of culture is allied with a more general position variously labeled poststructu-
ralist, postpositivist, or postmodernist. No general explanations are possible;
there can be no general theory of ideas, sociological or otherwise. Yet para-
doxically, postmodernism is itself a general theory of ideas. The theory has
been accumulating in intellectual networks for several generations. One stream
began in the phenomenological movement searching for the essences of con-
sciousness, broadened by Husserl into a crisis of European science and by
Heidegger into a crisis of lived meaning. Another stream came from Saussure’s
semiotics of language structure via formalist literary theory and Lévi-Strauss’s
search for the codes underlying every item of society and culture. Wittgenste-
inian analytical philosophy was eventually levied for contributions, yielding
the argument that thought has fragmented into a plurality of language games.
Popularizing the whole movement was the fusion with Marxism and Freudi-
anism widespread among French intellectuals after 1960; then in a twist which
snatched intellectual victory from political defeat came the shift to post-Marx-
ism, spearheaded by disillusioned activists who turned the Marxian technique
of ideological unveiling (and the allied technique of Freudian unveiling) against
those grand narratives themselves.
These sets of overlapping movements have constituted a theory of ideas,
converging on its reflexivity and its rejection of any fixed standpoint from
which an explanation might be made. At the same time, postmodernism is
itself an explanation. A good deal of its explanatory stance runs parallel to,
or even derives from, the branch of sociology studying the social production
of ideas. In Mannheim’s and Scheler’s generation this lineage was called the
sociology of knowledge; around 1960 it became the research field of sociology
of science, studying scientists’ networks, publications, and careers; in the late
1970s it was deepened by micro-sociological ethnographers of everyday life
into laboratory studies of the local social construction of scientific knowledge,
and theorized by neo-Durkheimians such as David Bloor and the Edinburgh
school. The widespread poststructuralist notion that the world is made up
of arbitrary oppositions has its roots in classical sociology: Saussure was
influenced by Durkheim’s sociology of ideas, and by a different route the
poststructuralists took over the theme of Lévi-Strauss (a pupil of Durkheim’s
nephew Marcel Mauss) of a binary code of oppositions, while repudiating the
specifics of structuralist theory. Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, which was the
paradigm for studying the local production of knowledge in scientific labora-
tories, comes from the same lineage of Husserlian phenomenology which in
another network branch produced Derrida.^3
Postmodernists radicalize the sociology of ideas in repudiating the possibil-
ity of general explanation, including the causal and dynamic principles of
Marx, Durkheim, or Lévi-Strauss. Unmasking is turned back against itself.
Introduction^ •^11