LAUSR

Why is it so difficult to define the lifecycle of postmodernism? I argue that postmodernism never actually existed, at least not in the way we thought it did. According to Crowther (2003, pp. 1–2), there is no theoretical framework which is not, in some way, fatally tainted by the particular nature of its sociocultural origins and by the complexities of signification as such (emphatic relativism). Postmodernism as a social-based and skeptical type of discourse concerning traditional philosophical concepts is not at all the significant break which it is often taken to be. It would be far better described as supermodernity, or a super enhanced modernity. Nevertheless, as Butler (2002, p. 11) notes there is a deep irrationalism at the heart of postmodernism. For instance, Foucault’s inquisitive strategy against any traditional interpretation of a historical development was to work out its implications by pointing to the simple existence of the other side of things (Shumway, 1989, p. 15). French postmodernists tried to disrupt supposedly ‘normal’ ways of seeing things, undermining the notion that the subject is primarily a consciousness that knows. They embraced a hostility toward the private cogito, that changed the way the positions of the teacher are conceptualized (Blake, Smeyers, Smith, & Standish, 1998, p. 59). So, modern education replaced pre-modern coercion and subjugation representing an essential part of governmentality, determined by power–knowledge dynamics. For Blake et al. (1998, p. 7), educational relativism that has come down to us from the 1970s is postmodern and nowadays the homeschool community seems to embrace it. But another approach may better explain the phenomenon. If modernism was the historical focus of a scholar examining specific norms (e.g. Foucault—educational institutions), then postmodernism represents the fringe, blurry area around and relative to this focus. This area could be described as ‘blurry’ like that out of our focus. Furthermore, there is a dialectical relationship between modern and postmodern. Any attempted focus on postmodern means entering the modern framework. In this respect, tradition is ‘topographically’ closer to postmodernism than to modernism because tradition was the theoretical fringe around modernism. The shift from the traditional fringe to the postmodern fringe came with the dominance of socialcultural elements (17th–18th c.). So, there exists only modernism. For Foucault’s educational norm, the previous fringe traditional area was coercion and subjugation (Usher & Edwards, 1994, p. 84), and the fringe postmodern area, on which he focused, was power and knowledge. Postmodern is but does not exist! Postmodernism stands next to modernism. We perceive it only peripherally, as a blurred area and cannot ‘see’ it or examine it as such (see Figure 1). It is just the frame of the modern; a dynamic modernity that exists throughout. The only way to have a next stage (after post-postmodernism) is through a meta-level alone. This is actually not about the end or death of postmodernism. It is about the realization of the need to enter a meta-level. And the aim of educational theory is to analyze contemporary and historical issues according to this new configuration.