John Schostak
2004, currently being revised and developed 2008
It's become a cliché to say that the pace of change today is faster, scarier, more exiciting than ever before. Yet, cliché or not, technology is having a global impact that no one can ignore. It is this impact that people have begun to label as bringing about the post modern condition, a situation where people no longer believe in the inevitable progress of science that will solve all human problems. Rather, science is often seen to be the cause, not the solution to so many social and environmental ills. In the following sections, the new roles of research and their implications for action will be explored.
Research is both a personal and a public act. I research because doing research is interesting, exciting, challenging, and I'm curious to find something out, or I want to inform myself on some matter of urgent concern to me and to others. Increasingly, knowledge is being equated with 'capital', with 'power' and more particularly, with the Power of Big Business, or the State or the Military and the Wealthy. However, as well understood by Bernays the 'father' of modern Public Relations, Power resides in the aggregated powers of each individual. For him, this meant that:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
(Bernays 1928: 37)
This contrasts sharply with the Enlightenment motivation defined by Kant:
Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! "Have courage to use your own understanding!"--that is the motto of enlightenment.
(Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?' (1784))
The reliance on reason went hand in hand with advances in science and the development of industry, and market based economies that were fundamental features of 'modernism'. As material nature could be manipulated and engineered so, it was increasingly believed, could human nature. However, it could be argued that the rational engineering of people was also a betrayal of Kant's fundamental principle of reason, that is, 'the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters.' Allied to bureaucracy, scientific management or managerialism, division of labour, mass production techniques whether in capitalism or state socialism it led to what Weber aptly called the iron cage of reason. Reason reduced to a set of techniques became the engineer of social conformity rather than the principle of freedom. However, the conception of Reason in Descartes' method of systematic doubt was born with that critical edge that the reduction of reason to technical recipes repressed. Perhaps some dimensions of postmodernist thought can be read as a return of the repressed, that is, the kind of skepticism that Modernism excluded in its optimistic rush towards mastery of nature and of social organisation through the use of technical reason.
Postmodernism can be read as modernism taken to its extremes - that is, its extremes of individuality in relation to market choice underpinned by the ever quickening pace of technological change. Rather than the individual acting under a principle of freedom as a critical reflective centre, individuality becames re-packaged for advertising advertising terms of life-style shopping under a principle of market choice where branding becomes more important than content. A feature of modernism, as succintly put by Marx and Engles in the Communist manifesto, was that 'all that is solid melts into air.' Where there had been stability, industrialisation brought change. where it had taken weeks to reach by walking, horse or sail, it took days or mere hours. With the telephone communication across continents became instantaneous. With the internet globalisation increased in pace, reach and complexity. What kind of art, philosophy, research is then appropriate to such conditions? Where postmodernism may be a term to describe contemporary social, economic, cultural and political conditions, a postmodernist perspective seeks to formulate approaches that are appropriate in some way to such conditions.
For Lytotard (1984) what characterises postmodernity is a skepticism or incredulity towards all 'grand narratives', or 'metanarratives', that is, narratives that claim to encompass everything and explain everything. If this is so, then Desartes is not only an architect of modernity through his systematic use of reason but also an architect of postmodernism in his methodical use of doubt towards all prior forms of knowledge, traditional beliefs and views concerning 'truth'. Thus any grand narrative about the purpose of History as progress towards the full realisation of Reason as the basis for a new world of 'freedom' is to be critiqued, whether it is ambitions of Science, Politics or the Economy to bring everything under its control, is to be critiqued as a form of totalitarianism:
One of the main features of postmodernist theory is its suspicion of (and in some cases direct hostility towards) Marxism as a radical theory of social explanation. As a 'mirror image' of capitalism, Marxism is attacked for its modernist assumptions of rationality, social coherence and 'productivism' (that is, its over-reliance on the model of production and the labour-process as an explanatory basis of social life), as well as for its 'macro-theoretical', universalising and totalising methods.
(Fox, 2003: 78)
If not reason, then what can be the prime mover of intellectual curiosity, personal creativity and cultural, social, political action?
It may be a sense of beauty as in art. The surrealists, for example, made art an alternative to Reason. Or, of course, rather than beauty, there may be the will to Power as in Nietzsche. Or again, it could be Desire or Libido as in Freud and Lacan.
The Postmodern world can be experienced as confusing, increasingly complex and dangerous. Through action research, it is said, professionals can inform their own decision making and improve the quality of social action. Teachers, doctors, lawyers, business people can all employ such research strategies. However, in whose interest are they to be employed? The danger is that action research can become simply another sophisticated surveillance and control technique 'in the best interests' of clients. Action Research: the reformation of maladjusted institutions provides a general argument and an approach for employing action research not as a service to taken for granted organisational needs but in a subversive or critical mode that opens up possibilities for creativity and change. In Action Research and the Point Instant of Change, a number of uses of action research are idenitifed and discussed. These are further developed in Schostak 2002.
Modernist models of action can be thought of as like the architecture of Le Corbusier, full of straight lines that stop for no one!
Central to understanding action in the postmodern scene is a reconceptualisation of the 'curriculum'. A curriculum, it is argued in Modernism, Post Modernism: The Curriculum of Surfaces is not a rigid body of information to be transmitted, but rather a set of courses of inquiry, reflection, expression and action. Curricula are like the tracks left behind and can be known more in retrospect than in anticipation. Democratic action, the freedom to think and to do and to engage in community with others should be the purpose of any process of education. Professionals, as do all others, have a choice: either to employ knowledge and 'expert action' for purposes of surveillance and control; or, to employ processes of critical inquiry to inform and support the free development of individuals and their communities.
The postmodern attitude has been defined as being skeptical of all metanarratives, all grand theories which would explain everything. It is simply that no theory is able to explain everything. Something is always left out. In the rush to dump grand narratives of how the world works or should work, what has often been lost is the hope of regenerating solidarity, of stimulating great social movements for change. Socialism seemed to offer that hope of a changed world where social justice rather than greed would dominate. The contemporary world seems more in line with the macabre visions of a de Sade or the paranoid hallucinations of the insane: Chez Sade: what's cooking tonight? Soul Murder, replied the Judge: Some draft notes about collaboration between consenting partners
education, schooling and postmodernism
It is useful to distinguish between schooling and education. Often they are used interchangably. However, I find it useful to use the term schooling to refer to the processes through which minds and behaviours are moulded according to the formal or informal, hidden or overt, prescriptions of authorities, whereas education
far from being a mere deliverer of curicula, of syllabi, of social values and so on, has a perspective on the issues of social organisation that are unique. Its role is to facilitate inquiry and encourage an awareness of structures and processes of cultural/social life, and to promote self expression and action in the world.
As such education draws out the possibilities for change and development, creativity, understanding, self expression and cultural, political, economic, personal, ethical action. What consitutes a curriculum is thus different in each case. Under schooling a curriculum is whaever is imposed by some powerful other. Under education the curriculum is an exploration of possibilities. As an extreme - perhaps caricaturish example I have described the curriculum in terms of its resemblances to the experiences of Judge Schreber who wrote a book on the impact of his father'sapproach to training on his mental state - I call it the paranoid curriculum. It uncomfortably parallels the characteristics of contemporary schooling in many societies - see in particular a study of violence in schools around the world, by Harber (2004), or my own earlier studies of Maladjusted Schooling (1983) and the Violent Imagination (Schostak 1986) or the forbidden discourse more widely in society (Schostak 1993). The arguments that are presented do not suggst that education does not take place in schools but that the organisation of schooling inhibits teachers and children, lecturers and students, people throughout all walks of life from engaging in the kinds of practices that would facilitate the free play of education - the drawing out of possibilities for creative, productive, enjoyable, free and democratic forms of self and social expression and action. Given that this is an age where many, if not all, of the certainties that were accepted in previous epochs are being challenged, then it makes sense that education becomes a fundamental process for drawing out the implications of alternative world views, of societies, organisations and cultures that are under constant change whether due to the impact of technological change or the challenges of new systems of belief and understanding the world(s) about. The postmodern curriculm, then, is one that addresses the issues that are raised by uncerainty, the challenges of change, difference and diversity. The challenges are explored in several papers: Voices and Visions, biographical curricula, the curriculum of surfaces.
If both modernity and postmodernity can be seen in the Cartesian reason built by means of a system of doubting all then an approach that encompasses and transcends that move is beyond both. However, there is also the 'enlightenment move' that Kant founded upon the freedom to employ reason publicly in all matters (see 'philosophical postions'). It is about constructing spaces publically through the mutual use of reason in its broadest sense, not in its technical bureaucratic sense. Radical research (Schostak and Schostak 2008) opens such an approach. How does that mutuality take place?
A mutual engagement in public space may have all the aggression of a boxing match but also a sense of rules through which the fight takes place. Otherwise, there would be the all out violence of the Hegelian struggle unto death. In each case there is the public stage where recognition by another is sought. That sense of recognition can be achieved in many ways. How then, can public spaces be created where people achieve their freedom on the basis of mutual regard for all? Radical research creates the conditions for public debate through the inclusion of all. It is a project that can never end since there are always new ways of seeing, new ways of expressing and new concerns, demands and circumstances to be taken into account in public debate, decision making and action. Radical research thus constitutes itself through a focus on the political in everyday life.The notion of the political is, of course ambiguous. First it refers to the system of politics - whether totalitarian or democratic - that has been instituted to govern a particular territory. On the other, it refers to that eruptive moment where demands are made against, or despite, the prevailaing system of government. It is that moment when what has been instituted is placed into question. The distinction has been made by Rancière (...) in the context of his discussion of the role of 'disagreement' in constructing a politics that is always open to difference. It has further been elaborated by Mouffe and Laclau in their conception of a radical democratic practice, where in Mouufe's view democracy is the unfinished revolution because it is essential unfinishable.
What has been repressed and what is always beyond being repressed is the cry that seeks to be recognised under whatever circumstances and within whatever insittuted political structure.
(remains to be completed)
References
Bernays, E. (1928) Propaganda, reprinted 2005 with an introduction by Mark Crispin Miller, Brooklyn, New York: ig publishing
Fox, N. F. (2003) The New Sartre. Explorations in Postmodernism, New York, London; Continuum
Harber, C. (2004) Schooling as violence. How schools harm pupils and societies, RoutledgeFalmer: London and new York
Lyotard, J. F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, forward by Frederic Jameson, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 10, Manchester: Manchester University Press