Having been forced to study postmodern clap-trap in English, I can point out the single main flaw in this idea that "many readings" will allow a person to "evaluate critically the relevance of culture to the world in which they live". If you want to translate the last quotation into normal prose, it would read "explain away everything as a relationship of power, thus encouraging cynicism of all power, and forwarding politically correct views of society from a strictly 'progressive' position, all the while destroying the real acheivement of literature".

The world is only a "postmodern world" because we are teaching children to ignore what is blatantly true and self-evident. The question is this: why should we be teaching children with theories derived from the philosophies of men who claimed that there was no truth, only the politically expedient? Simply put, giving in to postmodern degeneracy is repudiating the great acheivements of western civilisation.

Thank you Margaret for a useful account of the developments around the “label” debate. I might offer the cheeky suggestion of Bruno Latour’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour) that we have never been modern. The labelling game clearly upsets folk who “know” how the world “really” is. It has always been so. I for one am not persauded that teaching folk “truths” is a particularly clever thing to do in 2006 and beyond. We live in a dangerous and unpredictable world in which teaching students how to think and act in the world ought to be the name of the game. No easy task as any analysis, postmodern or otherwise ought to show.

DFXX, I found Maragaret's article a lot more meaningful than your post, even though I am not convinced of the virtues of postmodernism as a teaching device. What do you refer to as 'blatantly true and self-evident'? The mere posing of my question undermines your confident statement. Note: I am not dismissing you view, just asking you to elaborate so I can understand it.

Slightly off topic, but something on the ideas of post-modernism...

I'll never forget the story of an English professor who one day spent copious hours in the library. As the library was closing one night, he was forced to leave, but found himself outside in a rain storm.

He looked across the street and saw a sign "Recovered Umbrellas". 'At last!' he thought and walked over to see if he could purchase one, an 'umbrella for his recovery'. As he neared the store, he realised it was an umbrella repairs shop, not an umbrella sales shop. No matter how much he wanted the sign to mean a store which sold umbrellas, it could only mean what its writer actually intended it to mean- an umbrella repairs shop.

This guy had a post-grad degree in English but it took this simple sign to understand that the meaning of communication is defined by what the communicator intends to communicate, not what the interpreter wants to interpret.

I believe this is contrary to the ideas of post-modernism, however, it makes a lot more sense to me.

Ah yes, postmodernism. Something which came after something else in a linear, longitudinal progression of time and history. Curious, that a cultural paradigm promoting the irrational should define itself using old rational modernist concepts and words. So how are we to interpret this duality in lateral, non modernist terms? How are we to interpret something which can't explain itself without contradiction? How could we define, rename or reinvent postmodernism using its own principles? And then, what would that mean?

Perhaps we could rename it pre-next-thing. No, that's not correct, that's still on a timeline of sorts. What about omni-directional-timelessness-ism - something that defies rational positioning in both space and time? Yes. Now we're starting to get somewhere. But wait a minute. We're not supposed to get somewhere. That would define our position. We must remember that to be somewhere would be, by definition, contradictory to our post modernist ambitions.

We have to be very careful in postmodernism that we don't define ourselves. That would be compliance with that old nasty white man's authoritarian modernism that brought health, wealth and creativity to the world. We must ensure that we are unambiguously ambiguous. We must express ourselves in such terms and mediums that those who attempt to interpret our works are able to place any meaning upon them that they so fancy, because when we created the work, it doesn't matter what we really meant. Our work must be left open-ended to be interpreted by the whims of others in their post modernist spheres of influence and existence. To do anything else would be shockingly modernist.

Now, does this all sound like nonsense to you?

Well, of course it is. And so is this rubbish called postmodernism. Nothing but utter, unmitigated and total nonsense. There is no comprehension of postmodernism, because it is a nonsense. It's a non ism. And that which isn't, doesn't make any sense and cannot be understood. Postmodernism by its nature can be anything anyone wants it to be and so I am entitled by it's very own rules to declare it to be bullsh'!

Post modernism is a set of ideas that, by definition, cannot be defined. But actually I know foucault about post-modernism.

I liked Margaret's references to John Howard, linked to his criticisms of postmodernism as a tool for the teaching of literature. While I partly agreed with Howard on this, part of me also thought 'he should talk'. The master of spin, moral relativism and I think, the originator of the 'non-core promise' concept, Howard seeks to take the moral high ground when criticising others but bases most of his government's policies and decisions on either crass political expediency or the serving of narrow interests.

If postmodernism is partly a reaction to the uncertainties of modern living, Howard with his spin and his dancing on a pinhead when caught in the wrong has done more than most to add to the uncertainty of modern living.

Thank you for such a lucid description of the development of postmodern thought. We should be making sure that those students at school and university do understand the ideological underpinnings of the texts they read - from high or low culture. We live a world of multiple voices, jostling for recognition, and we all need to be able to distinguish between those voices that are just the loudest and those which are just.

But actually I feel that post modernism appears to have its geographical roots in French culture and and its timing is related specifically to the early decades after the Second World War.

France was one of Nazi Germany's greatest collaborators. It also had a long term and deep seated anti-Semetism, as demonstrated by the Dreyfuss Affair. Even Italy collaborated with the Nazis when it came to killing Jews less than France.

Additionally the French willingly sent workers to Germany to aid that country's war effort. French factories manufactured aircraft and weapons for Germany. The French Resistance was only ever supported by a small percentage of the French population.

The collapse of the French military in May 1940 was an absolute tragedy, compounded by the valour of some units and many individual soldiers in the face of defeatism and a lack of political will.

Post WW2 the 'market' was ripe for a new philosphy that would not only excuse the French for their shameful part in W2, but would also wipe it away.

After all, if there are no absolutes, only narratives, the sending of French Jews to German death camps can be simply explained away by the narrative, after all, no absolutes, no right or wrong, so no harm / no foul.

Post modernism was the way that French academia could simply adopt a type of collective amnesia - as if the occupation / collaboration never took place.

"We live a world of multiple voices, jostling for recognition, and we all need to be able to distinguish between those voices that are just the loudest and those which are just."

Piper, how do you define 'just'?

Sincerely,

Yngnluvnit

Thank you, I wil remain a modernist. Thus I can from a distance in time dream with wonder of that outstanding creature of the French enlightenment, Emilie de Breteuil, Marquise du Chatelet. Oh what a girl !!

PK posits that postmodernism could be partly a reaction to the
uncertainties of modern living.
I suggest that the blind acceptance of a postmodernist rationale may cause many of those uncertainties, by inducing the belief that “anything goes” in modern life, not whether something is worthy, and why.
“Why” demands an ability to measure. Against what?

The most profound knowledge possible of the origins of cultural expression is a valid step in understanding your own standards, and how you intend to apply them.

Teaching should not just be about imposing one’s own knowledge and attitudes on students.
It should be about guiding them to find truth; how to differentiate between fact and opinion.
How can a philosophical approach arise if one has no
wide understanding or appreciation of prior reasoning.

Murder.
Where to start?
Shakespeare, or Channel Ten?

PK's comments are very valid, especially JWH's moral relativism.

As for Ponder, if postmodernism meant no truth or total relativism then you might have a point. But i doesn't mean those things, as Professor Sankey's piece tries to argue. Post-modernism is a critical response to modernism, and modernism has never been as full of certainties as you seem to think. What certainties it held have been shattered by some of modernism's results, such as the depredations of colonization, WW1, nuclear weapons, and more. Postmodernism is a rational, critical response to those disasters, and is a project to renew our civilization, not destroy it.

Not too bad an article, but Sankey is responsible for one glaring oversight. When she described the "othered" voices of colonialism, feminism etc, she forgot to mention the original "othered" group, whose emergence through long struggle enabled the conditions for feminist, gender and anti-racial criticism to occur: the working classes.
I admit that drawing attention to the overall historical record, which identifies the process and ALL victims of historical change, to relations of ownership and production, division of labour; alienation, ideology, reification and commodification, attention does tend to draw focus away from the proposition of middle-class (women) as exclusive or sole victimised (and entitled) "other".
Personally, I would reject this new Aristotelianism, which perpetrates a new timelesssness that encourages preoccupation with the wants of a small, cossetted group, the privileged bourgeoisie. This new "understanding" arises of the dislocation and and decoupling of the nature and fact and narrative of historical origins and processes privilging an elite whose position has been gained at the expense of so many others: workers, women, aborigines-just about everyone.
It ignores the current problems of globalisation; hetero and homogeneity, hegemony and the relation of these to the arisen structures and pathologies of capitalism, as to the world's current real miseries, threats and problems. Think of Timor; think of I.R.-think of our Aborigines after the vile slanders heaped upon them by the government last week. All of this to ideologically justify tax cuts to the rich (again!).

Ah, at last a real response! One could argue that Marxism shares a certain critical response to social life with what can be labeled "postmodernism", but yes, postmodern theory as just another mechanism for resinscribing privilege is a strong and telling criticism. One that (forgive me) I have made in a very different context: http://mharrison.wordpress.com/2006/03/17/theory-and-identity-in-taiwan/

I think when I use 'just' I mean able to think in a balanced and fair manner, able to discriminate in the sense of being able to balance and query information critically. But I would be prepared to admit that this was a fairly glib statement, sorry. I do, however, think that the loudest voices are the ones that we hear, not the the wisest. Unfortunately.

Whatever happened to aesthetic appreciation of literary works? Discussion of aesthetics within postmodernism is entirely absent. Why is this? Why have qualities of beauty become the 'new taboo' in critical theory? Postmodernism creates and promotes just as many taboos as it seeks to destroy.

If the postmodern from the late 1950s represented learning as a move from the centre, a move to deny a centre, a move from the grand narrative, a move from the linear ...........AND to consider the relativism of culture, identity, environment, gender, etc then it says that learning is inherently nomadic rather than homogenous, ....... that learning relies on relevance and curiosity far more than memory or the system (even if that system is promoted as the most complete, profound and magnificent tradition in the world).

When quite young, I can remember looking at modern art where it was said literally that form was the content. The content was reduced to the formal arrangement of visual elements and principles that spoke of the aesthetics of the object. This gave us, through the system of reductionism, the object. We had painters like Ad Reinhart with his black square on black paintings. It seemed that modernism in this purity had lost relevance to life.

It was at that time that my thoughts were more with an environment than a system hence artists like Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys offered relevance and curiosity beyond the linear. Mostly I considered this post-object rather than the ubiquity of the lateral ‘postmodern’ that floats free and seemingly today is appropriated to stand in for everything and anything.

It also seems that deeply within the body of modernism was postmodernism.
e.g.
From 1995, with the birth proper of the www it now makes sense that "postmodern" has mutated the modern to reflect a change into the movement it always wanted to be ...... i.e. a hyperlink to the 360 degrees of an infinite meta-narrative with its global network of moderators and always connected. (lateral plus lineal and neither a system but an environment) .......... and coax out of chaos the rudiments of a civility without borders. Perhaps, after all, postmodernism can be “defined” as a continuous inquiry into self-definition.

Keiran, I like your post above. I can relate to what you're saying. Respect. And look, I'm not taking the P here, but your point, "Perhaps, after all, postmodernism can be 'defined' as a continuous inquiry into self-definition", well, couldn't that be colloquially described as navel gazing?

I can't see that that could do any of us any good.

However, you could very well be spot on

Margaret Sankey’s article a terrific explanation of postmodernism. What this discussion throws up is the paradox faced when trying to discuss postmodernism. Consider the following criticisms of postmodernism from this forum:

“Teaching should not just be about imposing one’s own knowledge and attitudes on students.
It should be about guiding them to find truth; how to differentiate between fact and opinion.
How can a philosophical approach arise if one has no wide understanding or appreciation of prior reasoning.”

“Whatever happened to aesthetic appreciation of literary works? Discussion of aesthetics within postmodernism is entirely absent. Why is this? Why have qualities of beauty become the 'new taboo' in critical theory? Postmodernism creates and promotes just as many taboos as it seeks to destroy.”

Our correspondents use terms such as “guiding” truth” “fact” “understanding” “aesthetics” “beauty” “taboos” as if they are somehow absolutes with a single defined meaning. Even if the writers have a clear understanding of what they mean by these terms, how they resonate (great postmodern term btw) with me or anyone else is more than likely to be very different. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand that a hardcore punk, or a stone-age New Guinea tribesman will see the concepts of “truth” and “beauty” and “aesthetics” and even “taboo” very differently.

If we take the argument of one of the correspondents:

“How can a philosophical approach arise if one has no wide understanding or appreciation of prior reasoning.”

Exactly. And surely one of the planks of any understanding and appreciation of reasoning is the capacity to understand that there are many ways of looking at a problem/issue. In a book of unnatural laws I used to own it was put as: Where you stand on an issue depends on where you sit.
So in any discussion about postmodernism we very quickly arrive at the point where the discussion becomes meaningless unless one applies the tool of postmodernism to the analysis. So the only way we can discuss postmodernism (and yes to argue against postmodernism) is to use the tool of postmodern analysis.
How’s that for a conundrum?

Barney

Mark Harrison, thanks for fascinating insight offered through Taiwan link.
Very dense, had me thinking hard. Am shot of personal reductionism and essentialism briefly, through this, and am considering both similarites and differences as to Australia, as well as being opened up to the Taiwanese as brothers and sisters (thanks, therefore, also to Prof. Sankey and On Line Opinion).
How fiercely and minutely are issues of identity fought out from moment to moment against desire, anxiety and fact, and what constantly morphing apprehended forms these tendencies assume.
Given what a mirror Taiwan obviously is as to tendencies down under, I learn I have again rested on my own assumptions.
But, the concept of "nativism", particularly, is a valuable window for insights into how "Australia" and "Australians" can handle their own rapprochements, but more carefully than in the drunkenly careless ways that occur just now. But could be just a personal representation of my aesthetics, most recently exercised in the admiration of the elegent representations of Indonesians suffering in the recent big 'quake. And as Baudrillard would remind us, we know it's not REALLY "real".

Yes, that paper was for a very specialized audience. Glad you got something out of it.

The "modern world" has led to vast growth in human knowledge, understanding and living standards. Without it, Margaret Sankey wouldn't be a professor and we wouldn't be having an intelligent online discussion.

By contrast, postmodernism seems nihilistic and negative, I can't see what it adds to human wellbeing. Conversely, I can see that its impact on the education system damages the life chances and future well-being of many children.

Hamlet, I liked yor ick'l witticism.

On the can't-sleep, won't-sleep graveyard shift, along the Street from a hopefully slumbering Realist, Faustino.

POSTMODERNISM

Postmodernism in poetry begins with the urge to return the political, ethical, historical; to incorporate the sociological, anthropological, pyschological, psycho-historical, indeed a vast gamut of social sciences and humanities material; as well as the physical and biological sciences into the domain of poetry. The poem to the postmodernist is an expression of the narrative and the educative, the serious and the comic, verse and prose. In postmodernist poetry the cry of the heart, as Yeats called it, is being subjected to the play of the mind and all the world’s complexities. This postmodernist poet also paints a great deal of religion and philosophy on his canvass, especially his own religio-philosophy, the Baha’i Faith. -Ron Price with thanks to Marjorie Perloff in Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism, Charles Altieri, Cambridge University Press, NY, 1989, p.381.

Constantly amalgamating disparate experiences,
as if a thought was itself an event to record, a
mechanism of sensibility devouring life, devouring
it, here, on these pages, making the visible, visible,
searching for an articulation of a new plane of
understanding, bringing in all that reading, endless
reading, hour after hour, until your eyes could take
in no more, could stand it not another minute, while
outside cold winds tore into the snow, hot sands blew
against spinifex and rain poured endlessly in the rainforest.
Then came the burnout, as if the brain went on shutdown,
and wandered into black-holes of darkness so intense that
even the body could not move: a rest was required. And
now it seems the work can go on until the final hour, at last.1

Ron Price
6 August 1997

1 these burnouts took place from 1963, perhaps as many as seven to nine times, until just before I began to write poetry extensivley in the early 1990s.