Ideas cannot be explained by the social because nothing can be explained by
anything, most centrally because the very fixing of thing-like boundaries is
itself undermined by the unmasking. To turn reflexivity against itself in this
way in some respects recapitulates previous stances of philosophical skepticism
(such as the Pyrrhonian skeptics of the Hellenistic/Roman period); although
postmodernism differs from Pyrrhonian quietism because it has acquired an
aggressively moralizing and polemical stance in its alliances with a branch of
radical feminists, gay liberation theorists, and ethnic/racial insurgents. Dissolv-
ing boundaries serves to attack privilege and to hold out the possibility of
reconstructing social categories (if only provisionally and temporarily) in dras-
tically different ways. On the most general theoretical level, we ought to
recognize that postmodernism here is Durkheim’s social determinism of cate-
gories radicalized into a fluid future from which his evolutionary directionality
has been pulled out; it is Marx’s sociology of ideologies cut adrift from his
directionality of modes of production into a condition of permanent epistemo-
logical revolution.
One does not have to repudiate a general sociological understanding of the
dynamics of historical paths in order to see that Durkheimian or Marxian
unilinear evolutionism is too restrictive. To recognize that social beings are not
thing-like does not commit us to holding that the processes which they are
have no structure and no causal contours.
The topic of this book is a sociology of philosophies, which is to say the
abstract conceptions produced by networks of specialized intellectuals turned
inward upon their own arguments. This network displays definite social dy-
namics over the expanse of world history. This topic is not the same thing as
the production of popular culture, such as the advertising, pop stars, tourist
industry, personal apparel, electronic networks, and their multiplex intercom-
binations that make up the topics for postmodernist sociology of culture. There
remains a distinction between intellectual networks and these commercial
marketplaces, even today, and the distinction was even sharper at most times
in past history. Postmodernist thinkers, like other intellectuals before them, live
in a region of academic discourse that is generally unrecognized by most people
outside their network. The generalized rhetoric of postmodernist critique tends
to hold illegitimate the drawing of any analytical boundaries; but this is mere
assertion.
One may claim that the personal is political, and that there is no rigid
separation between what intellectuals do and the economic, political, ethnic,
and gendered relations of the surrounding historical era. But the level at which
such statements are true cannot be fixed in advance of research on the way
intellectual networks operate. The personal is political, but the politics of
intellectual practice, within the inwardly focused network of specialists, is not
12 •^ Introduction