Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-txr5j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-24T05:23:15.650Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Postmodern Melancholia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Patricia Ewick
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In his presidential address to the Law and Society Association, Joel Handler describes recent changes in the character of social protest and the scholarship that seeks to understand these resistant practices. In his description, Handler depicts a world in which all that was once collective and effectual is now fragmented and futile. Not that long ago, he suggests, we had real (ideological/class-based) social movements and vital communities that were documented by scholars in optimistic stories of resistance and protest. But time passed and we became postmodernized: destabilized and uncertain, ironic and listless. Where once we challenged oppression and power en masse to the flourish of trumpets, now we are just so many flatulent individuals.

Type
Comments on Presidential Address
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , 1992 , pp. 755 - 763
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by The Law and Society Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I would like to thank Joel Handler, Susan Silbey, and Marc Steinberg for their comments on this essay.

References

De Certeau, Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.Google Scholar
Dreyfus, Hubert L., & Rabinow, Paul (1983) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ewick, Patricia, & Silbey, Susan (1992) “Conformity, Contestation, and Resistance: An Account of Legal Consciousness,” 26 New England Law Rev. 731.Google Scholar
Fantasia, Rick (1988) Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Gordon, C., New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Gusfield, Joseph (1981) “Social Movements and Social Change: Perspectives of Linearity and Fluidity,” 4 Research in Social Movements, Conflict & Change 317.Google Scholar
Handler, Joel F. (1992) “Postmodernism, Protest, and the New Social Movements,” 26 Law & Society Rev. 697.Google Scholar
Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hunt, Alan (1990) “Rights and Social Movements: Counter-hegemonic Strategies,” 17 J. of Law & Society 309.Google Scholar
Jameson, Frederic (1984) “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” 146 New Left Rev. 53.Google Scholar
Korstad, Bob (1980) “Those Who Were not Afraid: Winston-Salem, 1943,” in Miller, M., ed., Working Lives: The Southern Exposure History of Labor in the South. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Marshall, Gordon (1983) “Some Remarks on the Study of Working-Class Consciousness,” 12 Politics & Society 263.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Timothy (1990) “Everyday Metaphors of Power,” 19 Theory & Society 545.Google Scholar
Scott, James C. (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Simon, Jonathan (1988) “The Ideological Effects of Actuarial Practices,” 22 Law & Society Rev. 771.Google Scholar
Tilly, Charles (1991) “Domination, Resistance, Compliance … Discourse,” 6 Sociological Forum 593.Google Scholar
White, Lucie (1990) “Subordination, Rhetorical Survival Skills and Sunday Shoes: Notes on the Hearing of Mrs. G.,” 38 Buffalo Law Rev. 1.Google Scholar