Journal of Social Issues & Humanities, Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2015

ISSN 2345-2633

“Postmodernism”: Is the Contemporary State of

Affairs Correctly Described as ‘Postmodern’?
Davood Taghipour Bazargani, Vahid Noroozi Larsari

Abstract— The present study probes into the controversial issue of postmodernism. More specifically, it is an attempt to answer the
question of whether our era has enough distinctive features to be described as ‘postmodern’. According to some commentators, the
postmodern era is characterized by three features that distinguish it from the modern era: the failure of the Enlightenment project, the
growth of intracommunal ethnic diversity and the ever-growing pace of social, economic and technological change. By a closer inspection
of the contemporary state of affairs, especially from an educational point of view, the researchers tried to answer the above-mentioned
question. At the end of the study, some educational implications and criticisms of postmodernism have been provided.

Index Terms— Postmodernism, Postmodernism Philosophy, Modernism, Educational Implications of Postmodernism, Criticisms of
Postmodernism.

——————————  ——————————

1 INTRODUCTION

P OSTMODERNISM represents a rejection of all ‘totalizing

theories’ (Boyne and Rattansi, 1990:12), ‘incredulity to-
wards metanarratives’ (Lyotard, 1984: xxiv), ‘an interroga-
tion of Western discourse’s desire for certainty and absolutes’
(Sholle, 1992:275). And from this perspective, ‘we see our vi-
sion of the universe turning from the simple, stable one of
Newtonian modernism to the complex, chaotic, finite one of
postmodernism’ (Doll, 1989:243).
Postmodernism is a late-20th-century movement in the arts,
architecture, and criticism that was a departure from modern-
ism. Postmodernism includes skeptical interpretations of cul-
ture, literature, art, philosophy, history, economics, architec-
ture, fiction, and literary criticism. It is often associated with
deconstruction and post-structuralism because its usage as a
term gained significant popularity at the same time as twenti-
eth-century post-structural thought.
The term postmodernism has been applied to a host of move-
ments, many in art, music, and literature, that reacted against
tendencies in the imperialist phase of capitalism called
"modernism," and are typically marked by revival of historical
elements and techniques (Wikipedia).
As an intellectual movement, Postmodernism is highly con-
troversial. It is strongly opposed and rejected by politicians
and by those philosophers who also feel threatened by the loss
of those spurious certainties of the traditional, absolutist view
of human knowledge which seem to offer order and security
to their lives and careers.
It is also a movement which is subject to many different inter-
pretations from those who have advocated it, not least because
it is a perspective which has been applied in many different
intellectual contexts, from philosophy to art and architecture
(Kelly, 2004).
————————————————
Faculty of Letters and Humanities, Islamic Azad University, Rasht
Branch, Rasht, Iran. E-mail: bazargani74@yahoo.com Mobile: +98-
9111389715
M.A in TEFL, Islamic Azad University, Takestan Branch, Qazvin, Iran
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, Takestan Branch,
Qazvin, Iran. Email: v.nowrozi@gmail.com Mobile: +98-9118283949
Oxford dictionary defines postmodernism as “a late 20th-
century style and concept in the arts, architecture, and criti-
cism, which represents a departure from modernism and is
characterized by the self-conscious use of earlier styles and
conventions, a mixing of different artistic styles and media,
and a general distrust of theories”.
According to Dingell & Winch 2008, ‘Postmodernism’ is a
term given to a set of related attitudes to contemporary civili-
zation. The context is the decline of ‘modernism’. Modernism
is said to consist of two principal elements: the functional sep-
aration of different spheres of life and the rise of secular uni-
versalism, or what is sometimes known as the Enlightenment
project (cf. Gray 1995). According to some commentators, the
postmodern era is characterized by three features that distin-
guish it from the modern era: the failure of the Enlightenment
project, the growth of intracommunal ethnic diversity and the
ever-growing pace of social, economic and technological
change. In addition (Bauman 1997), the modern era had an
understandable rationale for functional separation, specifically
the belief that science and the economy needed to be freed
from traditional and religious interference in order to pro-
gress. When, however, unconditional belief in the value of
scientific progress and economic growth declines, as it appears
to have done in contemporary times, functional specialization
appears to be nothing more than an anomic fragmentation of
the unity of human life. This rationale-free fragmentation
brings in its train an increase in the loss of belief in the idea of
a common good. Admittedly a skepticism about the common
good has been around at least since the time of Mill (1974) but
the trends characteristic of postmodernity can be said to have
accentuated it.
2 POSTMODERN PHILOSOPHY
Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical direction which is
critical of the foundational assumptions and universalizing
tendency of Western philosophy.
It emphasizes the importance of power relationships, person-
alization and discourse in the "construction" of truth and

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Journal of Social Issues & Humanities, Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2015
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world views.
Postmodern philosophy is often particularly skeptical about
simple binary oppositions characteristic of structuralism, em-
phasizing the problem of the philosopher cleanly distinguish-
ing knowledge from ignorance, social progress from reversion,
dominance from submission, and presence from absence.
Postmodern philosophy has strong relations with the substan-
tial literature of critical theory.
3 THE 20TH CENTURY
The 20th century can generally be divided into two (unequal)
parts:
- MODERNISM and POST-MODERNISM
Modernism: 1890s~about 1945
Postmodernism: after WWII, after 1968
To have a better picture of postmodernism, it seems necessary
first to look at the main premises of modernism.
4 FUNDAMENTAL PREMISES OF MODERNITY
- Modernism tends to present a fragmented view of human
subjectivity and history, but presents that fragmentation as
something tragic, something to be lamented and mourned as a
loss.
(Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn't lament the idea of frag-
mentation
incoherence, but rather celebrates that.)
- Modernity is fundamentally about order: about rationality
and rationalization, creating order out of chaos.
- The assumption is that creating more rationality is conducive
to creating more order, and that the more ordered a society is,
the better it will function (the more rationally it will function).
- Thus modern societies rely on continually establishing a bi-
nary opposition
between "order" and "disorder," so that they can assert the
superiority of
"order."
- In western culture, then, disorder becomes "the other"—
defined in relation to other binary oppositions. Thus anything
non-white, non-male, non-
heterosexual, non-hygienic, non-rational, (etc.) becomes part
of "disorder,"
and has to be eliminated from the ordered, rational modern
society.
- The ways that modern societies go about creating categories
labeled as
"order" or "disorder" have to do with the effort to achieve sta-
bility.
5 WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?
Postmodernism is the name of a period and at the same time it
is the name of a new discourse, a different rationalism, a style,
a new idea and a philosophy. We can describe this style as
refusing generally acceptable propositions; accepting plural-
ism and disintegration in scientist groups, knowledge
sources and language games; emphasizing and adopting
differences and varieties; not hesitating or feeling afraid of
facing choices that are open to comment ; interpreting the
reality as much as possible (infinite); instead of using a defi-
nite time and place words, trying to understand reality in its
own integrity / autonomy; struggling with the idea that
separates people as soul and body opposing the dominance
of a single absolute reality.
6 RECURRENT IDEAS IN THEORY
(From: Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to
Literary and Cultural Theory. Second Edition. Manchester,
2002)
- Anti-essentialism—many of the notions previously re-
garded as universal and fixed (gender identity, individual
selfhood) are actually fluid and unstable. These are socially
constructed or contingent categories rather than absolute or
essential ones.
- All thinking and investigation is affected by prior ideolog-
ical commitments. There is no disinterested enquiry.
- “Language itself conditions, limits, and predetermines
what we see. Language doesn’t record reality but constructs
it. Meaning in texts is jointly constructed by the reader and
writer.
- “Theorists distrust all totalizing notions” (great books,
human nature)
or Barry sums these ideas up in 5 key points:
- Politics is pervasive
- Language is constitutive
- Truth is provisional
- Meaning is contingent
- Human nature is a myth.
7 MAIN THEMES OF POSTMODERN THEORY
Various main themes of postmodern theory can be seen to
grow out of these key ideas:
- The denial of a universal, objective and reliable founda-
tion for knowledge
- The denial of science as the exemplar of rationality and
true knowledge
- The denial of the neutrality of rationality and knowledge;
rather they are viewed as inherently political and social
- The denial of the transparency of language
- The denial of a stable, coherent self
- A distrust of the efficacy of received narratives and insti-
tutions.
8 SEVEN POSTMODERN TRENDS
- A celebration of change and crisis
Whereas for modernism change and crisis need to be dealt
with and managed in such a way as to return to stability,
postmodernism does not view rapid changes and attendant
crises as aberrations. Rather, they characterize and confirm the
arrival of a post-industrial or information society. Such a soci-
ety has as a prime feature a feeling of living at the cross-roads
of crisis, one which continually encourages people to redefine
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themselves, to adopt a different identity.
- A loss of confidence in and incredulity towards existing
narratives and institutions
According to Burbules, the crucial feature of postmodernist
arguments is that they represent a novel type of critique in the
intellectual landscape. This novel critique does not seek to
reject, deny or refute modernism and replace it with some-
thing else. Rather, postmodernism leads us to a position of
incredulity towards modernism.
Lyotard's plea that we should reject the 'grand narratives'
(that is, universal theories) of Western culture because they
have now lost all their credibility seems to sum up the ethos of
postmodernism.
- An emphasis on difference, diversity, and fragmentation
of identity
Burbules claims that one of the social circumstances fuel-
ling incredulity towards modernism is awareness of the ‘radi-
cal diversity and potential incommensurability of the different
cultural forms of life that sustain groups and individuals’.
Amongst the supposed social circumstances that postmodern-
ists point to as creating this awareness are:
A. a universal melting of identities
B. de-regulation and privatization of identity-formation
processes
C. dispersal of authorities
D. polyphony of value-messages.
The result of all these trends is a growing feeling of frag-
mentariness and dislocation in peoples’ lives.
- A focus on the particular and the local
As against the modernist epistemological predilection for
generality and universality, postmodernism celebrates the
particular and the local.
- A recognition of the political and social dimensions of
knowledge
Postmodernism rejects the modernist view that knowledge
stands aloof from the corrupting influence of power. For
postmodernism, all knowledge claims are partial in one way
or another. This position questions the very heart of the tradi-
tional disciplines. Knowledge is regarded as culturally and
socially shaped, reflecting power relations as much as it does
any notion of objective truths.
Such thinking obviously poses major challenges for educa-
tors since, according to postmodernism, this influence of pow-
er over knowledge is not eliminable.
- Overcoming dualisms – organic rather than binary logic
Postmodernism has as a major theme the rejection of all
claims to compartmentalize human thought and endeavor into
independent categories.
Pointing to what it sees as the slippage and non-
transparency of language, postmodernism is concerned that
binary polarities conceal as much as they reveal.
Influenced by thinkers such as Dewey, the emerging para-
digm of learning seeks to overcome dualisms in general. It has
a holistic, integrative emphasis that aims to avoid other dual-
isms common in educational writing such as mind/body,
thought/action, pure/applied, education/training, intrin-
sic/instrumental, internal/external, learner/world, knowing
91
that/knowing how, and process/product.
- A major focus on the power of discourse.
Postmodernists typically focus on the role of language in
shaping knowing and experiencing, but there is significant
disagreement about the preferred account of this.
Three different positions:
1. All is language (naive discursivism).
2. All that we can know or experience is language.
3. All that we can know or experience is via language, i.e.
we can never be sure of the accuracy of our knowledge and
experience of the world which is inevitably through the inter-
mediary of language
9 IS THE CONTEMPORARY STATE OF AFFAIRS
CORRECTLY DESCRIBED AS ‘POSTMODERN’?
There are two issues that need to be dealt with. First, is the
contemporary state of affairs correctly described as ‘postmod-
ern’? Second, what should our reaction be if the answer to the
first question is ‘yes’? It is not, perhaps, so obvious on closer
inspection that our era has enough distinctive features to be
described as ‘postmodern’. It is at least arguable that there is
or was no such thing as an Enlightenment project. Intra-
communal ethnic diversity and the problem of how to deal
with it are nothing new; one only has to look at Hobbes’ Levi-
athan (1968) to appreciate this. It is only the third feature of
the postmodern condition, namely rapid and continual
change, that seems to be an unequivocally characteristic fea-
ture of contemporary times. On the issue of our response to
alleged postmodernity there appear to be three identifiable
reactions. A recommendation for increase in personal auton-
omy to cope with uncertainty is one (e.g. Bauman 1997; Carl-
son 1995). A second is a continuing faith in universal liberal
values not buttressed by absolutely true principles discovera-
ble by reason, but by a pragmatic concern to maintain and
develop what has been found to be the most congenial form of
polity for humankind (see Rorty 1989, 1991). Rejection of the
Enlightenment project, including the advocacy of universal
liberalism, is yet another associated with Gray (1995, 2004).
Gray proposes that multivalent pluralism is the essence of the
postmodern era and that particular forms of liberalism, shorn
of universalizing pretensions, are one possible response. In
some ways, liberal responses to alleged postmodernism owe a
lot to more traditional liberalism. There is a Millian skepticism
about the common good and an associated emphasis on strong
autonomy as an educational aim. The downgrading of abso-
lute conceptions of truth and a strong belief in pragmatism is
another. The growth of a belief in relativism and a non-
judgmental attitude is also popular (Gingell & Winch, 2008).
10 POSTMODERN SOCIO-ECONOMIC TRENDS
Postmodern socio-economic trends are as follows. (1) Post-
Taylorist postmodern economies rely to a decreasing degree
on mass production (what there is, is being carried out auto-
matically to an increasing extent) and to a growing degree on
the provision of various kinds of services, relatively small-
Journal of Social Issues & Humanities, Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2015
ISSN 2345-2633
scale specialist production and the growing importance of
knowledge and intellectual property as economic assets. (2)
There is a break-up of class politics. This is a consequence of
post-Taylorism but has far-reaching social consequences. Tay-
lorism (division of labor in the context of a continuous produc-
tion line) brought in its train a working class with a relatively
strong sense of its own identity which was expressed, particu-
larly in Western Europe, through trade unions and communist
and socialist parties. These in their turn provided a normative
structure for the conduct of life within and outside the work-
place. The decline of class-based political agitation has loos-
ened the normative bonds holding together working-class
communities. (3) There is a move towards psychic discipline.
As a consequence of the decline of external normative con-
straints due to the changes mentioned in (1) and (2) above,
there is an increase in the need for individuals to discipline
themselves through internal mechanisms and a corresponding
search for ways in which they can be made to do so (Massche-
lein 2004).
11 POSTMODERNISM AND OBJECTIVITY
Postmodernists also attack the long-standing belief in objectiv-
ity. Because it is impossible to build an argument or interpret
an event or even gather data without a purpose and perspec-
tive, objectivity in the traditional sense becomes a myth. Some-
thing like objectivity may be attained, however, through inter-
subjectivity; that is, an aggregation of interpretations from
various perspectives may yield as nearly an unbiased picture
as we can obtain. Probably you, like all people who have un-
dergone higher education in Western institutions, have been
encouraged throughout your school career to "try to be objec-
tive." With this exhortation, your teachers have been urging
you to put aside your personal opinions and prejudices--to
avoid "subjectivity"--and give an account backed by impartial
evidence. Not only do postmodernists deny that this can be
done, but they also claim that the very attempt to do so has
already biased any investigation. An investigation or argu-
ment so launched is riddled with the assumptions of standard
modernist thought (Noddings, 1998).
12 POSTMODERNISM AND CAPITAL-T TRUTH
Most postmodern thinkers have abandoned the Enlighten-
ment quest for absolute truth; in this, postmodernists agree
with Dewey. They accept what might be called "local truth"--
facts of the sort that we might agree upon either through
common observations or through methodological conven-
tions. For example, we might all agree that much of what is
reported in daily newspapers--scores of sporting events, re-
ports of accidents, announcements of deaths and marriages--is
"true." Similarly, postmodernists accept as true the basic' rules
of mathematics and certain postulates of science. Even these
may be regarded as local or limited in the sense that they ap-
ply to entities and events with which we are so familiar that
we no longer think about the locus of their application. They
may in fact be local, but their locality is so extensive that they
seem almost universal.
92
Most philosophers today share with postmodernists the re-
jection of capital-T Truth, but in postmodernism the rejection
is accompanied by a challenge to the traditional field of epis-
temology. Postmodernists believe that the search for one all-
encompassing description of knowledge is hopeless. Instead,
they emphasize the sociology of knowledge--how knowledge
and power are connected, how domains of expertise evolve,
who profits from and who is hurt by various claims to
knowledge, and what sort of language develops in communi-
ties of knowers. In one sense, postmodernism implies
postepistemology; in another, it suggests a drastic revision of
traditional epistemology. When we look more deeply into
epistemology, we will see that contemporary educators are
caught up in something called "constructivism" that is thought
by some to be an epistemological position and by others to be
a postepistemological position (Noddings, 1998)
13 POSTMODERNISM AND THE "DEATH OF THE
SUBJECT"
Many postmodern thinkers have expressed doubts about the
constituting subject-both the abstract and the particular hu-
man knower/agent that have been at the center of modern
philosophy. Recognizing the multiple ways in which people
are shaped by their histories and cultures, by their personal
experiences, and by their interactions with others, postmodern
writers have described a constituted subject and multiple
identities. Such a view challenges not only the rational subject
of Cartesian epistemology but also the existential subject de-
scribed by Sartre. In this view, we do not make supremely free
choices, nor can we be held fully responsible for the persons
we become.
Unfortunately, the "death of the subject" not only sweeps
away the somewhat haughty knower of Descartes and Sartre
and the lofty moral commander of Kant; it also threatens the
autonomy and agency of ordinary actors. Feminists, even
those who lean toward postmodernism, worry about this. If
the death of the subject were a metaphysical claim we would
have to accept or reject it as a claim to truth; there either is or
is not such an entity. But postmodernists do not make meta-
physical claims (at least not deliberately); they urge us to
abandon metaphysics. Therefore, the claim has political im-
port and should be approached from a political perspective.
Hence, feminists must ask whether this claim aids or hinders
the feminist program. Women today are just beginning to feel
like agents, like persons who can exercise autonomy. Is this
the time, then, to write the obituary of the subject? It is rather
like losing one's driver's license immediately after buying a car
and learning to drive (Noddings, 1998).
14 POSTMODERNISM AND ARGUMENTATION
Habermas claims that a form of rational communication free
of distortion should place us in a position to base decisions on
"the force of the better argument." Commenting on this claim,
Richard Bernstein writes:
“Abstractly there is something enormously attractive about
Journal of Social Issues & Humanities, Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2015
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Habermas' appeal to the "force of the better argument" until
we ask ourselves what this means and presupposes. Even un-
der "ideal" conditions where participants are committed to
discursive argumentation, there is rarely agreement about
what constitutes "the force of the better argument." We philos-
ophers, for example, cannot even agree what are the argu-
ments advanced in any of our canonical texts, whether Plato,
Aristotle, Kant or Hegel, etc.--and there is certainly no consen-
sus about who has advanced the better argument.”
Bernstein goes on to remark that philosophers do not even
agree on the role that argumentation should play in philoso-
phy. Agreeing with the postmodernists on this, he notes that
“appeals to argumentation become ideological weapons for
dismissing or excluding philosophical alternatives--for exam-
ple, when analytic philosophers complain that Continental
philosophers (including Habermas) do not argue, or indulge
in "sloppy" argumentation. Who decides what is and what is
not an argument, by what criteria, and what constitutes the
force of the better argument?”
Bernstein does not suggest abandoning argumentation.
Certainly, good thinkers can separate configurations of words
that reveal logical flaws and gaps from those that are "better"
in this sense. But at bottom we simply cannot depend on being
able to identify the best argument. Many issues stubbornly
remain issues despite the great efforts of philosophers to settle
them by argumentation.
One great flaw in the "argument for arguments" is that ar-
gumentation, governed as it is by rules and criteria laid down
by authorities in a particular domain, tends to exclude voices,
words, and pleas from those who do not use the standard
forms. Worse, the criteria are claimed to be universal so that
the excluded voices appear to exclude themselves through
ignorance or perversity. Jacques Derrida has been particularly
eloquent in pleading for the inclusion of outsiders, Others,
who use a different language and see from a different perspec-
tive. He asks us "to let Others be"--to respect their otherness
and stop trying to assimilate them into our own language and
stories. In this plea, we hear an echo of existentialist thought--
essence is an achievement and not an a priori ideal (Noddings,
1998).
15 POSTMODERNISM AND GRAND THEORIES
Derrida's plea to let others be is a call to abandon grand narra-
tives. We can no longer assume that people can all be de-
scribed by some overarching theory, that they all long for ex-
actly the same goods, respect exactly the same virtues, or
mean the same things when they use similar words. To make
such assumptions is to be guilty of "totalizing," of summing up
unique parts of human experience in one grand description
that emphasizes similarity and covers up difference (Nod-
dings, 1998)
16 POSTMODERNISM AND RELATIVISM
As indicated in the preceding section, many of the characteris-
tic doctrines of postmodernism constitute or imply some form
of metaphysical, epistemological, or ethical relativism. (It
93
should be noted, however, that some postmodernists vehe-
mently reject the relativist label.) Postmodernists deny that
there are aspects of reality that are objective; that there are
statements about reality that are objectively true or false; that
it is possible to have knowledge of such statements (objective
knowledge); that it is possible for human beings to know some
things with certainty; and that there are objective, or absolute,
moral values. Reality, knowledge, and value are constructed
by discourses; hence they can vary with them. This means that
the discourse of modern science, when considered apart from
the evidential standards internal to it, has no greater purchase
on the truth than do alternative perspectives, including (for
example) astrology and witchcraft. Postmodernists sometimes
characterize the evidential standards of science, including the
use of reason and logic, as “Enlightenment rationality.
The broad relativism apparently so characteristic of post-
modernism invites a certain line of thinking regarding the na-
ture and function of discourses of different kinds. If postmod-
ernists are correct that reality, knowledge, and value are rela-
tive to discourse, then the established discourses of the En-
lightenment are no more necessary or justified than alternative
discourses. But this raises the question of how they came to be
established in the first place. If it is never possible to evaluate a
discourse according to whether it leads to objective Truth,
how did the established discourses become part of the prevail-
ing worldview of the modern era? Why were these discourses
adopted or developed, whereas others were not?
Part of the postmodern answer is that the prevailing dis-
courses in any society reflect the interests and values, broadly
speaking, of dominant or elite groups. Postmodernists disa-
gree about the nature of this connection; whereas some appar-
ently endorse the dictum of the German philosopher and
economist Karl Marx that “the ruling ideas of each age have
ever been the ideas of its ruling class,” others are more cir-
cumspect. Inspired by the historical research of the French
philosopher Michel Foucault, some postmodernists defend the
comparatively nuanced view that what counts as knowledge
in a given era is always influenced, in complex and subtle
ways, by considerations of power. There are others, however,
who are willing to go even further than Marx. The French phi-
losopher and literary theorist Luce Irigaray, for example, has
argued that the science of solid mechanics is better developed
than the science of fluid mechanics because the male-
dominated institution of physics associates solidity and fluidi-
ty with the male and female sex organs, respectively.
Because the established discourses of the Enlightenment are
more or less arbitrary and unjustified, they can be changed;
and because they more or less reflect the interests and values
of the powerful, they should be changed. Thus postmodernists
regard their theoretical position as uniquely inclusive and
democratic, because it allows them to recognize the unjust
hegemony of Enlightenment discourses over the equally valid
perspectives of nonelite groups. In the 1980s and ’90s, academ-
ic advocates on behalf of various ethnic, cultural, racial, and
religious groups embraced postmodern critiques of contempo-
rary Western society, and postmodernism became the unoffi-
cial philosophy of the new movement of “identity poli-
Journal of Social Issues & Humanities, Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2015
ISSN 2345-2633
tics.”(Encyclopedia Britannica).
17 POSTMODERNISM AND KNOWLEDGE
In relation to knowledge, it seeks to take us some way further
than those earlier theories we have noted. For, unlike them, in
challenging absolutism, objectivism and positivism, it does not
set out to offer us alternative theories or ‘metanarratives’, as
we saw, for example, Dewey sought to do. It places everything
in a cauldron of uncertainty and insists that that is where eve-
rything must stay. It thus adds great strength to the case for
viewing what appears to count as knowledge, at any given
time or in any given socio-political context, with continuing
skepticism and without dogmatic confidence (Kelly, 2004).
18 POSTMODERNISM AND CURRICULUM
Nothing has characterized intellectual development in the
twentieth century more than a growing appreciation of the
problematic nature of human knowledge. That current move-
ment known as postmodernism, while in itself problematic,
has over the last two or three decades highlighted the dangers
of dogmatism, raised important issues concerning the validity
of knowledge claims and thus, above all, drawn our attention
to the concept of ideology and the political dangers of ideolog-
ical domination. Hence, there has arisen a recent emphasis on
concepts of democracy and their implications for curriculum
planning (Kelly, 1995).
Its implications for the planning and organization of the
school curriculum are consequently wide-ranging. For it un-
dermines any theories anyone might mount for the God-given
right of any body of ‘knowledge’, school subject or whatever
to be included in a compulsory curriculum. Indeed, it alerts us
to the dangers of all such theories. And, as we shall see, it sug-
gests that we look elsewhere than knowledge-content for the
foundation stone of our curriculum. It further suggests the
need to recognize that knowledge is ideology, and that all ap-
proaches to the school curriculum are ideological. Central to
the dangers it alerts us to are those political dangers which we
have touched upon from time to time and which we must now
face head-on. For the prime significance of postmodernism for
students of curriculum is that it explicitly links theories of
knowledge with political movements. A major target within
social and political theory, for example, has been Marxism,
which is precisely the kind of totalizing theory which is the
bête noire, and which has, or had, dominated sociological en-
quiry for many years. This is a good example of the interpene-
tration of epistemology and political theory, as a political sys-
tem is built upon a particular theory of knowledge, and ideol-
ogy is conceived not merely as a point of view but as a form of
deviance from the ‘eternal truths’ generated by that theory of
knowledge. Again, however, postmodernism would go fur-
ther than this. For not only does it see all knowledge and all
versions of the truth as ideological; it also makes an explicit
link between knowledge and power, and sees power as being
exercised through the distribution of knowledge and the ma-
nipulation of the discourses through which that knowledge,
those ‘totalizing theories’ are expressed, ‘the bureaucratic im-
94
position of official values’ (Turner, 1990:11). ‘We live in a
world in which there is no ‘knowledge’, no ‘ultimate truths’, in
which all perception is subjective, so that we are the products
of the discourse, the ideologies, we are exposed to’ (Kelly,
1995:71).
In this way we see postmodern theory adding its weight to
that conviction which has been growing throughout the sec-
ond half of the last century that knowledge and politics are
inextricably interlinked and that serious political dangers,
threats to individual freedom and to social democracy, ensue
if we are not constantly aware of this and on the alert for in-
stances of it (Kelly, 2004)
19 EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS OF POSTMODERNISM
In a general sense they seem to suggest an increase in influ-
ence of already influential liberal ideas about education, par-
ticularly those that arise from both the American and Europe-
an progressivist traditions (e.g. English and Hill 1994). More
particularly, they herald a vocationalism that stresses prepara-
tion for a post-Taylorist economy; an emphasis on non-
judgmental multiculturalism in education; and finally, a grow-
ing interest in individual self-supervision and counseling to
achieve this. In the area of moral education the situation is less
clear. Some, like Rorty, break with the Deweyan tradition by
emphasizing the split between public and private personae (cf.
Wain 1996). Gray (1995) stresses communal moral plurality
possibly associated with communal schooling, but under-
pinned by a minimal conception of the common good; while
MacIntyre (1981) recommends a return to an Aristotelian con-
ception of morality, although without much hope of its being
realized. The question of whether we do live in a postmodern
era is debatable.
If the answer is affirmative, then there are various possible
educational responses. It is interesting, however, that many
educational liberals and progressives believe that the post-
modern condition strengthens the case for many of their fa-
vored policies while conservatives believe that it may under-
mine theirs. The question of whether we live in a postmodern
era may not, therefore, be a matter of entirely disinterested
debate among educational policy-makers, but may instead
provide a new backdrop to old debates (Gingell & Winch,
2008).
In sum, we can point to the following items as the educa-
tional implications of postmodernism:
- In postmodern education as Lyotard mentioned,
knowledge will not be a set of propositions, it will be means of
how to live to listen thus how to learn.
- Shortly, knowledge will be means of interpreting the reali-
ty and one's achieving his/her own rights. In such kind of an
education, a group interaction enabling individual originali-
ty, diversity and imagination; a continuous dialogue aiming
to reach targets by using means will be the base of education.
- Autonomous schools of postmodern society will have
more authority to decide and form than ever while performing
its pedagogical task.
- Classification of men and women will be meaningless and
Journal of Social Issues & Humanities, Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2015
ISSN 2345-2633
there will not be the education of the role of gender at schools.
- It should be clear that an effort to force all children into
the same course of study--however well-intended the attempt-
-is, from the perspective of postmodernism, a totalizing move.
It improperly (and unethically, Derrida would probably say)
assimilates all children to the model of an elite established by
criteria constructed by an exclusive few (Noddings, 1998).
- Briefly, the main aim of this education is not to depend
on a single right, single type of discourse but to create plu-
ralist, participating education environments which are in
search of new language systems and new interpretations.
- We should turn education into a dialogue by which indi-
viduals are provided to perform life long dialogues with reali-
ties and rights.
20 CRITICISMS OF POSTMODERNISM
Criticisms of postmodernism are intellectually diverse, includ-
ing the assertions that postmodernism is meaningless and
promotes obscurantism. For example, Noam Chomsky has
argued that postmodernism is meaningless because it adds
nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. He asks why
postmodernist intellectuals do not respond like people in oth-
er fields when asked, "What are the principles of their theories,
on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that
wasn't already obvious, etc.?...If [these requests] can't be met,
then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circum-
stances: 'to the flames'."
Formal, academic critiques of postmodernism can also be
found in works such as Beyond the Hoax and Fashionable
Nonsense.
However, as for continental philosophy, American academ-
ics have tended to label it "postmodernist", especially practi-
tioners of "French Theory". Such a trend might derive from
U.S. departments of Comparative Literature. It is interesting to
note that Félix Guattari, often considered a "postmodernist",
rejected its theoretical assumptions by arguing that the struc-
turalist and postmodernist visions of the world were not flexi-
ble enough to seek explanations in psychological, social and
environmental domains at the same time (Wikipedia).
Postmodernism has also been criticized by the following
scholars and thinkers:
Roy D’Andrade (1931- ) - In the article "Moral Models in
Anthropology," D'Andrade critiques postmodernism's defini-
tion of objectivity and subjectivity by examining the moral
nature of their models. He argues that these moral models are
purely subjective. D'Andrade argues that despite the fact that
utterly value-free objectivity is impossible, it is the goal of the
anthropologist to get as close as possible to that ideal. He ar-
gues that there must be a separation between moral and objec-
tive models because “they are counterproductive in discover-
ing how the world works.” (D’Andrade 1995: 402). From there
he takes issue with the postmodernist attack on objectivity. He
states that objectivity is in no way dehumanizing nor is objec-
tivity impossible. He states, “Science works not because it
produces unbiased accounts but because its accounts are ob-
jective enough to be proved or disproved no matter what any-
95
one wants to be true.” (D’Andrade 1995: 404).
Ryan Bishop - “The Postmodernist genre of ethnography
has been criticized for fostering a self-indulgent subjectivity,
and for exaggerating the esoteric and unique aspects of a cul-
ture at the expense of more prosaic but significant questions.”
(Bishop 1996: 58)
Patricia M. Greenfield Greenfield believes that postmod-
ernism’s complete lack of objectivity, and its tendency to push
political agendas, makes it virtually useless in any scientific
investigation (Greenfield 2005). Greenfield suggests using
resources in the field of psychology to help Anthropologists
gain a better grasp on cultural relativism, while still maintain-
ing their objectivity.
Bob McKinley - McKinley believes that Postmodernism is
more of a religion than a science (McKinley 2000). He argues
that the origin of Postmodernism is the Western emphasis on
individualism, which makes Postmodernists reluctant to
acknowledge the existence of distinct multi-individual cul-
tures.
Christopher Norris - Norris believes that Lyotard, Fou-
cault, and Baudrillard are too preoccupied in the idea of the
primacy of moral judgments (Norris 1990: 50).
Pauline Rosenau (1993) Rosenau identifies seven contradic-
tions in Postmodernism:
1. Its anti-theoretical position is essentially a theoretical
stand.
2. While Postmodernism stresses the irrational, instruments
of reason are freely employed to advance its perspective.
3. The Postmodern prescription to focus on the marginal is
itself an evaluative emphasis of precisely the sort that it oth-
erwise attacks.
4. Postmodernism stress intertextuality but often treats text
in isolation.
5. By adamantly rejecting modern criteria for assessing the-
ory, Postmodernists cannot argue that there are no valid crite-
ria for judgment.
6. Postmodernism criticizes the inconsistency of modern-
ism, but refuses to be held to norms of consistency itself.
7. Postmodernists contradict themselves by relinquishing
truth claims in their own writings.
Marshall Sahlins (1930 - ) - Sahlins criticizes the postmod-
ern preoccupation with power. "The current Foucauldian-
Gramscian-Nietzschean obsession with power is the latest
incarnation of anthropology's incurable functionalism. . . Now
'power' is the intellectual black hole into which all kinds of
cultural contents get sucked, if before it was social solidarity
or material advantage." (Sahlins, 1993: 15).
The most prominent and comprehensive critic of philo-
sophical postmodernism is Jürgen Habermas. In The Philo-
sophical Discourse of Modernity (Habermas 1987), he con-
fronts postmodernism at the level of society and “communica-
tive action.” He does not defend the concept of the subject,
conceived as consciousness or an autonomous self, against
postmodernists' attacks, but defends argumentative reason in
inter-subjective communication against their experimental,
avant-garde strategies. For example, he claims that Nietzsche,
Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault commit a performative con-
Journal of Social Issues & Humanities, Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2015
ISSN 2345-2633
tradiction in their critiques of modernism by employing con-
cepts and methods that only modern reason can provide. He
criticizes Nietzsche's Dionysianism as a compensatory gesture
toward the loss of unity in Western culture that, in pre-
modern times, was provided by religion. Nietzsche's sense of
a new Dionysus in modern art, moreover, is based upon an
aesthetic modernism in which art acquires its experimental
power by separating itself from the values of science and mo-
rality, a separation accomplished by the modern Enlighten-
ment, resulting in the loss of organic unity Nietzsche seeks to
restore via art itself (see Habermas 1987, 81-105). Habermas
sees Heidegger and Derrida as heirs to this “Dionysian messi-
anism.” Heidegger, for example, anticipates a new experience
of being, which has withdrawn. However, says Habermas, the
withdrawal of being is the result of an inverted philosophy of
the subject, where Heidegger's destruction of the subject leads
to hope for a unity to come, a unity of nothing other than the
subject that is now missing (Habermas 1987, 160). Derrida, he
says, develops the notion of différance or “archi-writing” in
similar fashion: here, we see the god Dionysus revealing him-
self once again in his absence, as meaning infinitely deferred
(Habermas 1987, 180-81).
Habermas also criticizes Derrida for leveling the distinction
between philosophy and literature in a textualism that brings
logic and argumentative reason into the domain of rhetoric. In
this way, he says, Derrida hopes to avoid the logical problem
of self-reference in his critique of reason. However, as Haber-
mas remarks: “Whoever transposes the radical critique of rea-
son into the domain of rhetoric in order to blunt the paradox
of self-referentiality, also dulls the sword of the critique of
reason itself” (Habermas 1987, 210). In similar fashion, he crit-
icizes Foucault for not subjecting his own genealogical method
to genealogical unmasking, which would reveal Foucault's re-
installation of a modern subject able to critically gaze at its
own history. Thus, he says, “Foucault cannot adequately deal
with the persistent problems that come up in connection with
an interpretive approach to the object domain, a self-
referential denial of universal validity claims, and a normative
justification of critique” (Habermas 1987, 286).
Habermas's critique of postmodernism on the basis of per-
formative contradiction and the paradox of self-reference sets
the tone and the terms for much of the critical debate now un-
der way. While postmodernists have rejected these criticisms,
or responded to them with rhetorical counter-strategies. Lyo-
tard, for example, rejects the notion that intersubjective com-
munication implies a set of rules already agreed upon, and
that universal consensus is the ultimate goal of discourse (see
Lyotard 1984, 65-66). That postmodernists openly respond to
Habermas is due to the fact that he takes postmodernism seri-
ously and does not, like other critics, reject it as mere non-
sense. Indeed, that he is able to read postmodernist texts close-
ly and discursively testifies to their intelligibility. He also
agrees with the postmodernists that the focus of debate should
be upon modernity as it is realized in social practices and in-
stitutions, rather than upon theories of cognition or formal
linguistics as autonomous domains. In this respect, Haber-
mas's concern with inter-subjective communication helps clar-
96
ify the basis upon which the modernist-postmodernist debates
continue to play out (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
21 POST-POSTMODERNISM
Recently metamodernism, post-postmodernism and the "death
of postmodernism" have been widely debated: in 2007 An-
drew Hoborek noted in his introduction to a special issue of
the journal Twentieth Century Literature titled "After Post-
modernism" that "declarations of postmodernism's demise
have become a critical commonplace". A small group of critics
has put forth a range of theories that aim to describe culture or
society in the alleged aftermath of postmodernism, most nota-
bly Raoul Eshelman (performatism), Gilles Lipovetsky (hy-
permodernity), Nicolas Bourriaud (altermodern), and Alan
Kirby (digimodernism, formerly called pseudo-modernism).
None of these new theories and labels have so far gained very
widespread acceptance. The exhibition Postmodernism - Style
and Subversion 1970-1990 at the Victoria and Albert Museum
(London, 24 September 2011 – 15 January 2012) was billed as
the first show to document postmodernism as a historical
movement (Wikipedia).
22 CONCLUSION
In sum, postmodernism is a mood that shakes the whole struc-
ture of modern thought. It challenges cherished assumptions,
methods, attitudes, modes of thought, and values. Thoughtful
educators should be aware of ways in which its proponents help
us to think better about educational problems, but they should
also be wary of accounts that merely use postmodern buzzwords
or that lure readers into accepting potentially harmful moves
along with helpful ones. One does not have to accept every pro-
nouncement of postmodernists to be postmodern. Indeed, it
might be better, especially from the postmodern view, to reject
such labels entirely (Noddings, 1998).
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[3] Encyclopedia Britannica (2008).
[4] Kelly, A.V. (1995) Education and Democracy. London: Paul Chapman Pub-
lishing.
[5] Kelly, A.V. (2004) The Curriculum: Theory and Practice, 5th edn. London:
Sage.
[6] Lyotard, J-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
[7] Oxford Dictionary (2012).
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vital strategies’, Cultural Studies, 6(2):271–89.
[10] Winch C. and Gingell J. (2008) Philosophy of Education The Key Concepts.
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