LAUSR

If postmodernism is dead, what is it that we’re seeing the end of? Its ludic sensibilities, its playful affectations, its ironies? In the face of contemporary realities that have wiped the postmodern grins from our faces, its playfulness must be seen as something of a luxury. Postmodernism came to us because, in an era of modernity when we had available to us the wherewithal to make progress through human efficacy informed by reason and rationality, we still got Hitler, Stalin and Mao. So, we tried to lay the blame for them on Enlightenment rationality—which would inexorably be perverted by instrumentalism and subverted into the service of ethnic cleansing and final solutions. Yet if the horrors of the Holocaust, Stalinism, the Cultural Revolution, lost us our faith in the ‘grand narratives’ of an Enlightenment modernity, a new set of realities has jolted us out of our resignation in irony: climate change, unspeakable disparities in wealth, endless wars in Central Africa and in the Middle East, and waves of refugees whose lives have been destroyed. So, it’s a critical realism that is wanted now. Bhaskar’s (1975) been saying that for a while. One proposed successor to postmodernism is ‘transnationality as the contemporary cultural logic of neoliberal global capitalism’—a nice play on Fredric Jameson, but too caught up in the perspectives of elites—as if ours is a transnational, borderless world consequent on global capitalism. It might be for elites. For climate, economic and war refugees, the pressure to move is a matter of life or death, but the walls have just gone up higher. My own project in this has been in ethics: to stand on the shoulders of Zygmunt Bauman as he argued in Postmodern Ethics (Bauman, 1993) to defend an ‘ethics of integrity’ that would have traction across cultural contexts (Mason, 2005). My project has also been in epistemology—primarily in a defence of critical reason—and in the consequences of these moral and epistemological arguments for education (Mason, 2007). What we need in a renewed critical realism is a discourse of precariousness, of fragility: economic insecurity, a world where the richest 1% have as much wealth as the rest of the world combined, a world where increasing numbers of people are discarded as the ‘outcasts of modernity’ (Bauman, 2003). But perhaps the most significant implications for educational theory of the end of postmodernism lie in a focus on education for resourcefulness in the face of such precariousness. Such an education should, however, be about community resourcefulness even more than it is about the development of resourceful individuals. It needs accordingly also a focus on relationality, both in community, mindful of our connectedness as humans to one another, and in our inextricable connectedness to the natural environment which sustains us. And underneath this should be a renewed focus on a critical realism that might help us to get to a pretty good approximation of what’s true and what matters beyond the fun of postmodern irony. Because things could be far more critical now, in ways we might not yet even know.