What Comes After Postmodernism in Educational Theory?

Michael A. Peters, Marek Tesar, Liz Jackson, Tina Besley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000051063
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Educational Philosophy and Theory journal, this book brings together the work of over 200 international scholars, who seek to address the question: 'What happened to postmodernism in educational theory after its alleged demise?'.

Declarations of the death knell of postmodernism are now quite commonplace. Scholars in various disciples have suggested that, if anything, postmodernism is at an end and has been dead and buried for some time. An age dominated by playfulness, hybridity, relativism and the fragmentary self has given way to something else—as yet undefined. The lifecycle of postmodernism started with Derrida's 1966 seminal paper 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences'; its peak years were 1973–1989; followed by uncertainty and reorientation in the 1990s; and the aftermath and beyond (McHale, 2015). What happened after 2001? This collection provides responses by over 200 scholars to this question who also focus on what comes after postmodernism in educational theory.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.

PESA President’s foreword for the EPAT 50th-anniversary issue

 

 

 

Educational Philosophy and Theory (EPAT) is 50 years old in 2019. It is the journal owned by the learned society, Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA) which turns 50 in 2020.

This celebration issue is dedicated to our contributors and readers and to all PESA members who have worked for EPAT in one capacity or another as editor, reviewer, or contributor. Fittingly the issue is a democratic writing experiment with some 170 contributors from 27 countries. We are pleased in particular that the invitation encouraged scholars from China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan and realise that we will have to work harder to attract scholars from Africa, India, and the Middle East. The journal is now truly international.

This issue asks a cheeky question on the basis of feigned ignorance or Socratic disposition – ‘what comes after postmodernism in educational theory?’ The results are quite surprising because they indicate no single successor paradigm, but rather a hatching of overlapping family concepts, a sort of ‘family resemblance’ after Wittgenstein. There is a series of themes that suggest a reflective return to earlier forms of philosophical modernism and a number of attempts to reform postmodernism in terms of subjectivity, indeterminism, incompleteness, and relativity that point to characteristics of anti-foundationalism, anti-representationalism, historical genealogies, and relational ontologies. With postmodernism as a platform, scholars have devised family networks of interests that all emphasise a kind of theoretical ecologism: post-humanism, new materialism, post-colonialism, and post-capitalism. An interesting development is the way that non-western thinkers have attempted to experiment with postmodernism in relation to classical or indigenous systems. Altogether this is a pleasing experiment. It is philosophically inclusive, a kind of philosophical thought survey and rain gauge.

EPAT has come a long way in 50 years from its Australian beginnings with a home produced broadsheet and a couple of issues a year by Australian and New Zealand scholars, to now being international and a world leader in the field with 14 issues a year. We wish to thank our publishers, Routledge/Taylor and Francis and the production team who have recently relocated to the Melbourne office.

In the recent rankings, EPAT’s impact factor went from 0.56 to 0.864–a massive jump in one year from 2016 to 2017 despite the dilution factor of producing 14 issues per year. Our priority has never been an impact factor ratio, but rather a focus on engaging in our world and creating opportunities for publication in our field and encouraging younger scholars who are often the thought leaders fresh from Ph.D. studies.

As President of PESA, I am happy to issue congratulations of the Society on this milestone achievement and to the Editor-In-Chief, Michael A Peters who has been editor for over 25 years, the Deputy Editors, Liz Jackson and Marek Tesar and to our Managing Editor Susanne Brighouse who are the nucleus of a larger network of Associate Editors and reviewers. It is hard to contemplate the next 50 years, especially with the technological disruption to academic publishing that is occurring currently. But one thing is clear, the peer-reviewed academic journal is required more today than even it was when it started in the mid-17th century, not just for the production of knowledge, but for the ability to offer criticism and to speak out. In the immediate term of the next ten years my hope, and I know it is Michael’s hope too, is to see the journal continue to flourish and to pass into the hands of younger scholars who are dedicated to the task. Fortunately, there are many such scholars with a considerable depth of talent in PESA.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Tina (A. C.) Besley
Beijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China

After postmodernism in educational theory? A collective writing experiment and thought survey

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 ‘big bang’ in 1966 with Derrida’s seminal paper ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ at the Johns Hopkins conference ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’ symposium; identifying its peak years as 1973–1989; 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 postmodernism—Sociology 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 (Domańska, 1998). These assessments continued well into the 2000s—Philosophy 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 ‘going viral’ in relation to social media mostly now measured in ‘hits’ 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, ‘objectivity’ 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 label—for whom it means ‘relativism’, anti-science’, 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 ‘progress’, one paradigm replaces another—modernism/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 ‘philosophy of a global thought survey’. We invited contributors to provide a short piece of writing and argument (about 500–600 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 mapping—a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system—will 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 object—the world space of multinational capital—at 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 ‘centre’ or ‘totality.’ 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 postmodernism’s impact is diminished or disappearing. Not at all; we can’t 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 world—or in any case, the literary cosmos—is 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 ‘Is postmodernism dead?’; quickly followed by ‘If so, when did it die?’. Critics—such as Christian Moraru, Josh Toth, Neil Brooks, Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen—repeatedly point to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the new millennium, the 9/11 attacks, the so-called ‘War on Terror’ 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 events—and the accompanying hyper-anxiety brought about by twenty-four hour news—has 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, I’d say it’s much less so. Since 9/11, we’ve 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 narrative—the Cold War—was indeed over, but, for reasons connected with the West’s 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, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 PESA President’s foreword for the EPAT 50th-anniversary issue
• 2 Introduction: After postmodernism in educational theory? A collective writing experiment and thought survey
• Postmodern Thinking
• Postmodern Politics
• Postmodern Crossdisciplines
• Non-Western Postmodernism
• Postmodern Critiques
• Postmodern Legacies
• Postmodern Education
• Postmodern New Ontologies
• Postmodern Theory
• Index