Counternarratives

Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces

Henry A. Giroux, Colin Lankshear, Peter McLaren, Michael Peters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135222475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

To understand contemporary times, we must appreciate the extent to which our lives are affected by the cultural and political struggle between "official" narratives and the counternarratives which emerge as oppositional responses. Counternarratives develops a concept of "postmodern counternarratives" as a frame for exploring the politics of media, technology and education within everyday struggles for human identities and loyalties. The authors identify two forms of counternarratives. One functions as a critique of the modernist propensity for grand narratives. The second concept, which is the focus of the book, builds on the first; the idea of "little stories" addressing cultural and political opposition to the "official" narratives used to manipulate public consciousness. Each marks an important point of contestation within contemporary education and culture: curriculum, pedagogy, literacy, media representations and applications of new technologies.

POSTMODERN COUNTERNARRATIVES

Michael Peters and Colin Lankshear

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

THE CONTEMPORARY social scene is flecked with a diverse array of more or less distinctively postmodern counternarratives. To understand the social present is very much a matter of recognizing and understanding the extent to which and ways in which our everyday lives are invested in and impacted and punctuated by these counternarratives and the “offcial” narratives against which they emerge as oppositional responses.

Subsequent chapters identify and explore some typical examples of “post odern counternarratives.” By way of introduction, however, we acknowledge that the very idea of postmodern counternarratives needs to be devel ped. It is as yet somewhat inchoate, and needs to be made explicit. It is also a complex idea, which needs to be clarified. In this chapter we undertake the philosophical task of distilling a working concept of counternarratives from the voluminous literatures that have developed around “postmodernity” as a theoretical construct and as lived reality. By providing this conceptual framework we clear the way for authors in later chapters to draw on their respective work in cultural studies, media criticism, sociology of education, critical pedagogy, and philosophy of technology, to frame and critique a range of counternarratives which have emerged as typical cultural productions in opposition to “official” narratives of youth, pedagogy, cultural normality or propriety, and media “truth”.

As developed here, the idea of postmodern counternarratives has two dimensions. The first observes the existence of counternarratives which function genetically as a critique of the modernist predilection for “grand,” “master,” and “meta” narratives. These take issue with the narratives which have come down to us as part of the culture of the Enhghtenment. They can be construed as countercultural critique, issuing from a basic skepticism, of the philosophies of history accompanying the grand claims concerning Man, Truth, Justice and Beauty, representing the West, and “America” as the last projection of European ideals, as the apex of an unbroken, evolutionary development of two thousand years of civihzation. One model of the counternarrative in this sense is Theordor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's (1972) Dialectic of the Enlightenmetit, a counternarrative which emphasises the dark side of the Enlightenment. Another model is that of Jean-François Lyotard's (1984) The Postmodern Condition which, utilizing a Wittgensteinian approach, emphasizes the radical incommensurability of “language-games.” Coun-ternarratives in this sense serve the strategic political function of splintering and disturbing grand stories which gain their legitimacy from foundational myths concerning the origins and development of an unbroken history of the West based on the evolutionary ideal of progress.

In addition, however, there is a second, related dimension of “counternar ratives,” which lies at the heart of this book and will be exemplified in following chapters. According to this, even in a postmodern age, where citizens retain some sense of the critical exhibiting a characteristic “incredulity towards metanarratives” there remain “official” narratives, whether grand or otherwise. Counternarratives, then, in a second sense counter not merely (or even necessarily) the grand narratives, but also (or instead) the “official” and “hegemonic” narratives of everyday life: those legitimating stories propagated for specific political purposes to manipulate public consciousness by heralding a national set of common cultural ideals. The notion of counternarratives in this sense carries with it Foucault's “counter-memory” and the idea of counter-practices, but in a specific and local sense. Such counternarratives are, as Lyotard explains, quintessentially “litde stories”—the litde stories of those individuals and groups whose knowledges and histories have been marginalized, excluded, subjugated or forgotten in the telling of official narratives.

In this chapter we mainly explore the notion of postmodern counternarratives in the first, or generic, sense as a backdrop to the following chapters which focus on official (counter) narratives in the second, more highly, contextual sense. These address, variously, the “official” narrative of the Gulf War; official narratives of what constitutes “good youth”; official narratives of classrooms and pedagogy; and official narratives of culture—together with specific, and specifically postmodern, counternarratives spawned within the cultural and political dialectics of everyday social practice.

POSTMODERNISM

Accounts of the present state of moral, political and aesthetic discourse allege there is no agreement on a universally accepted framework for resolving claims, and little immediate prospect of one emerging. Jean-François Lyotard (1984), the French poststructuralist philosopher, describes this state of affairs in terms of a crisis of legitimation of the “traditional” modernist metanarra-tives.These previously served to provide foundations for knowledge, morality and aesthetics, and for the cultural institutions based upon them. Lyotard argues that the metanarratives have collapsed: what characterizes cultural post-modernity is an “incredulity towards metanarratives”—an incurable suspicion that all grand, sweeping, narratives perform their legitimation functions by masking the will-to-power and excluding the interests of others.

According to this analysis of cultural postmodernity there are now only different ethical, political and aesthetic perspectives which are based on incommensurable premises—a heterogeneity of different moral language-games. Furthermore, philosophy itself is no longer considered the master discipline that can offer foundations; a metalanguage into which the claims and demands of competing language-games can be translated and resolved. The resulting “pluralism,” which is seen as characteristic of cultural postmodernity, has been explained in both Kantian and Weberian terms as an extended differentiation of value spheres, each with its own inner logic. Western culture is seen to have undergone a process of accelerated cultural differentiation, especially since the Second World War. The liberal myth of a common culture, or form of life, which functioned to assimilate difference and otherness has split into a seemingly endless proliferation of subcultures and groups. The revital-ization of indigenous cultures is seen as an important part of this differentiation process. With a new respect for the integrity of traditional cultures—a respect given only grudgingly under the increasing weight of a moral force deriving historically from philosophies of decolonization—Western liberal states have begun processes of redressing past grievances and of recognizing languages, epistemologies, aesthetics, and ethics different from “their own.”

What has been called the “crisis of reason” is a crisis not only of foundational approaches to knowledge and morality, but also of the foundations of our institutions. “Postmodernism” is the general, if ambiguous, term used to refer to these cultural crises. It is the broad cultural phenomenon of Western societies which best typifies this questioning and the related search for new cultural and political orientations following the collapse of foundationalism. Postmodernism is, then, allegedly a Western socio-cultural phenomenon. As Ryan (1988: 559) remarks, it is to art and mass culture what poststructuralism is to philosophy and social theory. Does postmodernist art and literature “obediently fall into step with the motifs and preoccupations of institutionalized poststructural theory,” as Conner (1989: 128) claims, or did poststructuralism take its lead from postmodernist developments in the arts (Huyssen, 1986)?

Postmodernism is often seen as associated in some way with advanced, or late, capitalism. To say this, however, is to raise an issue without resolving it. Is postmodernism reactionary and anti-modernist? Does it enter into a relation with the logic of late capitalism which serves simply to reinforce that logic, as Jameson (1983) claims, or does it have the double capacity to also resist that logic?

The term “postmodernism”, even in its linguistic inscription, is various: post-modernism, Post-Modernism (Jencks, 1987), POST modern ISM (Hassan, 1971), postmodernism. What do the hyphenated versions imply? What do the capitals signify?

It has been described as a method, a philosophy, an attitude, a tonality, a style, a moment, a condition, a movement and even a theory, suggesting a unitary body of presuppositions and assumptions.¹ It has variously been celebrated as “a revolution in Western culture” (Jencks, 1987: 11) which has taken place “without breaking anything more than a few eggheads,” and vilified as an obscurantist epistemology of free-play which has arisen in the Western academy at that precise point in history when women and non-Western peoples have begun to speak for themelves (Mascia-Lees et. al., 1989). Similarly, it has been said that postmodernism is disqualified from political import because it lacks an effective theory of agency (Hutcheon, 1989: 3). Further, the debate on postmodernism has generated a number of oppositional ideological positions: pre-modernist, anti-modernist, pro-postmodernist, anti-postmodernist (Jameson, 1984b); a postmodernism of resistance versus a postmodernism of reaction (Foster, 1985).

Feminism reveals an ambivalent attitude to postmodernism. Through a concern with otherness it has, along with postcolonial discourses, sought to demonstrate how representation can “no longer be considered a politically neutral and theoretically innocent activity” (Hutcheon, 1989: 21). In this respect the so-called poststructuralist critique of the subject has found favour with a number of feminist writers who have accepted and applied these insights in novel ways (e.g., see Nicholson, 1990). Flax (1990: 43), for instance, acknowledges how postmodern discourses make us skeptical about beliefs, derived from the Enhghtenment, concerning “truth”, “knowledge” and the “self” that are taken for granted and have served to legitimate contemporary western culture. In her view, feminists, echoing (other) postmodernists, are beginning to suspect that all such transcendental claims reflect and reify the experience of white males. On the other hand, feminism has remained wary of accepting a pluralism in politics which robs it of its universalism.

Postmodernism cuts a swathe across disciplines, especially in the arts and humanities. There are established literatures in architecture, art, dance, music, literature, film, photography and theatre (see e.g. Trachtenberg, 1985). In addition, debates on postmodernism have occurred within anthropology, history, politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, geography, education, and sociology. There are significant and growing literatures in feminist scholarship and studies of popular culture focusing on television, film and video. It is a mistake to think that these disciplines and discourses treat “postmodernism” in the same way, or to assume that they have developed in a similar fashion. Something of the depth and diversity in evidence can be gauged from the fact that during the 1970s and 1980s at least twenty major journals dedicated special issues to the topic.²

In the United States Irving Howe (1959) and Harry Levin (1966) used the term “postmodern” in a derogatory sense to indicate the shift to “mass society” and to detect the anti-intellectual anti-rationalist undercurrent threatening the humanism and enlightenment characteristics of the culture of modernism. It has a lineage in the study of fiction and poetry in the United States beginning in the late 1950s, and a separate genealogy in architecture dating from the work of Robert Venturi in the mid 1960s. Leslie Fieder and Susan Sontag attempted to define a postmodernism in terms of the emerging counterculture of the 1960s; William Spanos' interpretation in the early 1970s began with Heidegger's ontology; thereafter the term became somewhat more inclusive (Bertens, 1986).

In France, the situation is more complex. Poststructuralist thought has its origins in Alexandre Kojéve's and Jean Hyppolite's “existentialist” readings of Hegel and is foreshadowed in the “structuralism” of Lacan, Lévi-Strauss and others. Here the master discipline is Imguistics (Saussure), m both its struc turalist and poststructuralist modes, and in its seemingly endless developments and theoretical refinements of analysis: semiotics, schizoanalysis, deconstruct tionism. It draws upon Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of occidental rationality and Martin Heidegger's “destruction” of western metaphysics. Poststructuralism, evinced in the work of people like Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, surfaced in the late 1960s to flourish in the French speaking world in the 1970s and in anglophone culture in the 1980s. Lyotard's (1984) The Postmodern Condition, a book that was first published in France in 1979, crystallized the French critique of reason following a Kantian and Wittgensteinian line of thought.

In Britain, the story is very diflerent. Hayward and Kerr (1987: 4), for in stance, claim that British academics were especially inhospitable to postmod ernism in the 1980s. This resistance, they comment, may be attributed to a prudent skepticism, but also “reflected the substantial institutional investment in dominant theoretical paradigms.” They see Jean Baudrillard as the key figure in popularising postmodernism. His works, like those of other French poststructuralists, appeared in English only in the early 1980s. These works were received more enthusiastically in North America and Australia (especially in journals like Art and Text, Semiotext(e) and ZG) than in Britain. It was not until 1985 that the first significant signs of engaged debate in Britain became manifest, in a weekend conference on postmodernism organized by London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. Even with the presence of Lyotard this event failed to stimulate a broad cultural debate or anything like a general theoretical project (Hayward and Kerr, 1987: 4).

The situation in Germany is interestmg, if ambiguous. David Wellbery (1985: 229) claims that in Germany the term “postmodernism” has not enjoyed widespread accepted usage. Having said that, however, he goes on to construe postmodernism in terms of “the institutional saturation of life,” “the cyberne-tization and medialization of cultural communication,” and “the emergence of political forces of a number of groups that have traditionally been excluded from the political forum”: all of which are prominent themes in German sociology. He asserts there is no unified postmodern philosophy and cautions us against using the terms “modernism” and “postmodernism” as if they were names with established referents. At the same time, he identifies contextual factors surrounding Habermas' lecture “Modernity Versus Postmodernity,” delivered in 1980.³ While these do not necessarily indicate singular and definitive referents applying in Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they certainly do point toward some systematicity in German thought at the highest levels concerning the themes and issues at stake in “the postmodern debate.”

Postmodernism in non-Western cultures is more problematic and generalizing is difficult. Slemon (1989: 4) claims that the critical projects of postmodernist theory and postcolonial criticism “have remained more or less separate in their strategies and their foundational assumptions.” In current debates the genealogy of postmodernism is often lost or forgotten, along with its cultural and geographic place. Slemon suggests, however, that

postmodernism may yet find a way to join with, not assimilate, post-colonial critical discourse in the necessary post-modernist wave of decol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 POSTMODERN COUNTERNARRATIVES
• Chapter 2 IS THERE A PLACE FOR CULTURAL STUDIES IN COLLEGES OF EDUCATION?
• Chapter 3 SLACKING OFF: BORDER YOUTH AND POSTMODERN EDUCATION
• Chapter 4 MEDIA KNOWLEDGES, WARRIOR CITIZENRY, AND POSTMODERN LITERACIES
• Chapter 5 LIBERATORY POLITICS AND HIGHER EDUCATION: A FREIREAN PERSPECTIVE
• Chapter 6 CRITICAL PEDOGOGY AND CYBERSPACE
• INDEX