Re: Marxism Against Postmodernism

[Peter McLaren <mclaren@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Louis,
I thought this recent critique of my book in a major educational journal
might prove interesting for members of this listserve who are interested in
the postmodernism/Marxist debate.

Peter McLaren
UCLA



http://www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?ContentID=11154

Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory
Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory. Dave Hill, Peter
McLaren, Mike Cole, Glenn Rikowski (Eds.). Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books, 2002, ISBN: 0739103466, 364 pp.
Browse for this title at Amazon.com®
 
     Dan Butin
Gettysburg College
Author Bio | E-mail Author


 
 
Glenn Rikowski and Peter McLaren, in the opening paragraph of this edited
volume, sound the clarion call loudly and clearly:  ³In many parts of the
capitalist world, postmodern politics still attests to contemporary
relevance.  Indeed, it claims to be the only politics available.  The
authors of this book collectively discern a need to clear the decks of such
junk theory and debilitating ?political¹ posturing because of the urgent
tasks ahead for socialists² (p. 3).
 
This book brings together a group of prominent American and British critical
theorists to question postmodernism and argue for refocusing educational
research towards the Marxist emphasis on capital as determining educational
and social practices.  The headings of the main sections ­ ³Postmodern
Excess,² ³Human Resistance Against Postmodernism,² and ³Pedagogy, Reprise
and Conclusion² ­ are clear signs of the take-no-prisoners approach to be
found throughout the book.
 
I should note that the critical issues the authors raise concerning
inequity, social justice, and the importance of class-based analysis in
education continue to be extremely relevant.  Glaring achievement gaps
across socioeconomic classes, woeful funding inequities within and across
school districts, and the market-driven pressures that foster prescriptive
curricula, behaviorist outcome measures, and instrumental conceptions of
teaching and learning are endemic to our educational system.  I also accept
Marxist (and other) perspectives that question how the ³postmodern turn² can
offer fruitful and significant direction to educational practice, research,
and policy.  For we must all hold a healthy skepticism to claims of living
in the post-industrial age when the vast majority of the world¹s populace
has barely moved into the industrial.
 
Yet what I find highly problematic about this book are not only its sweeping
and inaccurate generalizations about postmodernism, but the very tenant that
postmodernism has become the de facto theoretical orientation in the academy
and an ally of the far Right. 
 
³The effects of postmodernism,² claim Rikiowski and McLaren, ³are
predictable: relativism, nihilism, solipsism, fragmentation, pathos,
hopelessness² (p. 5).  There is a harsh edge to these attacks; postmodernism
is equated to sophist posturing and vacuous theorizing.  Thus Jenny Bourne,
writing on postmodernism¹s seeming inability to tackle issues of race,
argues that, ³Fortunately, most postmodern theorists on race are confined to
the lecture theatre and so rarely contaminate ?the real world¹² (p. 204). 
 
Postmodernism is not just a failed conceptual undertaking for these authors,
but a (willing?) partner of the far Right project.  Mike Cole and David
Hill, in a phrase echoed throughout the book, argue that ³in rejecting the
determining effects of capital, or in neutralizing capitalism itself,
postmodernism serves to uphold the current capitalist project² that
privileges ³individualism, consumerism, and greed² (p. 90).  Postmodernism
becomes in this book a radical relativism that, by refusing to speak at all
about truth or justice, gives free reign to the radical right agenda of
corporate gluttony and capitalistic hegemony.
 
At first I wondered who they could be possibly reading to have such a stance
on postmodernism.  But they were reading the same authors I was: Patti
Lather, Elizabeth Ellsworth, Judith Butler, Stuart Hall, Ali Ratansi, Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida.  Yet they took such authors in a fundamentally
different, and I would suggest disingenuous, direction.  Peter Mclaren and
Ramin Farahmandpur, in their essay ³Breaking Signifying Chains,² suggest
that:
 
Like graffiti sprayed across the tropes and conceits of modernist
narratives, postmodern theory remains a soft form of revolt?Slouching under
the Promethean hubris of avant-garde cosmopolitanism, postmodern theorists
privilege the poetics of the sublime over the drab flux of quotidian
existence; evanescent immateriality over the concrete materiality of lived
experience?fashionable apostasy over the collective ideals of revolutionary
struggle from below; the salubriousness of aesthetic subversion over
political insurrection; the bewitchment and exorcism of signs over the class
struggle that shapes their epistemological character; transgressive pedagogy
over the pedagogy of revolution (p. 58). 
 
It is this ³pedagogy of revolution,² it seems to me, that ultimately drives
this book.  There is an urgency to the writings for maintaining the Marxist
frame of class-based analysis on all aspects of educational practice and
theory.  And there is a frustration that postmodernism has failed on such an
account.  Michael Apple and Geoff Whitty offer what I consider to be the
fairest account of this dilemma:
 
There are gritty realities out there, realities whose power is often
grounded in structural relations that are not simply social constructions
created by the meanings given by an observer.  Part of our task, it seems to
us, is not to lose sight of these gritty realities in the economy, in the
state, and cultural practices, at the same time as we recognize the dangers
of reductive and essentializing analyses.  Our point is not to deny that
many elements of ?postmodernity¹ exist, nor is it to deny the insights of
aspects of postmodern theory.  Rather, it is to avoid over-statement, to
avoid substituting one grand narrative for another?we need, then, to
continue to ?think through¹ the complicated structural and cultural
conditions surrounding schools, to uncover the cracks in these conditions,
and in doing so to find spaces for critical action (pp. 71-72). 
            
This is, I believe, an excellent articulation of the issue facing much of
educational research, and one that a postmodern perspective would certainly
embrace.  As Richard Rorty has argued on more than one occasion, ³nobody,
not even the most far-out post-modernist, believes that there is no
difference between the statements we call true and those we call false²
(1997, p. 23).  To claim that postmodernism is bereft of value and in league
with the Radical Right is a caricature not worth engaging; much like it
would be a caricature of Marxism to brand it as a failed project that
collapsed with the Berlin Wall. 
 
Let me thus, for the sake of argument, take the claim that postmodernism has
become the dominant theoretical orientation within the educational
establishment.  I just returned from AERA in Chicago, where postmodernism
certainly did not seem in ascendance.  A cursory use of the AERA conference
search engine (http://www.tigersystem.net/aera2003/searchaera2003.asp),
moreover, reveals the following ³hits² for the title/keyword search:
Postmodern ­ 9; Critical theory ­ 4; Marx ­ 1; Foucault ­ 5; Dewey ­ 19;
Motivation ­ 41; Professional development ­ 114.  What I take from this is
that if critical theorists want to attack anyone for theoretical hegemony,
it¹s the educational psychology folks (with due apologies, of course, to all
my colleagues in ed psych).
 
Seriously, though, my point is not that educational research should embrace
a destructive game of theoretical-king-of-the-hill.  Different theoretical
orientations allow all of us a clearer picture of the messy and turbulent
world within the educational system, and both critical theory and postmodern
perspectives have much to offer.  Yet it is this lack of genuine dialogue
across theoretical orientations within the book that truly frustrated me. 
Much fruitful work in the 1990s by some of these same authors ­ McLaren,
Apple, and Henri Giroux come immediately to mind ­ offered a useful
counterpoint to radical orthodox positions in both theoretical camps.  Yet
the book as a whole does not take up such work.  Instead, it may offer much
to the graduate student and/or researcher committed to a strong Marxist
perspective.  It may certainly win the immediate rhetorical battle of
theoretical one-upmanship.  But it offers little ground for collaboration in
the bigger picture of academic comprehension of and engagement with pressing
educational issues.
 
References
 
Rorty, Richard.  (1997).  Truth, Politics and 'Post-Modernism'.  Amsterdam: 
Van Gorcum. 
 

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    Teachers College Record Volume 106 Number 1, 2004, p. -
http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 11154, Date Accessed: 5/18/2003
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