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A potted guide

By Margaret Sankey - posted Monday, 29 May 2006


The “postmodern” is with us, whether we like it or not, and in more ways than one.

The word “postmodern” has been bandied about in recent times and used by Prime Minister Howard as a handy catchall to refer pejoratively to the methodologies used in English literature teaching in some high schools in Australia.

What disturbs particularly in this so-called debate is that nothing is in reality being debated and that “postmodern” is simply used as a term of abuse. Yet postmodernism, in a non-pejorative sense, would seem to be quite a useful term to describe the context in which the high school syllabus is framed, the one in which we live.

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The question then becomes whether the high-school syllabus is an appropriate one for educating the youth of today, equipping them with the information and analytical tools to take their places in the (post)modern world.

Some historical contextualisation is in order here: to understand what the postmodern is we need to understand what it is defined against - the modern.

The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in his book La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, published in 1979, (translated into English in 1985, The Postmodern Condition: A Report of Knowledge,) attempted to come to grips with, and theorise from a philosophical standpoint, a phenomenon which on and off had been licking around the edges of the modern for more than a century: in short the critique of the modernist project.

The “modern”, in the context of the history of ideas, refers to the beginning of the modern era, defined historically in terms of the paradigmatic shift inaugurated in Europe by the Renaissance and the European scientific revolution, and associated in the 17th century with the names of Francis Bacon, with his appeal to experience, and René Descartes, with his emphasis on individual reason as the path to truth.

Modernism, rooted in Renaissance humanism and reacting against the dogmatic authoritarianism of the Roman Catholic Church is characterised by the understanding that man is the measure of all things and that by reasoning he could come to understand the functioning of the universe, conceived in terms of universally true physical laws.

Thus was born the modernist age, characterised by the liberal humanist approach, the idea of progress and the beginning of capitalism. The cyclical time of the Middle Ages, the eternal return of the same, was replaced by the arrow of time: the idea that everything was developing towards a better future, continually becoming bigger, faster, larger.

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The scientific laws discovered were harnessed to develop technology capable of acting on and changing the world, to make men, in Descartes’ terms, the “masters and possessors of nature”. The optimistic thinkers of the 18th century Enlightenment explored the new vistas opened up in a world governed by the laws of nature, rather than the unpredictable actions of an impenetrable and inaccessible god, who kept the clockwork world running. Nature was exploited and infinitely exploitable and all that science made possible was good.

Alongside the developing scientific mastery of the world, the vast European project of discovery and colonisation was also taking place.

With Columbus, and probably even earlier, European superiority in the technological area made possible long sea voyages, the visiting of the unknown, non-Christian parts of the world and domination over these countries and peoples through conquest and enslavement, in the name of civilisation, reason and religion.

So the European modernist paradigm was established and the modernist discourse, claiming universalism, trampled on and excluded the non-European other, while at the same time, proclaiming contradictorily, in its most significant formulation in The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the brotherhood of man, freedom and equality.

It is against this “grand narrative”, as Lyotard calls it, that postmodernism can be defined.

Postmodernism is first of all a category to describe critiques and reactions, cultural, political and social, against the central tenets of monolithic modernism.

The word “postmodern” came into common usage relatively late in the piece, and referred to past as well as present reactions to, and critiques of, modernism from the 1960s onwards. Sometimes the term was used pejoratively, but mostly it was used as an attempt to delineate a new kind of Weltanschauung, challenging the modernist paradigm.

It then became current in the 1960s to refer to the approach in many fields of artistic endeavour. It focussed on different things in different places. In the arts, increasing and widespread self-referentiality signalled a lack of confidence in, and a refusal of, the authoritative authorial voice: the Absurdist aesthetic, the French nouveau roman in France can be grouped under the postmodern label.

The shaking of the modernist foundations of our culture and society paved the way for postmodern criticism in the arts and literature and brought into question the dichotomies of high and low culture, high and popular literature, classical and pop art.

Overall, “postmodern” is a term to describe the crisis in representation which has characterised the modern world with increasing urgency since the World War II.

The unassailability of the grand modernist narratives has been becoming increasingly untenable in a world where science and technology have led to wars of a scope unimaginable for the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers, where the dominant voice, given as a universal, comes to be recognised for what it is: the privileged voice of a white European male, affirming itself by excluding those other voices: women, non-Europeans, colonised peoples.

Another branch of the postmodern mix is that of poststructuralism. In France the structuralist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, with its strongholds in anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan) and literary criticism (A. J. Greimas, Roland Barthes) was the last gasp, as it were, of modernism.

Structuralism sought to establish these human and social sciences on a solid scientific basis originating in the linguistic analysis of the Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure. Analysis of the social phenomenon, be it a South American tribe, the unconscious, or a literary text, considered the object as a structure to be studied in terms of the binary oppositions which expressed its meaning. Thus meaning was to be found in the structures of the phenomenon to be examined, rather than in the historical or social context.

Poststructuralism, reacting against the excesses and ultimate sterility of literary structuralism, with its evacuation of the author, history and context, is a particular French manifestation of the postmodern. Michel Foucault demonstrates that language is power and that it is the discursive formations that speak the subject rather than the subject controlling language.

Likewise deconstruction, associated with the names of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, acutely focusses on the crisis in representation, the loss of confidence in the triumphal Enlightment discourse. Language, rather than being referential, can be seen as an infinite regression of the sign, creating a deferral and fragmentation of meaning. Representation becomes, then, a space where other voices can be heard, the black as well as the white, the colonised as well as the coloniser, women as well as men. All languages become legitimate in this pluralised and politicised space of representation.

Whatever we think of it, the fragmented, fractured world of postmodernism with its post-colonialism and poststructuralism, the polyphony of its voices, is the one in which we live.

What lessons can we take from this for English literature teaching in Australian high schools?

During the recent debates, a letter written by a high school English teacher and published in one of the daily newspapers, shed illuminating light on the rationale for the so-called “postmodern” syllabus. She made the point that the English syllabus is now a much more complex beast than it had been a generation ago, and this complexity comes from the attempt to come to grips with the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of the modern world. Where once Shakespeare was taught as a written text only, she said, now students learn to analyse the different stagings of the play. Each production is an interpretation, be it a feminist, post-colonialist, or simply “traditional” one, and unpicking the relationship between these and their relevance to the text needs expert guidance and the honing of students’ analytical skills. It teaches them to understand and evaluate critically the relevance of culture to the world in which they live.

And should we teach students to analyse pop as well as high culture? Of course - in the postmodern world there is no place for right choices of texts, nor for authoritative and authoritarian “right” readings.

This is not, of course, to say that anything goes: that some readings are not more correct and coherent than others in relation to the content of the text being analysed; that some texts are not more rich in meaning than others; that the choice of text in a syllabus should be chosen because it belongs to the traditional canon rather than because it relates to the world of the young reader. It simply means that texts invite a plurality of readings and approaches, and that texts should be chosen for their appropriateness to the student, linking the world he or she knows to the discovery other worlds.

Interpretation is always ideological. To insist on the exclusive teaching of the “canon”, or on one interpretation of a text over the many possible others, is to champion a dogmatic approach that refuses to address our present and harks back to an authoritarian and oppressive past.

It is more constructive then, especially in a debate on education, not to use “postmodern” as a term of abuse, nor as a synonym for incoherency. Whether he likes it or not, Howard is living in the postmodern world, with its uncomfortable lack of certainties. The way forward, both in education and politics, would be to confront our complex world courageously rather than to attempt to return to the reductionist, modernist dichotomies of the 1950s.

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About the Author

Professor Margaret Sankey holds the McCaughey Chair in the Department of French Studies at the University of Sydney.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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