Postmodernism and Education

Different Voices, Different Worlds

Richard Edwards, Robin Usher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134851164
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this book, the authors explore and clarify the nature of postmodernism and provide a detailed introduction to key writers in the field such as Lacan Derrida Foucault Lyotard They examine the impact of this thinking upon contemporary theory and practice of education, concentrating particularly upon how postmodernist ideas challenge existing concepts, structures and hierarchies.

1
POSTMODERNISM, POSTMODERNITY AND THE POSTMODERN MOMENT

Postmodernism: does it exist at all and, if so, what does it mean? Is it a concept or practice, a matter of local style or a whole new period or economic phase? What are its forms, effects, place?

(Foster 1985:ix)

The postmodern moment is an awareness of being within a way of thinking. The speaker (subject) cannot absolutely name the terms of that moment.

(Marshall 1992:3)

There is sense here, but not safe sense. Sense made here is limited, local, provisional and always critical. Self-critical. That is sense within the postmodern moment. That is the postmodern.

(Marshall 1992:2)

LOCATING THE POSTMODERN

Although it is customary to define what one is writing about, in the case of ‘postmodernism’ this is neither entirely possible nor entirely desirable. As Foster in the quote above makes clear there are many questions arising from and about postmodernism, postmodernity and the postmodern but no one simple answer or definition. The attempt to provide a definitive conceptualisation continues to spawn an extensive literature (e.g. Bauman 1992, Best and Kellner 1991, Boyne and Rattansi 1990, Connor 1989, Crook et al. 1992, Featherstone 1991, Foster 1985, Harvey 1991, Lash 1990, Lyotard 1984, Rosenau 1992, Seidman and Wagner 1992, Smart 1992, Wakefield 1990). This is a literature encompassing many areas and covering a variety of academic disciplines and cultural practices; for example, literature, music, art, architecture, the media, advertising, photography and cinema. Given the widespread impact of the postmodern this is appropriate enough, but it is of limited help if the task is seen as one of arriving at a clear definition.

At the same time, however, as Marshall (1992) implies in the quotes above, the postmodern is probably not something that is nameable anyhow—or at least if it is, only partially so. Perhaps, then, all we can say with any degree of safety is what it is not. Certainly, it is not a term that designates a systematic theory or comprehensive philosophy. Neither does it refer to a ‘system’ of ideas or concepts in the conventional sense, nor is it the name denoting a unified social or cultural movement. All that one can say is that it is complex and multiform, resisting reductive and simplistic explanation. As Smart puts it:

The postmodern problematic has been invoked to distinguish an historical period, an aesthetic style, and a change in the condition of knowledge; to conceptualise difference—a distinctive form beyond the modern—as well as similarity—a variant of the modern or its limit form; and to describe affirmative or reactionary and critical or progressive discourses and movements.

(Smart 1992:164)

What Smart is suggesting, and what we perhaps can say positively, is that the postmodern is, at the very least, a contested terrain.

There is a sense, anyhow, in which it is impossible to fully define the postmodern since the very attempt to do so confers upon it a status and identity which it must necessarily oppose. In other words, any attempt at definition must lead to paradox since it is to totalise, to provide a single unified explanation of that which sets its face against totalisation. Marshall’s comment implies that there is sense within the postmodern—we can understand it—but any understanding is never ‘safe’—it cannot be fully pinned down, universalised or domesticated. As soon as we say ‘the postmodern is’ we give it a fixed and definitive ontology and identity and as Nicholson points out:

Postmodernism must reject a description of itself as embodying a set of timeless ideals contrary to those of modernism; it must insist on being recognised as a set of viewpoints of a time, justifiable only within its own time.

(Nicholson 1990:11)

To talk about postmodernity, postmodernism or the postmodern is not therefore to designate some fixed and systematic ‘thing’. Rather, it is to use a loose umbrella term under whose broad cover can be encompassed at one and the same time a condition, a set of practices, a cultural discourse, an attitude and a mode of analysis. Lovlie (1992:120) advocates using ‘postmodernism’ as an index term for a position that is ‘different’ from traditional ones—‘a different position which in fact makes difference itself its point of view’.

In what follows we do not intend or pretend to sift through the various strands of the existing literature on postmodernism and the postmodern with a view to presenting a definitive perspective. Such an enterprise would be inconsistent with an important ‘message’ of the postmodern, that knowledge cannot be systematised or totalised into a singular, all-encompassing framework. In this chapter we shall attempt to provide a broad overview of certain key strands in the on-going debate about the modern and the postmodern, and from this examine the position of education; this will then form a backdrop for the more elaborated discussions that follow in later chapters.

Featherstone (1991) suggests that instead of trying to construct a single, all-encompassing definition it is more useful to look at the family of terms such as ‘postmodernity’, ‘postmodernisation’, ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postmodern’. ‘Modernity’, a distinct period or epoch of historical development, has its origins in the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century which, in contrast to the apparent stability of antiquity or the ‘premodern’, marked the inauguration of the economic and socio-cultural disruptions which founded industrial capitalism and the nation-state. Postmodernity suggests something ‘after’ modernity, or perhaps something that has replaced it. Featherstone argues that there has occurred ‘an epochal shift or break from modernity involving the emergence of a new social totality with its own distinct organising principles’ (1991:3). Here postmodernity refers to a new epoch, a new socio-economic order, associated with the notion of a post-culture, ‘post-industrial’ society and the changes produced by information technology, particularly in the sphere of global communications and media. It is an epoch of post-Fordism or ‘flexible specialisation’ (see Harvey 1991 and Murray 1989) where human lives are being reshaped, and in many cases disrupted, by new forces and desires.

‘Modernisation’ refers more specifically to the impact of economic development on social structures based upon ‘industrialisation, the growth of science and technology, the modern state, the capitalist world market, urbanisation and other infrastructural elements’ (Featherstone 1991:6). Alongside these developments have come cultural changes such as secularisation, the emphasis on self and personal growth, and the growing importance of electronic media and information technology. Postmodernisation is associated with the growth of service sector employment and ‘postindustrial’ social formations. The modern centres of production—the factory and large-scale manufacturing enterprise—are replaced in importance by centres of consumption—business and finacial services, shopping malls, entertainment centres and theme parks. Emerging from this development is a breakdown of modern, production-oriented identity as the cultural sphere becomes overloaded with consumption possibilities of which modern sensibilities can no longer make sense.

One aspect which many writers focus on is the question of the continuity between modernisation and postmodernisation, modernity and postmodernity. Featherstone’s analysis of ‘postmodernity’ suggests that there is a ‘break’ from modernity to postmodernity, with the latter qualitatively different from the former, and that this break is the condition of a new and distinct ‘social totality’. However, the notion that postmodernity represents a break with modernity is itself contentious. Other writers (e.g. Harvey 1991, Jameson 1984) have therefore argued that postmodernity is a continuation of modernity.

Lyotard (1984) has argued that it is possible to distinguish between the modern and the postmodern. However, the distinction is characterised primarily by changes in metaphysical forms, narratives of legitimacy and the organisation of knowledge. Foucault (1986) does not think in terms of epochal or periodic changes but rather sees modernity and postmodernity as oppositional attitudes which can be and indeed always are present in any epoch or period. Couzens Hoy (1988) points out that the very notion of periodisation is modernist. In defining and delineating a period through its characteristics, one has already moved beyond it. The present cannot therefore understand itself as a period other than through a modernist ‘metabelief that it is another period. It is characteristically postmodern to challenge this ‘by disrupting the modernist assumption that periods are selfcontained unities or coherent wholes clearly individuated from one another’ (1988:13). Postmodern thought is happy to use the tools of modernity—for example, the prefix ‘post’ even though this implies an acceptance of periodisation—but does so ‘rhetorically to subvert the progressivist assumption that modernity is the unequivocal telos of history’ (1988:14).

Progressivism and its consequent teleology are key features of modernity. Smart refers to modernity’s faith in rationality and science. This faith is allied to the strong conviction of the spread of rationality in the conduct of human affairs and a progressive growth in scientific knowledge that:

uncovers the natural order of things, making possible the construction of technologies through which control might be exercised over the development of events… A conception of inexorable progress, from the past through to the present and on into the future, has been a distinctive feature of modern Western civilisation.

(Smart 1992:62)

The faith in rationality and science with its promise of inevitable progress in the task of human betterment is perhaps the feature of modernity which has come under most significant attack. Debates within modernity e.g. that between Marxism and liberalism over the course of science-dictated progress have come under a deeper epistemological and metaphysical questioning. Human progress through the progress of scientific knowledge is one of those ‘metanarratives’ or ‘grand narratives’, the higher-order metaphysical forms of legitimation which, according to Lyotard (1984), are marked out as subject to ‘incredulity’ in postmodernity. Consequently, the notion of inevitable progress has been thrown into doubt, rendered ‘incredible’, by the continuation of want, disease, famine, destruction and the recognition of the ecological costs of ‘development’. Both Lyotard (1992) and Bauman (1992) argue that the humanising and progressive mission of modernity revealed its bankruptcy in the Holocaust. For them the Holocaust, rather than denying, actually represents the triumph of rationality and the application of scientific principles and knowledge to the ‘efficient conduct of human affairs’.

In postmodernity, the breakdown of the faith in science and rationality has further ramifications and associations. We witness a questioning of the scientific attitude, a denial of modernist scientificity with its emphasis on the universal efficacy of scientific method and of the stance of objectivity and value-neutrality in the making of knowledge-claims. As Lather (1992:90) puts it: ‘foregrounded as an ideological ruse, the claim to value-neutrality is held to delimit our concept of science and obscure and occlude its own particularity and interest’. The epistemological stance which sees scientific method as producing value-free and therefore ‘true’ knowledge is no longer so readily accepted. There is an increasing recognition that all knowledge-claims are partial, local and specific rather than universal and ahistorical, and that they are always imbued with power and normative interests—indeed that what characterises modernity is precisely the concealing of the partiality and rootedness of knowledge-claims in the cloak of universality and valueneutrality. Thus in postmodernity there is a rejection of universal and transcendental foundations of knowledge and thought, and a heightened awareness of the significance of language, discourse and socio-cultural locatedness in the making of any knowledge-claim.

In effect, in the condition of postmodernity, there is a questioning of the modernist belief in a legitimate and hence legitimating centre upon which beliefs and actions can be grounded. Science and the faith in inevitable progress provided such a centre, an ‘authorising’ position from which control could be exerted and socio-cultural hierarchies legitimated through a process of ‘mastery’. With the questioning of the legitimacy of mastery and the accompanying ‘decentring’ of knowledge, modernist certainty is undermined with consequent uncertainty pervading thought and action. Postmodernity, then, describes a world where people have to make their way without fixed referents and traditional anchoring points. It is a world of rapid change, of bewildering instability, where knowledge is constantly changing and meaning ‘floats’ without its traditional teleological fixing in foundational knowledge and the belief in inevitable human progress. But the significant thing is that in postmodernity uncertainty, the lack of a centre and the floating of meaning are understood as phenomena to be celebrated rather than regretted. In postmodernity, it is complexity, a myriad of meanings, rather than profundity, the one deep meaning, which is the norm (see Couzens Hoy 1988).

The lack of certainty is closely associated with the ‘hypercommodification’ (Crook et al., 1992) that is a characteristic of the social formation in postmodernity. Here, the consumer and consumerism increasingly reign supreme. Meanings that felt comfortable are no longer so. The communication/media ‘revolution’ means that people are engulfed by ‘information’ to the extent where the distinction between reality and the word/image which portrays it breaks down into a condition of hyperreality (Baudrillard 1988). Words, images and the information they convey become open to multiple interpretations, mirroring multiperspectival knowledge and the breakdown of ‘objectivity’, and where, in a condition of semiotic promiscuity (or ‘radical semiurgy’ as Baudrillard puts it), no single, unified, coherent grid of ‘common sense’ can be applied. Baudrillard’s hyperreality is a world of constantly proliferating signs or ‘simulacra’ which come to replace reality, creating new forms of experience and hence subjectivity in the process. Featherstone argues that in this situation the subject of postmodernity is best understood as:

the ideal-type channel-hopping MTV viewer who flips through different images at such speed that she/he is unable to chain the signifiers together into a meaningful narrative, he/she merely enjoys the multiphrenic intensities and sensations of the surface of the images.

(Featherstone 1991:5)

In other words, in postmodernity, sensibilities are attuned to the pleasure of constant and new experiencing, a desire which is its own end, unsubordinated to and therefore unconstrained by a hierarchy of foundational and transcendental reason and values. Experiencing becomes its own justification. In postmodernity the cultivation of desire threatens and to some extent replaces modernity’s cultivation of reason. There is an emphasis on:

the tendencies in consumer culture which favour the aestheticisation of life, the assumption that the aesthetic life is the ethically good life and that there is no human nature or true self, with the goal of life an endless pursuit of new experiences, values and vocabularies.

(Featherstone 1991:126)

We would add that this aestheticisation does not simply refer to elite ‘high’ culture since postmodernity is characterised, largely through the influence of the media, by a blurring of boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ or popular culture. The pursuit of new experience is not confined to the realm of ‘good taste’ but is part of the constant making and re-making of a ‘lifestyle’ where transcendental standards of good taste and aesthetic judgement no longer possess the power they held in modernity. The ‘tradition’ of high culture itself becomes merely a part of a culture of postmodernism, part of the emporium of styles to be promiscuously dipped into (Crook et al. 1992). It becomes yet another experience to be sampled—neither intrinsically better nor worse. The postmodern pursuit of experience has been likened to ‘cruising’ (Turner 1993), a notion perhaps best epitomised by the comment of Baudrillard (1990:168) that ‘the further you travel the more clearly you realise that the journey is all that matters’.

The archetypal person of modernity also experiences a sense of the ‘contingency of the present’, a sense of discontinuity and fragmentation. However, in modernity there is still an attempt to make sense of the socio-cultural space occupied. Modernity is characterised by a hermeneutic search for an underlying and unifying truth and certainty that can render the world, experiences and events (including the self and its experiences) coherent and meaningful. Postmodernity on the other hand ‘is marked by a view of the human world as irreducibly and irrevocably pluralistic, split into a multitude of sovereign units and sites of authority, with no horizontal or vertical order, either in actuality or in potency’ (Bauman 1992:35). The parallel and related search for a ‘true’ or authentic self gives way to an aestheticisation of everyday life in a ‘playfulness’ where identity is formed by a constantly unfolding desire expressed through choices of lifestyle. Thus in postmodernity, the decentring of knowledge is paralleled by the decentring of the subject. The unified subject of modern humanism as an assumed grounding for identity and action is reconceived as a multiple subjectivity constituted (and reconstituted) through the acquisition of multiple meanings.

We therefore need to recognise that terms like ‘postmodernity’ and ‘postmodernism’ are separable and should not be used interchangeably. Hutcheon (1989) argues that confusion has arisen because postmodernism—the cultural expression of postmodernity—has been conflated with postmodernity—a socio-economic ‘condition’. For Lovlie (1992:120) ‘postmodernism is one voice in the many-faceted discourse of (post)modern times’. ‘Postmodernism’ according to Featherstone (1991:8) commonly refers to ‘fundamental cultural changes as well as the possible expansion of the significance of culture in contemporary Western societies’. He argues that it is a term appropriately applied ‘to a wide range of artistic practices and social science and humanities disciplines because it directs our attention to changes taking place in contemporary culture’ (1991:11). One important reference, then, is to the state of contemporary cultural trends, the contemporary state of culture in its broadest sense, and to the increasing contemporary emphasis upon the ‘cultural’ to the extent where it is possible to talk of a complete blurring of the ‘culture-society’ boundary.

The significant feature of postmodernism is the breaking down of the hierarchical barriers between high and popular culture, art and everyday life leading to ‘a stylistic promiscuity favouring eclecticism and the mixing of codes; parody, pastiche and irony; a playfulness and the celebration of the surface depthlessness of culture’ (Featherstone 1991:7). The emphasis in postmodernism on promiscuity’, ‘surface’, ‘play’, ‘depthlessness’, makes it easy to caricature and dismiss as a trendy fad manufactured by intellectuals and cultural critics fearing for their livelihoods or who, because of boredom, seek something new, playful and transgressive. We do not sympathise with this position. Rather, we would argue that postmodernism should be taken seriously (although perhaps in a playful way!) because it directs our attention to the centrality of culture in the changes taking place at all levels—from the everyday practices and experiences of different social groups to more ‘rarefied’ artistic, intellectual and academic activities.

Postmodernism therefore signifies the changes that are taking place in the production, circulation and consumption of culture. However, there are significant theoretical differences over the nature and origins of postmodernism. Sociologists and others (e.g. Beck 1993, Crook et al. 1992, Giddens 1993, Harvey 1991, Jameson 1984) conduct a fierce debate about how these changes are to be understood—as examples of the most recent development of modernity,‘high’ modernity or reflexive modernity, as a qualitative, epochal break from modernity to postmodernity or the continuation of modernity to the extremes of its own logic where it ruptures and becomes postmodernity. All these positions exemplify the nature of postmodernism as a contested terrain, marking our uncertainty as to how we should properly characterise the times we live in. Yet, despite this uncertainty, there are still, as Marshall (1992) points out, enough glimpses of the postmodern moment or condition in our everyday lives for it to be something which is not as alien and incomprehensible as those who seek to caricature or dismiss postmodernism would make it out to be.

In postmodernism, cultural practices and media are seen as having an unprecedented impact and a central role in framing sensibilities and identities. We have noted the aestheticisation of everyday life as the cultural spreads throughout the social formation. This centrality signals a new cultural paradigm and in this sense postmodernism does indeed break with the past in representing both a changed culture, a change in the relationship between the cultural and other dimensions of social life and a change in the very way in which the place of the cultural is understood.

Lash (1990) identifies a number of components of the postmodernist cultural paradigm. He argues that postmodernism breaks with modernism in that the latter is a process of cultural differentiation producing clearly defined boundaries of practice and meaning whilst postmodernism on the other hand is a process of ‘de-differentiation’ where boundaries break down. Consequently different cultural spheres lose their autonomy, as ‘the aesthetic realm begins to colonise both theoretical and moral-political spheres’ (Lash 1990:11). The breakdown in the distinction between high and popular culture marks a different relationship between consumers/ audience and producers/artists. The cultural producer is no longer the autonomous ‘genius’, the legislator of ‘good taste’, whilst the the consumer now has the opportu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: POSTMODERNISM, POSTMODERNITY AND THE POSTMODERN MOMENT
• 2: SPEAKING ‘TRUTHFULLY’
• 3: KNOWING ONESELF
• 4: SUBJECT DISCIPLINES AND DISCIPLINING SUBJECTS
• 5: EXAMINING THE CASE
• 6: THE ‘END’ OF THE EDUCATIONAL PROJECT
• 7: EDUCATION AND TEXTUALITY
• 8: TELLING STORIES
• 9: THE END OF THE STORY
• 10: THE CULTIVATION OF DESIRE
• 11: CATCHING THE (LAST) POST
• REFERENCES