Michael A. Peters, Marek Tesar iD and Liz Jackson
Framing the postmodern invitation
Declarations of the death knell of postmodernism are now quite commonplace. Indeed, various publications such as those that we utilise below suggest that, if anything, postmodernism is at an end and has been dead and buried for some time. In its place, an age dominated by playfulness, hybridity, relativism and the fragmentary self has given way to something else, as yet undefined. Brian McHale (2015) describes the lifecycle of postmodernism in terms of the âbig bangâ in 1966 with Derridaâs seminal paper âStructure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciencesâ at the Johns Hopkins conference âThe Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Manâ symposium; identifying its peak years as 1973â1989; followed by an uncertainty and reorientation in the 1990s; and the aftermath and beyond after 2001, which we are currently experiencing.
Beginning in the late 1980s and extending into the 1990s a variety of texts proclaimed the end of postmodernismâSociology after postmodernism (Owen, 1997), Thinking Again: Education after postmodernism (Blake, Smeyers, Smith, & Standish, 1998), After Postmodernism: Education, Politics and Identity (Smith & Wexler, 1995), and Encounters: philosophy of history after postmodernism (DomaĹska, 1998). These assessments continued well into the 2000sâPhilosophy after postmodernism, (Crowther, 2003), Feminism after postmodernism (Zalewski, 2000), Painting after postmodernism (Rose, 2016), Literature after postmodernism: reconstructive fantasies (Huber, 2014), Value, art, politics: criticism, meaning and interpretation after postmodernism (Harris, 2007). All these texts, while different, and utilising diverse lenses, have clearly addressed the complexities of ontologies of postmodernism and its performances over the years.
However, given the theoretical and philosophical movements, including the ideology and recent turns in politics such as the post-truth and fake news era (Peters, 2017), it seems that PoMo is no more. It seems that it has been succeeded by a new sensibility and configuration. We are not sure what it is exactly but we know that one era has ended and another has begun. Should this be surprising? Perhaps not, as all intellectual fashions change. What some argue is that it is part of intellectuality under late capitalism, as even Western Marxism is subject to its whims. We know a little about the circulation of ideas and the phenomenon now referred to as âgoing viralâ in relation to social media mostly now measured in âhitsâ rather than use or citation. Indeed, various possibilities have been put forward after postmodernism: post-postmodernism, new materialism, posthumanism, critical realism, digimodernism, metamodernism, performatism, post-digitalism, trans-postmodernism, post-millennialism, Marxism after postmodernism and transnationality as the contemporary cultural logic of neoliberal global capitalism. There is no consensus, except an agreement that an innocent return to Modernism, humanism, âobjectivityâ is no longer a possibility. If the 1990s were a decade when scholars in a range of disciplines asked the question of what comes after postmodernism, the 2000s were a decade that investigated a range of substitutes and possibilities.
For the 50th anniversary of Educational Philosophy and Theory (EPAT), we have decided to conduct a philosophical survey, addressing philosophers of education from all around the globe with the same statement to solicit a comment, argument or position. In this experiment, we invited readers and contributors of EPAT to respond to the question of what comes after postmodernism and how this will affect educational philosophy and theory. This experiment, both with academic genre and with new modes of philosophical survey or pulse-taking, provided an opportunity for community-led deliberation on what postmodernism is, was, and has done; what it is and was not and has not done; and the nature of unfolding theory in the future from diverse ethical and ontological orientations.
The ruse and folly of the question
The question of what comes after postmodernism is deliberately obtuse. It is designed in part as a provocation, especially to those easily offended by the labelâfor whom it means ârelativismâ, anti-scienceâ, an attack on truth and all Western values. It is also designed as an invitation to respond creatively with an alternative, not necessarily a system or worldview, but possibly some idea that is not Western, that does not originate in Europe during the Enlightenment. The editors have remained agnostic on issues of ideology and we decided to publish all submissions with only light editing, with the idea not just of inclusiveness but also of protecting a diversity of viewpoints.
The question of what comes after postmodernism is, of course, a ruse and a folly. So many of those who have been responsible for promoting a kind of anti-modernist, anti-foundationalist and anti-representational philosophy have also addressed themselves to the notion of temporality, of history and of teleology that distinguishes a linear and causal succession where, at least, in the history of Western avant gardes and philosophy, wedded to an unexamined notion of âprogressâ, one paradigm replaces anotherâmodernism/postmodernism, impressionism/postimpressionism, preRaphelitism/postRaphelitism. The avant gardes from the 1860s to the 1950s were dominated by radical and challenging ideas associated with technological progress and the dominance of Western conceptions. Abstract Expressionism, neo-Dadism and Pop art that took a variety of forms including Conceptual art, Minimalism, Video art, Performance art and Installation art were reactions against the reigning modernist art practices questioning in an ironic and playful way concepts of originality and authenticity in art, the hierarchy of high and low culture, the master narratives and the idea that there is inherently one true meaning of a work of art. A movement that began in art and literature found it shared common sources in philosophy and the rest of the humanities. Yet to characterise the movement simply as a successor paradigm, as many contributing scholars have argued, is limiting especially when talking about a set of art or intellectual practices. It might be better to talk of the movement as a style or attitude.
Methodology and orientation
This special issue is an exercise in collective writing and we have envisaged it as a âphilosophy of a global thought surveyâ. We invited contributors to provide a short piece of writing and argument (about 500â600 words, and no more than 5 references). Our aim was to be as inclusive as possible. The process of collective writing in the past years has become an important exercise in ethics and multiplicity of engagements with diverse topics and people (see for instance: Peters et al., 2016; Jandric et al., 2017; Stewart et al., 2017).
Below are a number of statements by various authors to provide an orientation to the topic and help to frame the exercise:
An aesthetic of cognitive mappingâa pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global systemâwill necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex representational dialectic and invent radically new forms in order to do it justice. This is not then, clearly, a call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and more transparent national space, or some more traditional and reassuring perspectival or mimetic enclave: the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental objectâthe world space of multinational capitalâat the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralised by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale (Jameson, 1991).
As we know, postmodernism, as a literary and cultural movement, came to an end some time ago not only in the West but also in China, although it has permeated in a fragmentary way nearly all aspects of contemporary culture and thought. Today, we readily think about the duality of something without falling back on the traditional idea of âcentreâ or âtotality.â In the field of critical theory, there is no longer any dominant theoretical school or literary current that plays a role like the one played by postmodernism and poststructuralism in the latter part of the twentieth century (Ning, 2013, p. 296).
It is not that postmodernismâs impact is diminished or disappearing. Not at all; we canât unlearn a great idea. But rather, postmodernism is itself being replaced as the dominant discourse and is now taking its place on the artistic and intellectual palette alongside all the other great ideas and movements. In the same way as we are all a little Victorian at times, a little modernist, a little Romantic, so we are all, and will forever be, children of postmodernism. (This in itself is, of course, a postmodern idea) (Doxc, 2011).
It seems then, that a new dominant cultural logic is emerging; the worldâor in any case, the literary cosmosâis rearranging itself. This process is still in flux and must be approached strictly in the present tense. To understand the situation, we have to pose a number of questions. The first, and most dramatic, is âIs postmodernism dead?â; quickly followed by âIf so, when did it die?â. Criticsâsuch as Christian Moraru, Josh Toth, Neil Brooks, Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulenârepeatedly point to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the new millennium, the 9/11 attacks, the so-called âWar on Terrorâ and the wars in the Middle East, the financial crisis and the ensuing global revolutions. Taken together, these events signify the failure and unevenness of global capitalism as an enterprise, leading to an ensuing disillusionment with the project of neo-liberal postmodernity and the recent political splintering into extreme Left and extreme Right. The cumulative effect of these eventsâand the accompanying hyper-anxiety brought about by twenty-four hour newsâhas made the Western world feel like a more precarious and volatile place, in which we can no longer be nonchalant about our safety or our future (Gibbons, 2017).
As to whether postmodern discourse is still dominant these days, Iâd say itâs much less so. Since 9/11, weâve witnessed the unfolding of a new and rather alarming grand narrative, at just the point when grand narratives were complacently said to be finished. One grand narrativeâthe Cold Warâwas indeed over, but, for reasons connected with the Westâs victory in that struggle, it had no sooner ended than another got off the ground. Postmodernism, which had judged history to be now post-metaphysical, post-ideological, ...
