Bloland, Harland G.

Postmodernism and higher education.

Journal of Higher Education. 66(5):521-559. 1995 Sep.


Abstract

The concepts of four poststructuralist/postmodern authors--Jacques

Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard--are

examined in terms of their implications for higher education and the

academy's values of merit, community, and autonomy.






Postmodern perspectives, terms, and assumptions have penetrated the core

of American culture over the past thirty years. Postmodernism's primary

significance is its power to account for and reflect vast changes in our

society, cultures, polity, and economy as we move from a production to a

consumption society, shift from national to local and international

politics, commingle high and low culture, and generate new social

movements. Postmodernism has captured our interest because it involves a

stunning critique of modernism, the foundation upon which our thinking and

our institutions have rested. Today, modernist values and institutions are

increasingly viewed as inadequate, pernicious, and costly. Postmodernists

attack the validity and legitimacy of the most basic assumptions of

modernism. Because higher education is quintessentially a modern

institution, attacks on modernism are attacks on the higher education

system as it is now constituted. The modern/postmodern debate began in the

United States in the 1960s in the humanities, gained momentum in the 1970s

in the arts and social theory, and by the early 1980s became, as Andreas

Huyssen noted, "one of the most contested terrains in the intellectual

life of Western society" [59, p. 357]. Today, having swept through the

humanities and social sciences, the modern/postmodern debate has ebbed,

and in literary studies at least, scholars refer to the current period as

"post-theory" [101, p. A9].



In anthropology and other social sciences, postmodernism has had

transformational effects, but currently many scholars who have been

influenced by it distance themselves from the term, asserting that it

identifies others, but not them [70, p. 563]. In literary studies,

scholars continue to employ postmodern conceptualization extensively,

while they assume that those who use the words also know the theory. No

such assumption can be made in higher education studies concerning

familiarity with modern/postmodern theory. Despite its significance in the

past three decades the modern/postmodern debate has had relatively little

direct impact on the study of higher education. The term "postmodern"

appears with increasing frequency in the titles of presentations on

postsecondary education in American Educational Research Association

presentations, but few of the discussions address directly the background

of the modern/postmodern divide that provides the vocabulary for the

issues addressed.(1)



The paucity of literature in higher education on postmodernism is

surprising, because the postmodern debate has been in the foreground for

many education scholars who write about the public schools, particularly

in the fields of curriculum studies, school administration, and

educational theory [3, 37, 68]. Still, we rarely find postmodernism

studies in the ASHE Reader series, in the ASHE/ERIC monographs, the

Journal of Higher Education, the Review of Higher Education, or Change

magazine. Postmodernism does find a place in The Chronicle of Higher

Education articles, but they are not authored by higher education

professors. The meagerness of higher educationists' general engagement

with the postmodern is unfortunate, for despite the fact that the high

tide of debate seems to be waning, the postmodern/modern discussion

continues to have an unsettling but significant impact on the way in which

we now think about society, politics, economics, and education. Thus, the

terms and concepts of this debate are still with us, and the postmodern

critique affects every field of inquiry that deals with human society.



Perhaps nowhere are the issues of the postmodern/modern debate more

sharply drawn, more clearly illuminated, and more difficult to acknowledge

than in higher education in the United States. For higher education is so

deeply immersed in modernist sensibilities and so dependent upon modernist

foundations that erosion of our faith in the modernist project calls into

question higher education's legitimacy, its purpose, its activities, its

very raison detre. In attacking modernism, postmodernism presents a

hostile interpretation of much of what higher education believes it is

doing and what it stands for.



This study examines postmodernism and higher education by presenting four

seminal postmodernist authors' ideas that provide a framework for

discussions for much of the literature on postmodernism: Jacques Derrida,

Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard. Derrida and

Foucault are viewed as representative of poststructuralist thought from

which postmodernism as a perspective is derived, and Lyotard and

Baudrillard are reflective of the view of postmodernism as a historical

period. The postmodern concepts of these authors are discussed in terms of

their implications for merit, community, and autonomy, three crucial

characteristics of modernist higher education as it is situated in

American society. Twelve reactions to the postmodern are introduced, each

of which purports to interpret the consequences and illuminate the uses of

postmodern thought. A summary of postmodernism's legacy for higher

education concludes the discussion.



Postmodernism as a Perspective



The terms "modern" and "postmodern" occupy no fixed positions; their

meanings are imprecise and highly contested. Despite this ambiguity,

however, these concepts are critical reference points for discussions that

try to make sense of what appear to be disparate cultural, economic,

political, and social changes taking place in architecture, art,

philosophy, literary criticism, the social sciences, in every day life, in

popular culture, in industry, business, technology, and education.



Modernism



Modernism requires faith that there are universals that can be discovered

through reason, that science and the scientific method are superior means

for arriving at truth and reality, and that language describes and can be

used as a credible and reliable means of access to that reality. With its

privileging of reason, modernism has long been considered the basis for

the emancipation of men and women from the bonds of ignorance associated

with stagnant tradition, narrow religions, and meager educations.

Championing democracy, modernism promises freedom, equality, justice, the

good life, and prosperity. Equating merit with high culture, modernism

provides expectations of more rigorous standards for and greater enjoyment

of the arts and architecture. Through science and scientific method,

modernism promises health, the eradication of hunger, crime, and poverty.

Modernist science claims to be progressing toward true knowledge of the

universe and to be delivering ever higher standards of living with

effectiveness and efficiency. Modernism promises stability, peace, and a

graspable sense of the rational unfolding of history. Modernism equates

change with progress, which is defined as increasing control over nature

and society.



Perhaps the most important means for understanding and carrying out the

modernist project is education. Higher education is deeply embedded in the

ideals, institutions, and vocabulary of modernism. Higher education trusts

that merit should be rewarded through good jobs, promotions, higher

status, and prestige. Higher education defends the notion that knowledge

and expertise are important for problem solving in the society. Higher

education assumes that science, scientific methods, and the science

sensibility are better means for discovering and creating truth than

tradition. Higher education treats high culture as separate from and

better than popular culture. Higher education values differentiation,

recognizing that there are different discourse communities in the academy

and that there is a difference between the inside and outside of

institutions of higher education. While valuing diversity, colleges and

universities treasure community and institutional autonomy.



Higher education assumes that middle-class values are good for society and

for individuals, that parents and students want middle-class status, and

that the road to upward mobility and the way to prevent downward mobility

or skidding is through education. Higher education assumes that progress

is possible and good, and that the way to move in that direction is

through education. Higher education assumes that community is good, that

some fundamental set of values, some basic accepted rules of conduct, and

some sense of limits are good.



However, over time, modernism has displayed another, quite negative face.

Although modernism has been a spectacularly successful and powerful

orientation, it has also organized and constructed its own serious

failures. For Max Weber (a doubting, skeptical modernist), reason in the

form of instrumental rationality has generated the overorganized modern

economic order which in turn has imprisoned people in an "iron cage" of

work incentives As Weber writes, "This order is now bound to the technical

and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the

lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism . . . with

irresistible force" [97, p. 181]. The highly rationalized world Weber

described as our modern fate is characterized as having lost the sense of

enchantment that tradition provides for societies [41, p. 155]. The

Frankfort school of critical social theory, with such luminaries as

Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer [1], and Herbert Marcuse [71] offered

pessimistic interpretations of modernism, seeing in it the rise of

faceless, characterless mass societies. Even Jurgen Habermas, the current

generation's premier Frankfort school intellectual who believes in

Enlightenment values and goals and whose project is to save modernism,

sees rationality as having strayed from its proper direction, resulting in

highly dysfunctional institutions in the world society [51, 52]. Many of

the Frankfort school's ideas have been incorporated into the postmodern

diatribe against modernism. Instrumental rationality in its current

postmodern reading is seen as having forged the consumer society, in which

commodification, the definition of persons and activities solely in terms

of their market value, has become dominant. Science is now associated as

much with death through annihilation, environmental problems, and

uncontrollable technology as it is with progress and benign innovation.



Richard Bernstein reminds us that the terms, "reason" and "rationality"

now "evoke images of domination, oppression, repression, patriarchy,

sterility, violence, totality, totalitarianism, and even terror" [12, p.

32]. Thus, fascism, nazism, and communism, as well as democracy, are

associated with modernism. As Stephen White writes, "The costs of Western

modernization or rationalization are being progressively reestimated

upward" [99, p. 5]. In this negative image of modernism, postmodernists

deeply implicate higher education.



Poststmodernism and Poststructuralism: Derrida and Foucault



Postmodernism may be seen as a perspective [67, p. 14), a means for

understanding the conditions we now live in. It may also be viewed as a

new epoch, or a new historical era. In either case, the major concepts and

ideas of postmodernism provide a devastating attack on modernism. This

assault renders as questionable the major assumptions and assertions of

our modern culture. That is, it makes problematic what is taken for

granted in a wide range of topics. The postmodern problematic zeroes in on

hierarchies of any kind -- and hierarchies are inherent in modern life --

with the view that "there are no natural hierarchies, only those we

construct" [57, p. 13].



Postmodernism interrogates the modern system, which is built on

continuing, persistent efforts to totalize or unify, pointing out that

totalization hides contradictions, ambiguities, and oppositions and is a

means for generating power and control. Institutions of modernity come

under critical postmodern scrutiny, and among the primary institutions

open to questioning are the college and university. To see postmodernism

as a way of understanding the limits of modernism is to view our world in

the midst of profound change and to concentrate on the disillusionment we

are experiencing with some of our deepest assumptions and cherished hopes

relating to our most important institutions. We seek rational solutions in

a world that increasingly distrusts reason as a legitimate approach to

problem solving. We try to move forward in our lives and through our

institutions in a milieu of declining faith in the possibility of

progress. We act on dimly apprehended foundational assumptions, for

example, faith in science and the scientific method, even as we grow

increasingly suspicious of all grand narratives. Postmodernism as a

perspective (often printed "postmodern" rather than "post-modern," defined

as an era) borrows extensively from the definitions and concepts of

poststructuralism. Thus it focuses upon the indeterminacy of language, the

primacy of discourse, the decentering and fragmentation of the concept of

self, the significance of the "other," a recognition of the tight,

unbreakable power/knowledge nexus, the attenuation of a belief in

metanarratives, and the decline of dependence upon rationalism.

Poststructuralist thought developed in France in the 1970s as a reaction

to the French structuralist attempts to build a rigorous, objective,

scientific analysis of social life through the discovery of the

underlying, deep structural linguistic and social rules that organize

language and social systems [13, pp. 18, 20]. Poststructuralist concepts

have been appropriated, broadened, and extended by the international

movement of postmodernism, which has applied the poststructural ideas to a

much larger number of topics in its wide-ranging attacks on modernism.



What do these poststructural/postmodern concepts mean and what is their

significance for society and for higher education? Much of this

orientation is related to poststructuralist views of language and of how

language is used. Two poststructuralists who have transformed our ideas

about language are Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.



Derrida



Derrida attacks basic modernist assumptions about languages and reality.

The usual assumption is that there are thoughts and realities prior to

language and that language is the vehicle for communicating ideas and of

describing reality. He asserts, instead, that language comes before

knowledge and that the meaning of words is constantly changing. Language

becomes indeterminate and difficult to control. For Derrida, the meanings

of words are permanently in flux. Word meanings continually escape their

boundaries as these meanings are negotiated and renegotiated in social

settings. The Derridian strategy is to search out and illuminate the

internal contradictions in language and in doing so show how final meaning

is forever withheld or postponed in the concepts we use. The means for

carrying out this project is deconstruction [29].



Deconstruction involves a close reading of a text,(2) examining and

bringing to the surface concealed hierarchies and hidden oppositions,

inconsistencies, and contradictions in the language [29]. The method of

deconstruction includes "demystifying a text, tearing it apart to reveal

its internal, arbitrary hierarchies and its presuppositions" [86, p. 120].



The central arguments of a text are ignored as deconstruction looks to the

margins and to that which has been omitted, erased, or withheld. The

Derrida position is that "the binary oppositions governing Western

philosophy and culture (subject/object, appearance/reality,

speech/writing, and so on) work to construct a far-from-innocent hierarchy

of values which attempts not only to guarantee truth, but also serves to

exclude and devalue allegedly inferior terms or potions. This binary

metaphysics thus works to positively position reality over appearance,

speech over writing, men over women, or reason over nature, thus

positioning negatively the supposedly inferior term" [13, p. 21].



The purpose of deconstruction is not simply to unmask or illuminate

hierarchies and demonstrate their arbitrariness, to delegitimate them, but

to do so without replacing them with other hierarchies and so create

tensions without resolving them. Thus, as Rosenau points out,

"deconstruction attempts to undo, reverse, displace, and resituate the

hierarchies in polar opposites. . . . But the goal is to do more than

overturn oppositions, for this would permit new hierarchies to be

reappropriated" [86, p. 120].



Deconstruction and higher education. Derrida's powerful attack upon

hierarchies of the modernist world can be used with great effect in

challenging higher education's hierarchies and illuminating its

exclusions. Higher education is composed of hierarchies. The disciplines

are arranged within institutions of higher education in a loose hierarchy

of discourses(3) that give preference to the physical sciences over the

social sciences and humanities and to the arts and sciences over education

and other marginal professions.



Research is above teaching, doctoral studies over masters, and bachelors

over associate degree studies. Private education is over public education,

professors over students, administrators over professors, tenured over

nontenured professors. The list is long. To deconstruct these discourses

is to indicate first that they are social constructions and did not emerge

from some inherent, universalistic rationale or logic. It is to point out

the hidden contradictions, inconsistencies, and ambiguities within

academia, to show just how much hierarchy is based on what look like

arbitrary exclusions, and to illuminate how much they serve to put other

ideas and people on the margin or exclude them entirely. Concepts that

lend credence to faith in reason, science, progress, and the Enlightenment

are privileged in the modernist world, and especially in the university

and college. Once their legitimacy is called into question, all sorts of

hierarchies become suspect in the university -- science over the

humanities, high culture over popular culture, literary canons over wider

definitions of literature, classical over popular music. This erosion of

faith in the legitimacy of the assumptions embedded in the hierarchical

academic order provides a series of cracks in the dominant culture of the

university, encouraging historically marginal groups, such as persons of

color, gay and lesbian groups, and women, to claim space in these

institutions, even as this erosion delegitimates the dominant modernist

culture for its assumptions of superiority.



The deligitimation goes well beyond simply allowing space for those

individuals traditionally thought to be marginal in the universities.

Delegitimation encompasses harsh questioning of universities and colleges

about their reward structures, the purposes and practices inwhich they are

engaged, and the claims of those now in positions of power and

responsibility to their right of office. If the hierarchies of academia

are falsely assembled, are arbitrary, and illegitimate, the question

becomes why are these particular professors and administrators, rather

than others, now sitting in their superior positions benefiting from the

modernist academic hierarchies?



Colleges and universities are particularly susceptible to the postmodern

critique that denigrates hierarchy because institutions of higher

education see themselves as institutions with the responsibility to create

and distribute knowledge, civic values, and meaning to new generations.

They act as sorting mechanisms and as institutions that maintain the

middle class status of students (class being another modernist

hierarchical concept), while also creating the means for upward mobility

of students. Institutions of higher education are the generators of large

numbers of professionals and of the professional sensibility. Expertise,

the primary attribute of professionals, is suspect, for it places clients

and lay people in an inferior position. These concepts, when directed

toward higher education, provide a powerful delegitimating lever that

interrogates the purposes, structure, and activities of higher education

as it now operates in its modernist context.



Deconstruction provides reasons and arguments supporting the accusations

that excluded groups make against institutions of higher education. Some

authors are particularly good at providing the ideas and language that

speak to marginality. No one is clearer in pointing out the exclusionary

character of modern language and institutions than Derrida. A Richard

Bernstein says of Derrida, "Few contemporary writers equal him in his

sensitivity and alertness to the multifarious ways in which the 'history

of the West' -- even in its institutionalization of communicative

practices -- has always tended to silence differences, to exclude

outsiders and exiles, those who live on the margins. . . . This is one of

the many good reasons why Derrida 'speaks' to those who have felt the pain

and suffering of being excluded by the prevailing hierarchies embedded in

the text called 'the history of the West' whether they be women, Blacks,

or others bludgeoned by exclusionary tactics" [12, pp. 51, 52].



However, this deprivileging is dangerous and can easily backfire for

marginal groups. If there are no legitimate bases for rewarding the

privileged in our society, there are also no foundational standards for

rewarding marginal groups. There are no grounded assumptions or moral

grounds from which marginal groups can claim privilege. From this

postmodern perspective there is no compelling reason for controlling

groups to give ground to others.



Merit and community. Higher education is a modern institution that has the

concept "merit" deeply embedded in its value structure. Derrida's

hostility toward hierarchies is an attack on merit, for merit creates

standards that separate and hierarchicalize those who meet them from those

who do not. Deconstruction can be used to demonstrate that merit or

standards are not only capricious and without foundation, but are

arbitrarily exclusive in their consequences. They instantly create

marginality. Because higher education places high value on scholarly merit

-- attempting to find a way to keep it, but make it fair -- it is

constantly structurally creating and justifying exclusions. Derrida would

not eliminate merit, although in his thought there are no foundational

reasons for claiming that one standard for merit is better than another;

rather, he would keep a continuous tension between what is viewed as merit

and what is not, thus making the merit boundaries more open and presumably

less exclusionary.



Deconstruction celebrates differences, but refers not to the difference of

heterogeneity, which is intrinsic to modernism, but to the difference of

disruption, tension, and the withholding of closure. The modernist idea of

community also celebrates difference, but emphasizes that which unites

people, smooths over disruption, and places limits on the depth and

intensity of differences. The creation of community generally is a process

of setting boundaries, and this means that communities always have those

excluded and those created as marginals. An extreme anticommunity

perspective is developed by Iris Marion Young, who believes that a

politics of difference should be organized which would have as its chief

characteristics "inexhaustible heterogeneity' and "openness to

unassimilated otherness," a system that would completely eliminate

community with its exclusions of others [102, p. 301].



Higher education promotes the idea of community and is interested in

community on several levels. Disciplines are conceived of as communities

of scholars, and institutions are viewed as communities of scholars,

students, and administrators. The promotion of community is a constant in

higher education, and one of its assumptions is that it fosters a concept

of citizenship that is an idea of community. Higher education teaches and

promotes identification with the larger differentiated community.



Foucault



Both Derrida and Foucault give discourse theory a central place in their

writings. Foucault deals initially with what he terms an archaeological

approach to discourse. Foucault asks, "What rules permit certain

statements to be made; what rules order these statements; what rules

permit us to identify some statements as true and some false; what rules

allow the construction of a map, model, or classificatory system [78, p.

69].



Archaeology. Archaeology seeks out the rules that designate what will be

true or false in a discourse and create the possibility of organizing a

discipline, a field of knowledge such as physics or psychology. When

academic disciplines, especially the human sciences, are looked at in this

archaeological way, they have histories that do not resemble mainstream,

modernist notions of how history explains things. Instead of smooth

continuities and totalizing explanations, one gets discontinuities and

disruptions. As Gibson Burrell points out, Foucault's "aim is to attack

great systems, grand theories and vital truths, and to give free play to

difference, to local and specific knowledge, and to rupture, contingency,

and discontinuity. In Foucault, there is no unity of history, no unity of

the subject, no sense of progress, no acceptance of the History of

Ideas"[15, pp. 223, 229].



Genealogy. Foucault later expanded his archaeological approach to

concentrate on the power/knowledge relationships that exist in

institutions. For Foucault, knowledge and power are inextricably bound

together. That is, there is no knowledge without a power question arising,

and no power without knowledge. This power/knowledge connection has a

confounding effect on our understanding of knowledge in the academy. If

Foucault is correct about the power/knowledge relationship, there can

never be anything approaching neutral, objective knowledge. That is,

whatever knowledge comes from research in the disciplines is always

implicated in power considerations. This is very different from the

modernist assumption in higher education that each discipline can be a

separate and independent intellectual enterprise that exists above and

outside of politics. Rather, Foucault and the postmodernists view

disciplines as completely involved with politics, economics, culture, and

other external influences. In Foucault's terms, this means there is little

interest in the substance of a discipline or in whether it has legitimate

rules for determining meritorious from mediocre work. The interest is only

in what power relations are permitted and assumed. The power/knowledge

relationship is embedded in discourses, and discourses are the locations

where groups and individuals battle for hegemony and over the production

of meaning. Disciplines become sites for power contests for control of

subject matter through language. As Val Rust writes, "Discourse analysis

and cultural studies are really fundamentally studies of power. They

should reveal who wields power, in whose interest it is wielded, and with

what effects" [89, p. 619].



Power and politics in Foucault's thought. Foucault views power not in

terms of a commodity that someone or some group uses or has over others,

but as a system or network. Power is pervasive, but it is not in the hands

of anyone or any institution, such as the state. Thus one does not ask,

Who has power? but, What are the consequences of applying power? Foucault

is interested in power in terms of its results, or power at the point

where it is wielded. This places his interest at the local level. The

Foucaultian analysis provides a species of politics at the margin,

ineluctably plural, and on the microlevel. "Foucault calls for a plurality

of autonomous struggles throughout the microlevels of society, in the

prisons, asylums, hospitals, and schools"[13, p. 56].



Negatively, the Foucaultian perspective is disinterested in what

politically could build a larger, better society. His micropolitical

perspective favors small communities at the margins of institutions, such

as those formed through identity politics. Modernist notions of politics

are usually couched in terms of what cross-cutting political activism

would add to the larger community. Thus, modernist politics uses such

categories as class, or class struggle, or the state and political party

action, or the unions and union activities, categories that are justified

on the basis of their commitment to an improved macrocommunity and to

universals.



As Todd Gitlin argues, in a discussion that employs traditional right/left

political orientations, "A troubling irony: the right, traditionally the

custodian of the privileges of the few, now speaks in the general language

of merit, reason, individual rights, and virtue that transcends politics,

whereas much of the left is so preoccupied with debunking generalizations

and affirming the differences among groups -- real as they often are --

that it has ceded the very language of universality that is its

birthright" [45, pp. 16, 18, 19].



This politics at the microlevel, or the politics of everyday life, is


significant for universities and colleges in terms of the idea of

community. Institutions of higher education recognize and encourage

differences among disciplines in methods, orientations, languages, and

scholarly commitments by individual professors. Colleges and universities

recognize that disciplinary discourses may be incommensurate. But even

incommensurate academic discourses are assumed to identify with a broad,

common set of values that include respect and reward for academic rigor,

intellectual creativity, academic freedom, peer review, and general

respect for the rules of scholarship. Incommensurate social and cultural

discourses are much more difficult to encompass within academia, for

institutions have trouble reconciling academic values as they are

interpreted within the institutions of higher education with the

incommensurate cultural values that are apparent between marginal groups

and mainstream academia. The usual method for trying to create community

in this situation is for colleges and universities to broaden their

interpretations of merit and justice in such a way as to include other

cultural values and thus preserve community through the traditional common

values. But this modernist strategy in colleges and universities is

failing.



For marginal groups, such modernist concepts as freedom, equality, and

justice provide the vocabulary for legitimating incommensurate cultural

discourses, but their meanings are so contested that they do not provide

the same sense of having common values that academia assumes it has, and

hence they do not provide the foundations for commitment to a larger

community. The larger community values of academia and the language in

which they are communicated are viewed in the Foucaultian argument as

elements of a hegemonic discourse that places minorities and others at the

margins of the institution and directly benefits those who created and

sustain the discourse of scholarship and community. The knowledge/power

nexus cuts in a different direction that also affects higher education. As

Sarup points out, for Foucault "knowledge ceases to be liberation and

becomes a mode of surveillance, regulation, discipline" [90, p.73]. This

view of knowledge as surveillance and discipline is in contradistinction

to the modernist view that knowledge is emancipating and liberating. And

it flies totally in the face of what colleges and universities are

traditionally about in a modernist world, for they are the master

institutions that preach freedom, liberation, and emancipation through

knowledge.



Postmodernism as a Historical Period



The concepts embedded in the notion of postmodernism as a perspective feed

into and provide a basis for looking at postmodernism as a new historical

era. Viewing postmodernism as a new historical phase is a means for

approaching a number of important questions that higher education is

involved in and must deal with. To see our postmodern condition through

the lens of a new era is to focus on the rapid and unfamiliar changes that

are taking place in the world. Looking at postmodernism as a new era

dovetails with the intense interest we have in societal change generated

by the rapid approach of a new century.



Postmodernism as a new era concentrates our attention on the impact of the

information age, consumer society, commodification, performativity,

multinational corporations, and similacra. Perhaps most disconcerting,

this new age is characterized by increasingly shattered cultural orders

and growing levels of disorganization in such significant institutions as

the state, society, and the economy.



Lyotard



Although Lyotard sees postmodernism as a condition or mood, not an epoch

[67, p. xiii], he can be viewed as a transitional figure because his

analysis takes on characteristics of a historical period. Lyotard picks up

the assault upon modernism, particularly in terms of a denigration of

rationalism, but concentrates on what he calls "metanarratives:' those

large universals that undergird our orientations toward the modern world,

the grand stories that provide the foundation for modern life.

Metanarratives are the foundational stories that legitimate discourses and

are criticized by postmodernists as locking society in a prison of

restrictive, totalizing systems of thought. In Stephen K. White's

description, metanarratives, "focusing on God, nature, progress, and

emancipation, are the anchors of modern life" [99, p. 5]. For Lyotard the

postmodern is defined "as incredulity toward metanarratives" [67, p.

xxiv]. The erosion of belief in metanarratives fits with the Derridian and

Foucaultian notions that language is not a path to truth or



means for describing reality, but simply a series of discourses socially

created in varying contexts, none of which have superior truth claims. The

disbelief in metanarratives again foregrounds a questioning of

hierarchies, including those of higher education.



The questioning of metanarratives is important for higher education,

because metanarratives are the foundation of modern university and college

life, especially as they undergird the scientific-technological aspects of

higher education, but also higher education's assumptions about progress,

knowledge, and socialization. Unlike Derrida and Foucault, who avoid the

term postmodern in describing their works, Lyotard writes specifically

about postmodernism, and his most influential book is called The

Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge [67].



Lyotard is interested in the changing circumstances of contemporary

science and technology in what he sees as a postmodern society. This

concern allows him to look at a number of questions about society, many of

which are related to university and college organization and

circumstances. He specifically discusses the changing university and the

future status of the professor. Lyotard predicts a dim future for higher

education as it is now constituted. His notion that performativity is the

only viable criterion in a postmodern world means that higher education's

sole reason for existence is its ability to contribute directly to the

performativity of the economic system. For Lyotard, the task of

universities and colleges is to "create skills, and no longer ideals. . .

. The transmission of knowledge is no longer designed to train an elite

capable of guiding the nation towards its emancipation, but to supply the

players capable of acceptably fulfilling their roles at the pragmatic

posts required by its institutions" [67, p. 48].



Teaching by professors is still necessary, but it is reduced to

instructing students in the use of the terminals [67, p.50]. If you do not

have legitimate grand narratives, you do not need professors to teach

them, but you can rely upon machines to teach students what they need to

know in a performatively driven society. Lyotard is quite explicit about

the death of the professorship. In the cases of both the production and

transmission of knowledge, he asserts that "the process of delegitimation

and the predominance of the performance criteria are sounding the knell of

the Professor" [67, p. 53].



Like Foucault, Lyotard is concerned with questions of power and language.

Lyotard has an interest in legitimacy and how it is created. He sees

discourses as language games in which players' speech is viewed as "moves"

directed at legitimating their language game and proving its superiority

over other language games. As Keane describes Lyotard's perspective,

"players within language games are always embedded in relations of power

-- power here understood as the capacity of actors wilfully to block or to

effect changes in speech activities of others within the already existing

framework of a language game which itself always prestructures the speech

activities of individuals and groups" [62, p. 86].



The discourse of science and higher education. Modernism is associated

with science and the scientific mode of thinking and doing, and science is

tightly connected to higher education. For one hundred fifty years, higher

education has promoted the concept that science and its forms, science

research, scientific methods, and the progress that results from science,

are the principal guarantors of the legitimacy of higher education. The

belief in science and its assumptions and methods has provided the basis

for creating and justifying the prestige hierarchies among and within

colleges and universities and the reward structures among academics. Much

of higher education's argument for autonomy is premised on scientific

values relating to creativity, objectivity, and neutrality. The social

sciences strive for legitimacy through claiming that what they do is

scientifically grounded. Even where science and the scientific method are

not dominant, as in the humanities, there are constant debates concerning

whether the humanist disciplines ought to be more scientific, and if they

decide that they are not, they are still consumed by notions of discovery,

of objectivity, and of cumulative knowledge, notions that are derived from

perceptions of how science proceeds in its work. Higher education as it is

currently organized, constituted, and structured is committed to a search

for truth, is dependent for its legitimacy on a belief in the scientific

method and science as a way of obtaining this goal. Such a search has the

assumption that as the search becomes more sophisticated and knowledge

information accumulates, progress will result. Problems will be solved.

Life will become better. Science has operated as an independent sphere

with its own rules,much of its own structure, and though not unaffected by

the market, government, and the institutions in which it has been housed,

it has, nevertheless, been viewed as clearly differentiated from them. It

has had a superior position in the academy, has lived by its own standards

of excellence and good work, and has been able to impose its perspectives

on large areas within the academy.



In the postmodern world this position is jeopardized. Lyotard, who writes

extensively on science and technology in The Postmodern Condition,

denigrates this view of science on two grounds. First, science is just one

more metanarrative and has no more legitimacy than any other

metanarratives. Second, science in the postmodern world becomes judged by

efficiency and effectiveness and turns into technology. Postmodernism thus

makes science and the scientific method problematic, less a basis for

legitimacy or for determining good work. Science is viewed, not as a

value-free, disassociated form of knowledge, above and outside of social

and political values, but as a discourse like any other discourse, a

political terrain where power struggles take place for the control of

meaning. If science is a discourse equal to any other discourse, then

there is no meritocratic basis for privileging science over creationism,

astrology, or any number of noxious theories about race and gender. It

means there is no rational argument for keeping any discourse from finding

a place in the curricula of colleges and universities. What is left is a

series of power positions and contested viewpoints vying for a place in

academe with no real set of standards by which to judge their relative

merits and no rules to follow that allow anyone to say yes or no to

questions of inclusion and exclusion in the curriculum. This is the

extreme consequence of relativism that is involved in extreme readings of

the postmodern critique.



Performativity. In the postmodern world described by Lyotard,

performativity is viewed as the: most powerful criterion for judging

worth, taking the place of agreed upon, rational, modernist criteria for

merit. Crook, Pakulski, and Waters describe performativity as "the

capacity to deliver outputs at the lowest cost, replaces truth as the

yardstick of knowledge" [24, p. 31]. That is, efficiency and effectiveness

become the exclusive criteria for judging knowledge and its worth in the

college and university. Knowledge becomes "technically useful knowledge.

The criterion of technically useful knowledge is its efficiency and its

translatability into information (computer) knowledge. Therefore, the

questions, "'Is it true?', 'Is it just?, 'Is it morally important?' become

reduced to 'Is it efficient?', 'Is it marketable?', 'Is it sellable?', 'Is

it translatable into information quantities?" [62, p. 108].



Baudrillard



Baudrillard also identifies himself as a postmodern thinker. His

significance lies in what he has to say about the consumerism, fashion,

and the media/information society. His ideas about simulation, implosion

of boundaries, hyperreality, and simulacra destabilize our sense of the

boundaries within institutions of higher education and between them and

the external world [6]



His political stance is similar to that of Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard.

That is, he is interested in micropolitics, politics at the margin, with

emphasis upon differences. In Baudrillard's case, it is a micropolitics

that emphasizes lifestyle and communication changes that would free

individuals from a repressive modernist society. For Baudrillard, the

postmodern society is a world in which the images or simulations, which

are an intrinsic aspect of computerization, media, and information

processing generally, replace modern production as the basis for

organizing our lives [13, p. 118].



Perhaps the most significant of his concepts is that of implosion. This

involves a process that leads to boundary collapses in a wide variety of

circumstances. Implosion simply means that the boundary between



simulation and reality is erased, that is, implodes, and the basis for

determining the teal is gone. A telling example of postmodern implosion is

the collapse of the boundary between the political and the image, in which

the image of the politician in our society replaces the reality of the

political. One of his most startling concepts is "hyperreality,"

postmodernist state in which models become the basis far determining the

real, thereby replacing the real. According to Linda Hutcheon, Baudrillard

"has argued that mass media has neutralized reality for us and it has done

so in stages: first reflecting, then masking reality, and then masking the

absence of reality, and finally, bearing no relation to reality at all.

This is a simulacrum, the final destruction of meaning" [57, p. 223].



Higher education implosions in the postmodern era. If we accept

Baudrillard's concept of implosion, we see in education that the

collapsing of boundaries may be drastically changing the organization,

purposes, and activities of higher education. As the metanarratives of

progress, rationality, and science are undermined and deprivileged, the

boundaries and hierarchies they sustain are weakened and move toward

collapse. Thus, academic disciplines based on these metanarratives find

their borders dissolving and the bases for their hierarchical structures

attenuated. Also threatened are those boundaries that define the

difference between the inside and outside of organizations, institutions,

groups, and individuals. In the postmodern era, there is danger of the

collapse of the distinction between knowledge inside the academy and

outside of it, with the result that certain kinds of knowledge that used

to be the monopoly of the academy are now shared with institutions outside

of the academy. As Geyer writes, "Students no longer get their knowledge

about the world from the universities, which are losing their 'paternal

authority'. . . . TV entertainment, news and documentary spectacles, radio

talk shows, and for that matter, the religious revival and the instruction

that comes with it have developed a power commensurate with university

education. They are our competition, replacing rapidly the remnants of

civic and transcivic education that have survived the past decade" [42, p.

511].



With the collapse of boundaries between the inside and outside of the

academy, there is pressure for the inclusion of new subjects waiting to be

taught, brought in by groups who believe they should be a part of the

curriculum without the impediment of the usual modernist criteria as a

restraint. This means that the boundaries between modern differentiating

curricula based on rationality, the discipline's standards, and the model

that science offers are breaking down. These boundaries have always been

contested and in flux. But now, curricular boundaries are contested by

religious, racial, ethnic, gender, and new cultural perspectives that seek

to establish their own potentially incommensurable criteria for inclusion

in higher education curricula. The idea of the canon is a concept from

literary studies concerning what the boundaries of a discipline should be.

As the canons are contested, the boundaries of various disciplinary

discourses become more vulnerable to disintegration. However, this

collapsing, like other aspects of the postmodern changes, is occurring

slowly and sporadically. For example, in the teaching of literature, where

some of the most divisive and rancorous arguments over the canon have been

occurring, the 1990 MLA biennial survey of English departments indicates

that some changes have taken place, such as the introduction of feminist

perspectives and heightened interest in the relationship of race, class,

and gender to literature generation and interpretation. The authors go on

to say, "These innovations, however, have not displaced traditional

classroom goals or approaches to literary study" [39, p. 42].



Implosion of cultures and other boundary collapses. An implosion often

noted in postmodern discussion is the collapse of the distinction between

high culture and popular culture. What is its significance for higher

education? The postmodernist collapse of boundaries entails a mixing

together of high and low culture. Intellectuals, including academic

intellectuals, enter the world of popular culture and interpret it. As

intellectuals become associated with popular culture and identified with

it, they begin to lose their hierarchical station as experts [95, p. 4].



Another example of the collapse of the boundary between the college or

university and its city environment is that campuses are now viewed as the

scenes of crimes that are simply a part of the same density and pattern of

crime that any urban center generates. The campus is rapidly losing its

identity as an enclave. None of the racial, poverty, health, and

environmental problems of the city or the surroundings of the campus can

be avoided by institutions of higher education. The boundaries between

city and campus continue to weaken.



Postmodernism, Economic Life, and Higher Education



Some of the most striking postmodern changes are associated with economic

life viewed in terms of performativity, and these changes profoundly

affect the place of higher education in the society. The changes affect

what kind of education may be offered by higher education, the methods of

delivery, the autonomy of the colleges and universities, and the

competitive position of institutions of higher education. The postmodern

society is a postindustrial society. The changes taking place are

striking. The workforce is moving out of industrial production to service

jobs. A primary change for United States citizens is from the centrality

of work to the centrality of consumption. We now emphasize the production

of information over the manufacturing of goods. Corporations are less

constrained by national and state boundaries and areentering a world of

multinational manufacturing and trade, relying on telecommunications

networks and using foreign local work forces for producing goods and

services. Large, industrial conglomerates are giving way to small, highly

specialized businesses confined to single sites and run by a relatively

small cadre of highly entrepreneurial owners.



Service jobs. When postmodernism is viewed as a new historical era, it

illuminates the potentiality for higher education to play a much different

and potentially attenuated role in the postmodern society of the future.

The changes put considerable strain on the conventional purposes and

activities of institutions of higher education. However, institutions of

higher education respond by introducing conventional changes in

curriculum, under the increasingly questionable assumption that the

changes will allow institutions of higher education to continue to educate

middle-class managers and professionals in hierarchically arranged, large

scale, now global bureaucracies. Thus the optimistic assumption is that

educating for service jobs means preparing people for professional

careers, and that the information society requires large numbers of

professionals at many levels to operate it. In fact, service jobs may turn

out to be low-paying, noncareer-producing positions that require

vocational and technical education. Although the impact of the information

society is very much in a muddle at this point, there may be only a small

number of opportunities for autonomous, highly skilled information

professionals, what Jencks has called a "cognitariat" [60].



Multinational corporations. There is an assumption that multinational,

globally oriented corporations will need many persons fluent in foreign

languages, able to understand diverse cultures, willing to move easily to

foreign sites which will act as way stations in the corporate ladder. Many

higher education institutions are initiating programs of global studies

with this scenario in mind. However, it has become more apparent with

time, that multinational corporations find local work forces to have great

advantages over imported American experts. Local workers are knowing about

the local culture and language, will often work for lower wages and

salaries, and have less desire to globe trot in order to move up the

corporate ladder.



The aggressive activities of multinational corporations, the great

fluidity of capital, and the increasing cross-national mobility of labor

mean that multinational corporations with their Eurocentric cultures must

incorporate great chunks of the cultural assumptions and, indeed, of the

cultural orientations of the Third world. The global system itself may be

drastically changing the culture of business. In doing so, Eurocentric

culture becomes diffused and the Eurocentric cultures of multinational

corporations may be watered down.



Dirlik has a fascinating interpretation of the complex interplay of

incentives, actions, and consequences that arise from what are usually

perceived to be the contradictory perspectives on the multiculturalism of

the academy and business. "Focusing on liberal arts institutions, some

conservative intellectuals overlook how much headway multiculturalism has

made with business school administrators and the managers of transnational

corporations. . . . While in an earlier day it might have been Marxist and

feminist radicals, with the aid of a few ethnics, who spearheaded

multiculturalism, by now the initiative has passed into the hands of

'enlightened' administrators and trustees who are quite aware of the

'manpower needs of the new economic situation. . . . Among the foremost

and earliest of United States advocates of transnationalism and

multiculturalism is the Harvard Business Review" [32, 354-55].



Consumer culture. Perhaps most foreign of all, and potentially most

disruptive to the higher education curricula, is the notion that the

United States is now a consumer culture. The conventional interpretation

of this in higher education is that a consumer culture education prepares

persons to supply consumer goods and services to a population that is

awash in conspicuous displays of television and other electronic devices,

a population that seeks an ever greater supply and variety of consumer

goods. But the postmodern interpretation is that consumer activity is now

"the cognitive and moral focus of life, the integrative bond of the

society, and the focus of systemic management" [93, p. 63]. In

Baudrillard's perception of postmodern society, commodities through

advertising in the media, become "codes, shared systems of meaning . . .

without material foundation [24, p. 132].



Such an orientation, if it is an accurate description, would call for

higher education to prepare students, not simply to be producers and

sellers of consumer goods, but to be intellectually and philosophically

skillful and knowing consumers. But higher education has such formidable

competition for attention from the mass media that it is almost

unthinkable that it would be viewed as the legitimate institution which

teaches consumerism. Learning what a consumer society should or wants to

consume comes not from the teachings of professors in a university or

college, but from television, the information highway, or another mass

media alternative.



Much of what students want to consume that higher education has supplied

in the past is either in the process of erosion, for example, high

culture, or can be supplied by other sources (science education, education

for the professions). To say that students are extremely

consumption-oriented at this time is to say that they have choices, can do

comparative shopping, and can find much of what they want outside the

walls of the traditional colleges or university. Institutions of higher

education, over much of our history, have defined to a large extent the

nature and shape of an education and have confidently and accurately

assumed that the legitimacy that education conferred was not only a

societal but a private good. Students as consumers are rapidly reaching a

point where they are asking for a different education, and they are

willing to look for this education in a variety of locations. As Robert

Zemsky writes, "Students today want technical knowledge, useful knowledge,

labor related knowledge in convenient, digestible packages [103, p. 17].



At present, institutions of higher education are still able to offer

legitimacy and credentials that promise to give graduates a jump start on

middle-class careers. But the changes in the economy and culture make this

promise highly problematic for the future. A consumer culture calls into

question the assumption that the academy has a monopoly of knowledge. This

delegitimates belief in professors as experts, particularly as ultimate

authorities on the subjects they teach.



The Loss of State Authority in the Postmodern Era



The changes taking place that increase the power and reach of

multinational organizations and the reality of a truly global world mean a

potential reduction of the strength and legitimacy of the state,

historically the chief financial supplier for higher education. It also

means the continuation and expansion of research, but for competitive,

consumer, and international interests.



In this postmodern era, institutions rely increasingly on their own

efforts to acquire funding in the face of weakened state and federal

agencies to grant needed resources. There is more dependence on

multinational organizations for funding. A consequence is that research is

judged on its ability to aid in the competitive position of the

multinational organizations. A totally utilitarian view of research is a

logical consequence. Science as a totally commodified enterprise becomes

simply technology.



The loss of authority of governments is paradoxical. Centralization, which

includes increased regulatory demands by government upon institutions and

more means of control, is occurring simultaneously with loss of control by

government. Persons within institutions of higher education feel

increasingly burdened by the addition of more rules and stringent

regulations from the state. This seems to demonstrate that the state is

becoming stronger as the institutions of higher education become weaker

and lose more of their autonomy. Paradoxically, the increase in

regulations can be seen as a loss of authority by the state. The state,

through government, has great difficulty in maintaining a taxing capacity

that will allow it to do its business. Governments find it harder to make

necessary but unpopular decisions. Governments are hampered by the

explosion of interest groups with incompatible interests, whose collective

weight easily vetoes government decisions. The state finds it more

difficult to permit institutions of higher education the autonomy they

need to fulfill their purposes.



Changes related to postmodernism must be viewed in a long time frame, such

as the time it has taken tradition to give way to modernism. We can expect

to see changes occur in fits and starts, discontinuously, with some

aspects of the world in accelerated change, and some changing slowly,

while in some areas of life there is no change at all. Thus, as we see

that both the traditional and the modern are very much alive in today's

society, we also become increasingly aware of postmodernism in our world.



What is the impact of the ideas of our four representative authors on the

whole field of higher education? How can higher education retain three

modern metanarratives, the ideas of merit, community, and autonomy, all

three of which are extremely questionable in the poststructuralist,

postmodern modes of thought? These essentialist characteristics,

community, merit, and autonomy, are sorely tested by the deconstructive

and postmodern descriptions of boundary collapse, the celebration of

differences, the close connection of power to knowledge, the strength of

micropolitics that take the form of identity politics, the rising

disbelief in metanarratives, and the destruction of reality that is a part

of the similacrum.



Solutions



The postmodern world is a place of contradictions. It is rife with

uncertainty, ambiguity, and contradiction. In reaction to the devastating

critique of modernism, a number of voices, positive and negative, have

been raised that tell us how we might react to the postmodern assault

and/or the postmodern world. Some see in postmodernism a return to a kind

of right-wing barbarism that seeks to undo all of the progress associated

with the Enlightenment. Others see postmodernism as a basis for the

organization of a new, freer, more open society, capable of allowing the

individual to create his/her own life in ways that have not been conceived

of previously, picking and choosing parts of lifestyles that appear

everywhere.



Presented next are some voices from among the many who have taken

seriously and commented on the consequences of the postmodern sensibility.

It is not meant to be exhaustive but to give some perspectives on

postmodernism and what its meaning might be for our society.



The Social Conservative Position



This response to a postmodern society is to pull back to an ideal time, a

period when the country's values were homogeneous, where hierarchy reined,

distinctions between high and low culture were ironclad and backed by

money, government, tradition, and a belief in experts. The politics of

nostalgia can be used to promote elements of both a premodern tradition

and a modern sensibility. The argument is that we should return to a time

that seems in retrospect enchanted, more stable, more predictable, and

safer. One modernist source of such enchantment is the romance of

technology when viewed optimistically. Attempts to capture the enchantment

of a traditional world often emanate from religious fundamentalism and

political conservatism.



There is also in this social conservatism, a good deal of talk about how a

particular institution previously had been characterized by community, but

is now rife with fractiousness and depersonalization. But, as most

marginalized persons and groups are aware, such a community was

hegemonically white, male, Western European, and exclusive. Such

communities marginalized minorities and women in ways that are

unacceptable in a postmodern world.



Hardcore Postmodernism



At the other extreme is what Rosenau calls "skeptical postmodernism"[86,

p. 15]. Its adherents use postmodernism to attack and delegitimate

modernism, but essentially offer no real way to organize a society or a

university. They see a collection of autonomous discourse groups operating

in a university, responding entirely to their own vocabularies and sets of

values, which are assumed not to be commensurable with other discourses,

groups of discourses without any hierarchical principles and eschewing the

values of merit and the larger college or university community. It is not

clear how this apparently anarchic organization would work, because it

seems clear that some discourses are going to be more equal than others,

and some are going to have more power, more resources, richer

vocabularies, and definitions of merit that work better than others. The

result will again be hierarchy, but without the values of merit,

neutrality, or objectivity. It will be based strictly on power.



Although power seems to be at the center of much of the discussion about

postmodernism, in its most extreme form, postmodernism so assaults as

foundational any standards for justifying the assertion of power that

actual political intervention to change things has only weak reasons to

motivate action by anyone. This is one of the reasons why

post-postmodernists, new historicists, and students of cultural studies

find themselves in such an ambiguous relationship to postmodernism. They

want to act, to change the modernist world, and in order to do so they

need strong reasons to do so, foundational reasons.



The Project of Unfulfilled Modernism



Habermas, the defender of modernism, agrees with much of the critique by

postmodernists, but sees postmodernism as a retrogressive conservative

force pushing modernism toward a premodern unenlightened stage. In

contrast, he seeks to develop a renewed modernism, a rationality based on

communication; open, free, and engaged in by all, as a means for

preserving and improving democracy, freedom, equality, and progress.

Habermas has strongly asserted that "we can never escape the demand to

warrant our validity claims, to defend them y the best possible arguments

and reasons which are available to us. This is the 'truth' in the

Enlightenment tradition that needs to be preserved and defended" [12, p.

26].



Yet Habermas has been strongly criticized for depending too much upon the

possibility of building institutions that could and would sustain what

sounds like perfect communication. So much dependence upon the

communication process seems extremely precarious in a postmodern moment,

when we are discovering the extent to which meanings shift and slide and

disappear across cultures and time contexts.



Feminist Perspectives on Postmodernism



Feminists have conflicting views on postmodernism. For those who have

viewed themselves as marginal and excluded because of gender, postmodern

criticism is helpful. Postmodernism is used to attack many of the major

philosophical perspectives of modernism, such as essentialism,

foundationalism, and the assumption of universals, which have been used to

create hierarchies that place women in positions inferior to men and then

legitimate that subordination. Best and Kellner assert that modernist

discourses since the time of Plato and Aristotle have generated

"antithetical sets of characteristics that position men as superior and

women as inferior. This scheme includes dichotomies between

rational/emotional, assertive/passive, strong/weak, or public/private"

[13, p. 207]. Feminists are sympathetic to attacks on modernist academic

assumptions about neutrality and objectivity, for these assumptions are

associated with the maintenance of the binary oppositions that subordinate

women. Feminists find that the postmodern notions of difference, plurality

-- including plural selves, transience, marginality, otherness, and

disjointedness -- are compatible with many feminist perspectives [16, p.

108; 39, pp. 34-35]. However, feminists are concerned that the elimination

of essentialist assumptions, that is, metanarratives, weakens the

possibility of doing theory and of having a strong philosophical basis for

political change and change in gender relations [16, pp. 107-8].



Feminists are bothered by postmodernism's potential for a relativist

reading of feminist agendas and goals that severely attenuates the basis

for political and social action to change the male-dominated status quo in

and out of universities. As Best and Kellner point out, "Modern categories

such as human rights, equality, and democratic freedoms and power are used

by feminists to criticize and fight against gender domination, and

categories of the Enlightenment have been effectively mobilized by women

in political struggles and consciousness-raising groups; indeed, the very

discourse of emancipation is a modern discourse" [13, p. 208]. Also,

empiricist and standpoint theories that maintain as legitimate the

modernist scientific and academic standards are negated by postmodernist

perspectives.



Marxist Responses to Postmodernism



Many Marxists are critical of postmodern thought [17], but others see

postmodernism as a new, higher stage of capitalism [61]. Frederick

Jameson, in particular, has written extensively about postmodernism, which

he sees as a historical period in which culture has penetrated all forms

of social life, including economics. The postmodern era is characterized

for Jameson By a global capitalism far more extensive than ever before,

with considerable cultural fragmentation and differences in how a person

experiences time and space [61]. His perspective takes into consideration

the impact of media and information and their relationship to an almost

total commodification of social and political life.



Jameson's critics see him as one who tries to introduce postmodernist

concepts into a traditional foundational Marxist emphasis upon class and

economic determinism. Because the concept of a Marxist metanarrative would

seem to be incompatible with the anti-metanarrative orientation of

postmodernism, he is accused of inconsistency in his position [13, pp.

187-88]. As Cohen writes, "The fundamental charge is that Jameson cannot

have it both ways" [21, p. 3391. Nevertheless, he has greatly

reinvigorated the Marxist position.



The Post-Marxist Reaction



As post-Marxists, Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe embrace postmodernism

but are interested in political action as well [65]. They attempt to find

a path to change the order of things in the university and in society.

This means that they accept the idea of discourse theory and assert that

it implies "the commitment to show the world for what it is: an entirely

social construction of human beings which is not grounded on any

metaphysical 'necessity' external to it -- neither God, nor 'essential

forms' nor the 'necessary laws of history'" [65, p. 198].



These theorists differ from Marxists in their views on class struggle. As

post-Marxists they are no longer convinced that the analysis of classes is

relevant in the struggle against capitalism. They emphasize, instead, the

need for a variety of forms of resistance.



Cultural Studies



Cultural studies is one of several movements -- this one highly

interdisciplinary -- that attempt to reflect the diversity, the plurality,

the diffuseness, and the blurring of boundaries of academic disciplines

and between disciplines and the external world. Its orientation is to what

has been called the "new politics of difference -- racial, sexual,

cultural, transnational" [69, p. 393]. It overlaps with postcolonial

studies and uses concepts and vocabulary from postmodernism and

poststructuralism. It seems to be in a fluid state by choice, and has not

gelled into a discipline with its own methodology. It draws from

anthropology and tends to be humanistic in its orientation. There is a

strong predilection to think in terms of political action in relation to

marginal groups [49].



New Historicism



In the aftermath of the powerful impact of poststructuralism and

postmodernism upon English departments in the nineteen-seventies, literary

studies in the United States began to focus on the historical, political,

and cultural contexts in which literary texts are written and read [72, p.

392]. The major figure leading this movement was Stephan Greenblatt, who

coined the term "new historicism" to describe this form of literary

criticism [9, p. 32]. Retaining many of the concepts from postmodernism,

such as Foucault's ideas about power, disbelief in the metanarratives

related to objectivity or neutrality, new historicist scholars are

particularly concerned about the boundaries that result from the continual

struggle for control over meaning in literary studies. New historicists

penetrate the borders that separate literary studies from history,

anthropology, art, economics, science, cultural studies, and other

disciplines. "The boundaries to be reckoned with in literary studies range

from national, linguistic, historical, generational, and geographical to

racial, ethnic, social, sexual, political, ethical, and religious" [47, p.

4].



New historicists are accused by some feminists of speaking in a "neutral,

authoritative, putatively interest-free voice" [10, p. 93]. Conservative

critics deplore the new historicist's politicization of literary studies

and are hostile to the boundary collapse that seems to eliminate "the

distinction between good art, bad art, and non-art" [9, p. 32].



Postcolonialism



The postcolonial perspective has developed from the efforts of third world

intellectuals. They want to dismantle Eurocentrism, which has in the past

dominated not only the territories of the third world, but also their

histories, their perceptions of self, and their political lives. Their aim

is to "abolish all distinctions between center and periphery as well as

other 'binarisms' that are allegedly a legacy of colonial(ist) ways of

thinking and to reveal societies in their complex heterogeneity and

contingency" [32, p. 329].



Postcolonialism is related to postmodernism in that metanarratives are

repudiated, which means that the premises and concepts of European

enlightenment, and therefore of modernism, are deeply criticized.

Postcolonialists have a strong affinity for local politics, local

histories, and fragmentation of the national into the local. A strong

criticism of the postcolonial approach is that "within the institutional

site of the First World academy, fragmentation of earlier metanarratives

appears benign (except to hidebound conservatives) for its promise of more

democratic, multicultural, and cosmopolitan epistemologies. In the world

outside the academy, however, it shows in murderous ethnic conflict,

continued inequalities among societies, classes, and genders, and absence

of oppositional possibilities that, always lacking in coherence, are

rendered even more impotent than earlier by the fetishization of

difference, fragmentation, and so on" [32, p. 347].



Postmodernism and Chaos Theory



An optimistic perspective on postmodernism links it with chaos theory.

Both postmodern and chaos theory give center stage to ideas about

disorder, indeterminacy, undecidability, and fragmentation in their

emphasis upon complexity. But in its two most frequently argued versions,

that is, order hidden in chaos and order rising out of chaotic systems

[54, p. 12], chaos theory gives a structure and hope for controlling

complexity that is not found in several of the reactions to postmodernism

discussed above -- for example, hardcore postmodernism, social

conservatism, and new historicism.



In an optimistic reading of postmodernism, the affinity with chaos theory

is striking. What could be more optimistic for the postmodern emphasis

upon the marginal and the local than the concept of nonlinearity, in which

small causes result in large consequences (the butterfly effect -- that

is, the butterfly flapping its wings in China through a long, complex

chain of causes and effects results in a hurricane in Guatemala). It would

seem to give hope to a number of politically conscious groups whose focus

is the micropolitical stage, but who seek large changes in the society,

such as postcolonialists, those interested in cultural studies, and

post-Marxists. At the same time, however, the idea of the butterfly effect

from chaos theory should lead to pessimism for those with specific

political agendas, because it emphasizes that those who initiate local

actions will have no power to predict or control the consequences that

follow on the macrolevel.



But the most important convergence, or relationship, between chaos theory

and postmodernism lies in the area where one branch of chaos theory

emphasizes the possibility of the creation of order from disorder. This

concept when transferred to postmodernist conceptions of society, or of

narratives and texts, provides strong reason for using deconstruction to

attack seemingly settled metanarratives, to generate discontinuities, and

to point to the void that lies beneath language. Chaos theory seems to

promise that out of the nothingness that results from deconstructing the

language, will arise a new, albeit tenuous, and constantly shifting order

that will provide space for new voices and new perspectives to be heard

and granted legitimacy.



Border Crossing and Border Pedagogy



Henry A. Giroux combines postmodernism, feminism, postcolonialism, and

culture studies to promote a social, cultural, political, educational

agenda that invites teachers, students, and cultural workers to critique,

then challenge and oppose the institutions, the knowledge claims of

disciplines, and the social relationships that now dominate our society.

This process he calls "border crossing The means for helping and effecting

this crossing is "border pedagogy," and the purpose of border crossing is

to create "borderlands" or "alternative public spaces" [44, p. 22], where

the partial, shifting nature of negotiated and constructed realities

allows students, among others, "to rewrite their own histories,

identities, and learning possibilities" [44, p. 30]. These constructed

borderlands are realms where democratic political and ethical

revolutionary battles are to be waged, and the values of this crusade are

to be firmly grounded in what appear to be modernist readings of such

values as freedom, equality, liberty, and justice [44, p. 32].



Postmodern language is invoked when the author discusses how educators

might understand marginality, the life world of the Other, and the

positive qualities of difference and radical pluralism. While border

pedagogy speaks of revolutionary change in society, it takes a long and

benign road to that end by focusing first on the transformation of

individuals; only later, when radical changes in individuals have

occurred, will quick changes in society and its institutions happen.



The Liberal, Pragmatist Approach



Liberal thinking continues to dominate higher education today, and

liberalism is quintessentially modernist in its orientation and in its

effects. It is clear that this approach does not dismantle the ideas of

merit, democracy, progress, science, and rationality, but expands and

modifies them so that new ideas and orientations will be accommodated. The

strategy in current higher education thinking, in an era of greatly

increasing multicultural consciousness, is to redouble efforts to bring

marginal persons and ideologies into an expanded modernist college and

university. Mainstream educators assume that given educational

opportunities and access, ethnic, minority, and religious groups and

individuals will be socialized into liberal modernist culture.

Administrators and faculty hope that this strategy will change the

structure and life of the college and university, but not the

metanarratives.



This solution is attractive in that it preserves merit, autonomy, and

community, but it does require considerable modification to have

credibility with the marginal and excluded groups to whom it is directed.

Richard Rorty's distinction between public and private life provides a

possible justification for the use of a liberal, pragmatic approach that

is postmodern in orientation, strong, but flexible, yet retains room for

merit, community, and autonomy. In the Rorty perspective, such modernist

Enlightenment concepts should be fostered, not on the basis of any

objective or foundational superiority, but because they are historically,

traditionally, and habitually shared by enough people in academe to make

it worthwhile to preserve them, albeit not in as rigid a basis as before.

Rorty takes his justification from Jefferson's view of politics and

religion: "Jefferson maintained that religion is essentially 'irrelevant

to social order but relevant to, and possibly essential to individual

perfection.' The gist of this insight, formulated as the 'Jefferson

compromise,' is that any ideas used to shape public policy, which are

bound to some larger commitments -- whether religious, philosophical, or

ideological -- must be capable of defense in terms of views and traditions

widely shared by a given polity. If such ideas cannot be defended on these

grounds, then they must be rebuffed and the individual must sacrifice her

conscience on the 'altar of public expediency.' Politics is about

common-sensical argument that appeals to the values and traditions shared

by a given 'public' and commitment which falls outside this grouping, or

cannot be translated to appeal to citizens must be relegated to the

private realm. . . . This direction reflects his deep misgivings about

philosophy as well as his sense that people could agree about a wide range

of problems and share common practices while maintaining vastly different

cultural and ethnic backgrounds as well as religious and philosophical

convictions" [100, p. 553].



However, the feminist scholar Nancy Frazer is strongly critical of Rorty's

separation of the public and private spheres. Feminists argue that the

private is the public. From this perspective, practical politics have

always emanated from what modernists have thought of as nonpolitical, that

is, "the domestic and the personal" [100, p. 555]. Thus, if the private

and the public are separated, the result is the retention of the modernist

status quo with its built-in superior/inferior oppositions.



Nevertheless, Rorty does address this problem through his version of

pragmatism and irony. As Wicks points out, the ironist "acts to negotiate

the boundaries of the private and the public" [100, p. 554]. Ironists are

especially sensitive to and capable of showing us where we do not

understand our biases. "We may expand the logical space of reasons to

include, and socially embrace, alternative understanding of practices that

do not oppress. It is this capacity for empathetic understanding,

vocabulary switching, and metaphor construction which makes the role of

the ironist . . . so vital to oppressed groups" [100, p. 557].



This perspective does two things for the maintenance of the college and

university and their values of merit, community, and autonomy. It expands

the space for having multiple definitions for the three terms, while

perhaps indicating limits to what those definitions might contain.



At the same time, as with Jefferson's desire to keep religion out of

politics, we can justify severely limiting the inclusion as truth in the

curriculum, assumptions inherent in fundamentalist religions, for example,

or contained in extreme ideological positions.



But for those who have been heavily influenced by the postmodern critique,

the foundational premises of liberalism do not have the legitimacy they

used to have. This is why Rorty is significant. He believes in the

postmodern critique but asks of us that we embrace a liberal stance,

knowing full well that it does not provide the foundations that modern

notions of liberalism assume but only that its practical consequences are

better than other ideologies. But others, particularly Richard Bernstein,

add an especially significant caveat: the necessity for dialogue. In fact,

Rorty, Bernstein, Derrida, Habermas, all place a heavy burden on listening

and dialogue.



The Legacy of Postmodern Thought for Higher Education



An important consequence of postmodern thought is that almost no

responsible scholar today is unaffected by the arguments that displace

essentialism, or metanarratives. Postmodernism makes us aware of the

destabilization and uncertainty that we confront not only in society, but

in higher education. We are in a crisis in which the standard categories

of modernism fail to account for -- that is, to explain and make

predictable -- the conditions we face in the world today. The specter of

relativism hangs over all our institutions. Higher education is not an

exception. It cannot act as though it spoke truths; it can argue only that

what it does is useful, but not that it is true.



The modernist orientation is to resolve problems; the postmodern

perspective not only points to the contradictions in discourses, but makes

a virtue of preserving that essential tension. It may be that opposing

perspectives need to be kept alive and in tension with the dominant model.

This would mean that institutions of higher education must be able to

sustain and cope permanently with considerable unresolved conflict and

contradiction.



If there is a transformation in higher education, what should it be? Is

there a need for a set of values that transcend group values, for a

vocabulary that will speak to all groups within the academy? Or should

there be a wide open conglomeration of presumably incommensurate values,

ethics, standards? Some poststructuralist thought seems to indicate that

we already have this incommensurability among discourses. The destruction

of the belief in eternal verities and the attenuation of the drive to

search for truth mean that higher education's task may be to pay much more

attention to values, what they mean, where they come from, what their

function is, and how to forge new values that fit the higher education

world and its mission.



Because the borders of colleges and universities are becoming more

permeable in the postmodern world and the great sustainers of the

independence of higher education, the state and governments, are becoming

weaker, institutions need to find ways of maintaining autonomy in the face

of multinational corporate resources and power, the debilitating effects

of the increased proliferation of active interest groups, and the

encroachment of extreme local power.



In the world of simulacra and the power that comes from creating images,

the universities' task may be to seek and sustain a kind of authenticity

of information and knowledge. In this it needs to create a consistent and

useful concept of merit; it cannot rely as heavily upon the strictures of

science or the rules of a broken canon. But it needs to sustain the value

of merit and find with all the contradictions, the plural voices, the lack

of a sense of progress, and the continual tension an interest in and

pursuit of means for measuring, judging, and rewarding merit. As the

boundary between higher education and the market collapses, some means for

organizing and sustaining autonomous sanctuaries, oases, or enclaves in

universities should be found that do not simply respond to the drive for

performativity and the standards of the market. Institutions of higher

education need ways to construct and sustain community, and community at

several levels: community on the campus and community in the larger

society, a commitment to citizenship.



The emphasis upon the other, the marginal, the outsider, in postmodern

thought needs to be kept in the foreground in higher education. Colleges

and universities need to find ways of encompassing the other, of taking in

marginal people and ideas. However, it should not be done in the usual

liberal strategy of simply adding courses on multinationalism, women's

studies, and cultural studies. These need to be included in academia more

on the basis of their own standards. But the argument here is that this

inclusion does not mean that the search for and creation of standards of

merit is compromised. An important means for ensuring this is to follow

the advice that a number of postmodern writers have offered, namely, to

listen very hard and openly. As Cornell West has written, "I hope that we

can overcome the virtual de facto segregation in the life of the mind in

this country, for we have yet actually to create contexts in which black

intellectuals, brown intellectuals, red intellectuals, white

intellectuals, feminist intellectuals, genuinely struggle with each other"

[98, p. 696].



At the same time, we need to pay attention to Richard Bernstein's caution,

"There can be no dialogue, no communication unless beliefs, values,

commitments, and even emotions and passions are shared in common. . . .

Dialogical communication presupposes moral virtues -- a certain 'good

will' at least in the willingness to really listen, to seek to understand

what is genuinely other, different, alien, and the courage to risk one's

more cherished prejudgments. But too frequently this commonality is not

really shared, it is violently opposed" [12, p. 51].



Just how difficult the process of authentic listening to "others" and

creating and sustaining meaningful dialogue is, may be illustrated by U.S.

business as it becomes globalized. We must face the fact that moral

boundaries may blur as we face a world in which the center, the

Eurocentric center, is in transition, perhaps moving to the periphery,

while the marginal is becoming central. Thus, a business overseas may

encounter the moral dilemma of responding to the situation in Saudi

Arabia, in which "it is illegal to hire female managers for most jobs"

[33, p. 11]. The lines of morality become very fuzzy indeed. A kind of

in-between moral relativism may result. Thus, "If Thai tolerates the

bribery of public officials, then Thai tolerance is no worse than Japanese

or German intolerance If Switzerland fails to find insider trading morally

repugnant, then Swiss liberality is no worse than American

restrictiveness" [33, p. 11].



Although no other institution in our society is as capable of listening

and of dialogue as the colleges and universities, institutions of higher

education find themselves confronting similar problems as they seek to

relate to other cultures, internationalize the curriculum, and enter also

into the globalized world. It is not just a matter of responding with open

arms to different dress and celebrations of new holidays, or of taking in

new languages and literatures; it is dealing fairly but firmly with

customs and values that have been morally repugnant to higher education.



Conclusion



The term postmodern is disappearing from the vocabularies of excluded

groups, social scientists, humanist intellectuals, scholars of all kinds.

But postmodern terms and concepts remain very much alive and in constant

use. Postmodernism is disappearing because of its relativistic

connotations and because, by accepting the corpus of the postmodern

perspective, a group with a political agenda places its own position in

jeopardy. For those drawn to the postmodern critique, who have political,

cultural, social, and/or economic agendas, including feminists and ethnic

and cultural groups, postmodern concepts are an extremely effective weapon

to discredit and delegitimate modernism, the status quo, and colleges and

universities as they are now constituted. However, if the metanarratives

of modernism and higher education have no philosophical foundation, the

metanarratives of marginal and excluded groups do not have essentialist

foundations either. This is what engenders the profound ambivalence toward

postmodernism of those who are most critical of the current modernist

world. By avoiding the term "postmodernism" and by declining to identify

oneself as a postmodernist, critics may and do continue to use the

terminology of postmodernism, while retaining their own necessary

metanarratives to justify their political, cultural agendas.



If we accept the implications of postmodernism and see it as a critique

that applies both to modernists and to those critical of modernism, we can

reach a point where the postmodern stricture to listen and listen very

hard and long to the "other" has strong credibility. If neither side has

any foundational credentials, there is space for real and continuing

dialogue. The result of such listening and the pursuit of dialogue under

such conditions could mean the retention in universities and colleges of

the values of merit, community, and autonomy, and their justification in

Rorty's terms, on the basis of agreement that these are, in some form,

even as the particulars are contested, an integral part of our higher

education heritage. For the excluded "others" this kind of dialogue could

well provide the basis for changing the meaning and terms of merit,

community, and autonomy in ways that are satisfactorily inclusive and

representative of the plurality of "others'" cultures and politics.

Currently, we are precariously poised between a modern/postmodern

incommensurable hostility and the conditions for tough authentic dialogue.

In higher education our course is clear. We need to increase and sustain

the dialogue, even as we acknowledge that the tension will not, and

perhaps should not, be resolved.



Notes



1 One set of notable exceptions published in the Journal of Higher

Education involved an article by Gary Rhoades which used both Derrida and

Foucault [81]. This stimulated a lively and provocative exchange (two

critiques and a rebuttal) in a subsequent issue [19, 66, 82].



2 In addition to referring to the words of a speech or piece of writing,

texts should be understood as events and relationships. Almost anything

can be a text. This means that events and relationships as well as words

can be deconstructed to indicate contradictions, tensions, oppositions,

hierarchies, hidden meanings, withheld meanings, and multiple

interpretations [82, pp. 34-41].



3 "Discourses are about what can be said and thought, but also about who

can speak, when and with what authority. . . . Meanings . . . arise not

from language but from institutional practices, from power relations.

Words and concepts change their meaning and their effects as they are

deployed within different discourses" [5, p. 2].



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Harland G. Bloland is professor emeritus at the University of Miami.

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