Getting Smart

Feminist Research and Pedagogy within/in the Postmodern

Patti Lather

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1991
• ISBN:
  9781136611087
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The ways in which knowledge relates to power have been much discussed in radical education theory. New emphasis on the role of gender and the growing debate about subjectivity have deepened the discussion, while making it more complex. In Getting Smart, Patti Lather makes use of her unique integration of feminism and postmodernism into critical education theory to address some of the most vital questions facing education researchers and teachers.

1

Framing the Issues

What is really happening, then, is itself a function of frames, which are a kind of fiction. (Hassan, 1987:118)

By way of introduction, let me briefly state the many strands of this book. One is my research into student resistance to liberatory curriculum. As one cannot talk of students learning without talk of teachers teaching, I also look at empowering pedagogy. Another strand of the book is my exploration of what it means to do empirical research in a postpositivist/postmodern era, an era premised on the essential indeterminancy of human experiencing, “the irreducible disparity between the world and the knowledge we might have of it” (White, 1973). A final strand is my desire to write my way to some understanding of the deeply unsettling discourses of postmodernism in a way that doesn't totalize, that doesn't present emergent, multiply-sited, contradictory movements as fixed and monolithic. To write “postmodern” is to simultaneously use and call into question a discourse, to both challenge and inscribe dominant meaning systems in ways that construct our own categories and frameworks as contingent, positioned, partial. My struggle is to find a way of communicating these deconstructive ideas so as to interrupt hegemonic relations and received notions of what our work is to be and to do.

As elaborated in what follows, I continue to share with many academics an ambivalence about the politics of postmodern thought and practice. At present, I align with those attempting to create “a cultural and adversarial postmodernism, a postmodernism of resistance” (Huyssen, 1987:xvi; Foster, 1985). This “critical appropriation of postmodernism” (Hutcheon, 1988b) grows out of the dilemma of those intellectuals who, while committed to emancipatory discourse and modernist strategies (e.g., consciousness-raising), are yet engaged by postmodernism to try to use it in the interests of emancipation.¹ It is this intersection of postmodernism and the politics of emancipation that I put at the center of my attempt to explore what it might mean to generate ways of knowing that can take us beyond ourselves. This chapter provides background for such a project by sketching the basic assumptions which guide my work.

The failure of positivism. My first basic assumption is that a definitive critique of positivism has been established and that our challenge is to pursue the possibilities offered by a postpositivist era. The critique that has amassed over the last 20 years or so regarding the inadequacies of positivist assumptions in the face of human complexity has opened up a sense of possibilities in the human sciences. We live in a period of dramatic shift in our understanding of scientific inquiry, an age which has learned much about the nature of science, its inner workings and its limitations (Kuhn, 1970). Few corners of social inquiry have been impervious to the great ferment over what is seen as appropriate within the boundaries of the human sciences.

Within educational research, while positivism retains its hegemony over practice, its long-lost theoretic hegemony has been disrupted and displaced by a newly hegemonic discourse of paradigm shifts. Interpretive and, increasingly, critical “paradigms”² are posited and articulated (Bredo and Feinberg, 1982; Carr and Kemmis, 1986; Popkewitz, 1984). Unsettlement and contestation permeate discussion of what it means to do educational inquiry. Some talk of crisis (e.g., Phillips, 1987); others talk of a dissemination of legitimacy and an openness to “an experimental moment in the human sciences” (Marcus and Fischer, 1986).

The value-ladenness of inquiry. My second assumption is that ways of knowing are inherently culture-bound and perspectival. Built upon Gramsci’s (1971) thesis that ideology is the medium through which consciousness and meaningfulness operate in everyday life, and Allthusser’s (1971) focus on the materiality of ideology, I conceptualize ideology as the stories a culture tells itself about itself. Within post-Athusserean Marxism or cultural Marxism, ideology is viewed as something people inhabit in very daily, material ways and which speaks to both progressive and determinant aspects of culture (Apple, 1982; Wexler, 1982; Giroux, 1983). Such a stance provides the grounds for both an “openly ideological” approach to critical inquiry (Lather, 1986b) and the necessity of self-reflexivity, of growing awareness of how researcher values permeate inquiry.

Harding (1986) distinguishes between “coercive values—racism, classism, sexism—that deteriorate objectivity” and “participatory values—antiracism, anticlassism, antisexism—that decrease distortions and mystifications in our culture’s explanations and understandings” (p. 249). This second assumption, then, argues that change-enhancing, advocacy approaches to inquiry based on what Bernstein (1983:128) terms “enabling” versus “blinding” prejudices on the part of the researcher have much to offer as we begin to grasp the possibilities of the postpositivist era. As we come to see how knowledge production and legitimation are historically situated and structurally located, “scholarship that makes its biases part of its argument arises as a new contender for legitimacy.”³

The possibilities of critical social science. A third assumption that guides my work concerns the possibilities for a critical social science (Fay, 1987). Within the context of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, critical reason was used as the interlocutor of instrumental reason, the driving force behind modernism. What Van Maanen (1988) calls “critical tales” ask questions of power, economy, history and exploitation. In the words of Poster (1989), “critical theory springs from an assumption that we live amid a world of pain, that much can be done to alleviate that pain, and that theory has a crucial role to play in that process” (p. 3). The various feminisms, neo-Marxisms and some of the poststructuralisms, then, become kinds of critical theories which are informed by identification with and interest in oppositional social movements. While in practice not unknown to have instrumental moments, critical theories are positioned in relation to counter-hegemonic social movements and take as their charge “‘the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age’ “(Marx, quoted in Fraser, 1987:31). As critical practices derive their forms and meanings in relation to their changing historical conditions, “a position of resistance can never be established once and for all, but must be perpetually refashioned and renewed to address adequately those shifting conditions and circumstances that are its ground” (Solomon-Godeau, 1988:204).⁴

The politics of empowerment. My fourth assumption is that an emancipatory, critical social science must be premised upon the development of research approaches which empower those involved to change as well as understand the world. My usage of empowerment opposes the reduction of the term as it is used in the current fashion of individual self-assertion, upward mobility and the psychological experience of feeling powerful.⁵ Drawing on Gramsci’s (1971) ideas of counter-he-gemony, I use empowerment to mean analyzing ideas about the causes of powerlessness, recognizing systemic oppressive forces, and acting both individually and collectively to change the conditions of our lives (Bookman and Morgan, 1988; Shapiro, 1989). It is important to note that, in such a view, empowerment is a process one undertakes for oneself; it is not something done “to” or “for” someone: “The heart of the idea of empowerment involves people coming into a sense of their own power, a new relationship with their own contexts” (Fox, 1988:2).

This raises many questions about vanguard politics and the limits of consciousness-raising. The historical role of self-conscious human agency and the efforts of intellectuals to inspire change toward more equitable social arrangements are precisely the aspects of liberatory politics most problematized by postmodernism (Cocks, 1989). Derrida (1982), for example, deconstructs “enlighten” as a light-based metaphor or heliocentric view of knowledge which positions the emancipators as “senders” and the emancipated as passive “receivers” of rays. These problems are at the center of this book which is written from within but against the grain of the emancipatory tradition given its foregrounding of the questions raised about that tradition by postmodernism.

The challenges of postmodernism. Hence, the central assumption undergirding this work is that postmodernism profoundly challenges the politics of emancipation sketched out in the preceding basic assumptions. In terms of definition, throughout the book I sometimes use postmodern to mean the larger cultural shifts of a post-industrial, post-colonial era and poststructural to mean the working out of those shifts within the arenas of academic theory. I also, however, use the terms interchangeably. This conflation of postmodern with poststructural is not popular with some cultural critics (e.g., Grossberg, 1988b: 171), but another, in the same edited collection, divides postmodernism into “neoconservative postmodernism” and “poststructural postmodernism” (Foster, 1988:251). Hall (1985) adds the term “discourse theory” to the confusion and describes it as follows:

The general term, “discourse theory,” refers to a number of related, recent, theoretical developments in linguistics and semiotics, and psychoanalytic theory, which followed the “break” made by structuralist theory in the 1970s, with the work of Barthes and Althusser. Some examples in Britain would be recent work on film and discourse in Screen, critical and theoretical writing influenced by Lacan and Foucault, and post-Derridean deconstructionism. In the U.S., many of these trends would now be referred to under the title of “postmodernism.” (p. 113)

Any effort at definition domesticates, analytically fixes, and mobilizes pro and contra positions. Lattas (1989) suggests that a way to diffuse this is to get rid of the progressivist idea of history encoded in the “post” of postmodernism (p. 92). As a conjunction of debates and circulating ideas, postmodernism is not positioned as a “successor regime.” Both/and and neither/nor the disease and the cure of modernist excesses and failures, postmodernism is “the horizon of our contemporaneity” (Arac, 1988:vii). Rather than a progressive development, it is movements which “cross each other and give rise to something else, some other site” (Derrida, quoted in Kearney, 1984:122), a conjunction of often contradictory ideas and practices which has come to be coded with the name “postmodern.”

Spanos (1987) advises that remarks toward a definition be used to displace the desire to comprehend, to “clearly understand.” In that spirit, I offer Fraser’s and Nicholson’s (1988) definition which draws on Lyotard’s (1984) identification of modernism with “grand narratives”:

The postmodern condition is one in which “grand narratives” of legitimation are no longer credible. By “grand narratives” Lyotard means … overarching philosophies of history like the Enlightenment story of the gradual but steady progress of reason and freedom, Hegel’s dialectic of the Spirit coming to know itself, and, most importantly, Marx’s drama of the forward march of human productive capacities via class conflict culminating in proletarian revolution, (p. 86)

What is foregrounded in this definition is the postmodern break with totalizing, universalizing “metanarratives” and the humanist view of the subject that undergirds them. Humanism posits the subject as an autonomous individual capable of full consciousness and endowed with a stable “self constituted by a set of static characteristics such as sex, class, race, sexual orientation. Such a subject has been at the heart of the Enlightenment project of progress via education, reflexive rationality, and human agency (Bowers, 1987; Peller, 1987). Such a subject has been decentered, refashioned as a site of disarray and conflict inscribed by multiple contestatory discourses. “Grand narratives” are displaced by “the contingent, messy, boundless, infinitely particular, and endlessly still to be explained” (Murdoch, quoted in Spanos, 1987:240). In Lyo-tard’s (1984) already classic definition, postmodernism is “that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms … that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them, but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable” (p. 81).

Hence, contemporary intellectuals work within a time Foucault argues is noteworthy for its disturbing of the formerly secure foundations of our knowledge and understanding. Foundational views of knowledge are increasingly under attack (Bernstein, 1983; Smith, 1984; Sheridan, 1980; Gergen, 1985; Haraway, 1985, 1988; Harding, 1986). It is the end of the quest for a “God’s Eye” perspective (Smith and Heshusius, 1986) and the confrontation of what Bernstein calls “the Cartesian Anxiety” (1983), the lust for absolutes, for certainty in our ways of knowing. It is a time of demystification, of critical discourses which disrupt “the smooth passage of ‘regimes of truth’ “(Foucault, quoted in Smart, 1983:135), “not to substitute an alternative and more secure foundation, but to produce an awareness of the complexity, contingency and fragility of historical forms and events” (Smart, 1983:76).

In this context of ferment, educational inquiry is increasingly viewed as no more outside the power/knowledge nexus than any other human enterprise. Lincoln and Guba have a chapter in their Naturalistic Inquiry (1985) entitled, “Is Being Value-Free Valuable?” The pages of the Educational Researcher increasingly pay attention to issues of subjectivity (Peshkin, 1988) and the politics of method (Eisner, 1988). Postmodernism implodes the concepts of “disinterested knowledge” and the referential, innocent notions of language that continue to haunt the efforts of educational inquiry to move away from positivism and to loosen the grip of psychologism on its theories and practices. As such, educational research is another site where postmodernism exacerbates an already felt erosion of basic assumptions.

The following chart⁶ brings all of this definitional work together and presents an image of positionality regarding the project that I have been involved with over the last few years concerning the methodological implications of the various critical theories. This chart is grounded in Habermas’ (1971) thesis of the three categories of human interest that underscore knowledge claims: prediction, understanding, emancipation. It assumes postpositivism, the loss of positivism’s theoretic hegemony in the face of the sustained and trenchant criticisms of its basic assumptions. I have added the non-Habermasian column of “deconstruct.”⁷ Each of the three postpositivist “paradigms” offers a different approach to generating and legitimating knowledge; each is a contender for allegiance. I place my work in the emancipatory column with great fascination with the implications of deconstruction for the research and teaching that I do in the name of liberation.

Postpositivist Inquiry

Predict	Understand	Emancipate	Deconstruct
positivism	interpretive	critical	poststructural
	naturalistic	neo-Marxist	postmodern
	constructivist	feminist	post-paradigmatic diaspora
	phenomenological	praxis-oriented
	hermeneutic	educative
		Freirian participatory action research

The chapters which follow will go into greater detail regarding the above chart; what is of note here is the plethora of terms used to describe postpositivist work. Whether heard as cacophany or polyphony, such profusion attests to the loosening of the grip of positivism on theory and practice in the human sciences. An explosion has transformed the landscape of what we do in the name of social inquiry. This explosion goes by many names: phenomenological, hermeneutic, naturalistic, critical, feminist, neo-Marxist, constructivist. And now, of course, we have the proliferation of “post-conditions,” including “post-paradigmatic diaspora” (Caputo, 1987:262) which undercuts the very concept of paradigm itself. All of these terms question the basic assumptions ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Framing the Issues
• 2 Postmodernism and the Discourses of Emancipation: Precedents, Parallels and Interruptions
• 3 Research as Praxis
• 4 Feminist Perspectives on Empowering Research Methodologies
• 5 Deconstructing/Deconstructive Inquiry: The Politics of Knowing and Being Known
• 6 Reinscribing Otherwise: Postmodernism and the Human Sciences
• 7 Staying Dumb? Student Resistance to Liberatory Curriculum
• Postscript, Epilogue, Afterword, and Coda: Seductions and Resistances
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index