than ‘why’. By tracing the development of a specific style, medium, and location (‘dot painting’, acrylic, Western Desert), Myers analyses how these objects were made into ‘high art’. He states that his book ‘is an attempt to understand exactly what happened and how it happened. How did acrylic painting come to be a valued, meaningful signifying practice?’ (p. 7). In this respect, this is important work and the first consolidated effort to comprehend this history. However, Myers remains ultimately uncritical of the implied project his work examines; his anthropology is not informed by art history. It is as though he views the making of ‘high art’ – the move from ethnographic object to tourist art to high art – as progress. The wonderful exhibition Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2000, described in the closing chapters of the book, seems to become the pinnacle achievement of a movement in decline. Certainly, there is much to celebrate and learn in Aboriginal art, recent arguments regarding ‘post-history’ notwithstanding. As Myers sagely observes, ‘For the formal construction of these paintings to become intelligible communication for white Australians, then, some local art history – ethnographic and historical understanding – is needed’ (p. 310). As one of the few people working on Aboriginal art with any great knowledge of indigenous culture and language, Myers delivers his ‘local art history’ in tantalizingly small doses. Reviewed by Susan Lowish Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University email: [email protected]

Michael Newman, Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left (Merlin Press/Monthly Review Press/Fernwood Publishing, 2002) Ralph Miliband was a remarkable figure, independent socialist, writer and editor of Socialist Register. Famous for combat with Nicos Poulantzas, in the days of our youth, he left us wonderful books including Parliamentary Socialism (1961) and The State in Capitalist Society (1969). Looking back through my own correspondence, and remembering occasional encounters with him, I have the distinct image of a sharp, literate, eloquent man who carried his independence proudly, as a matter of faith. Reading Michael Newman’s fine biography confirmed my memories of Ralph Miliband, but it

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also filled them out. This is a fine and important book about the life and times, ideas and politics of a radical torchbearer. Miliband was born in 1924 in Brussels, and died in London in 1994. The events of world history took him to England where, self-made, he came to be seen as the successor of Harold Laski. The mix of Marxism and politics was similar, yet distinct. Like Laski, he came to work the transatlantic axis. His connections with the Monthly Review folks were lifelong; his special soulmate in the earlier days was C. Wright Mills. He was a Marxist, but never a communist, a pioneering critic of labourism who nevertheless veered closer to left labour, and to Tony Benn, later in life. Miliband took an independent path in the division between the two generations of New Left Review. He opposed the original merger of New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review, took a distance from Trotskyism and later from Althusserianism. There is nevertheless a sense in which he anticipated the position that New Left Review still inhabits today. In his own time, Miliband’s was a kind of non-party Marxism which centred on politics, rather than culture or political economy, and sustained hopes of both the Communist Party, early, and the left of the Labour Party, later on. Socialist Register began in 1964, edited together with John Saville, later with Marcel Liebman and Leo Panitch. It is still, in a sense, Miliband’s most enduring monument. For those who do not know it, or came later, the best advice is likely still to go to the library, look it up, and take a cut lunch. For to revisit The Socialist Register is also to revisit the history of parts of the British and associated Left. Miliband’s students included Australians such as Winton Higgins, who wrote eloquently on the Australian left in the 1974 Register. Ten years after, when Australian Labor was just opening its long decade, the great transformation, I wrote to Miliband to ask if he would like a sequel. My essay, ‘The Australian Left – Beyond Labourism?’, appeared in the 1985/6 Register. None of this, nor my subsequent work on the critique of Australian labourism, would have been possible without Miliband’s example. Miliband was entirely open with me editorially, as open as he was honest when I then, perhaps foolishly, asked his views of my decidedly antiDeutscher book Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Transition to Socialism. He told me in no uncertain terms what he thought of the book. As Newman observes, Marcel Liebman offered a strikingly similar response to Miliband’s Parliamentary Socialism, criticizing it less for what it said than for its silence (in my case, on the transition itself, beyond or after Trotskyism). And then our correspondence went on. He spoke his mind, but was generous of spirit, and keen to keep moving. I suspect, on reading Newman’s book, that the strength of his criticism of my critique was also, in a sense, self-critical. For even if we were able, intellectually, to shift Bolshevism’s attraction, we were unable to develop better ways, in those days still referred to as third ways. The State in Capitalist Society helped legitimate the period need to discuss politics; if it did not inform Franco-German state theory substantially,

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it nevertheless enabled all that to happen. Miliband was, in fact, supportive of Poulantzas, though preferring Fascism and Dictatorship to the earlier Political Power and Social Classes. Classes in Contemporary Capitalism was more directly influential on period debate; and the final instalment, State, Power, Socialism, most poignant of all. Miliband, meantime, had escaped from the London School of Economics to Leeds, where he became friendly with the Baumans. More books followed, most notably Marxism and Politics. Now Miliband began commuting to Brandeis, and to City University in New York, and to Toronto, where his influence on North American political sociologists in the making was substantial. But the process was wearing, taxing, and he was slowing down. My clearest recollection of Ralph is of his visit to Australia in 1990, for the Socialist Scholars Conference. His public presentations were witty, sharp and strong. This was, more, a personally significant moment for me. I remember, in that moment of our lives, two visitors from distant lands who came into our home and who were full of affection for our children, then still small. The other was Cornelius Castoriadis. Ralph Miliband’s letters to me in this period always close with a hug for the kids. He was an important figure, but more, he was a good man. Michael Newman’s book should be widely read. As Newman has written biographies of Laski and Miliband so well, perhaps he might now contemplate adding a biography of Paul Hirst to his achievements. We are so much the less for their loss. Reviewed by Peter Beilharz Sociology, La Trobe University email: [email protected]