Webdiary - Independent, Ethical, Accountable and Transparent
header_02 home about login header_06
header_07
search_bar_left
date_box_left
date_box_right.jpg
search_bar_right
sidebar-top content-top

Howard and post modernism

A debate about post-modernism has simmered beneath the surface of a number of Webdiary debates in my view. MF McAuliffe's first piece for Webdiary gives us the opportunity. Thanks MF.

by MF McAuliffe

On April 21st The Age reported the Prime Minister as attacking "the teaching of 'dumb' English ... in ...various parts of the country."

The reason for this dumbness? "The English syllabus in Australian schools ... is falling victim to postmodernism and political correctness" ... [and is treating] ... traditional texts no differently from pop cultural commentary."

Peter Craven helpfully appeared in the same issue to intimate that, according to postmodernism "there is no aesthetic value that's not illusory, and that our kids might as well be studying any old aspect of pop culture ... rather than King Lear or the poetry of Keats."

The basis of that assertion is "the postmodernist notion that everything is relative."

Postmodernism of course, says no such thing.

Postmodernism says that some texts are privileged over others, just as some people, castes and classes are. For example: Arundhati Roy often says that she is everything a woman should not be - small, ugly and clever. In colonial India, could she ever have published a book? What publishing house would have let her past the front door, a small, dark, ugly, native woman?

Keeping Arundhati Roy in her place - out of school, out of print, on the street - is not simply a case of not being able to see past appearances. Postmodernism contends that war and politics arrange appearances in hierarchies of value/acceptability to justify the way the world's goods are divided.

Could Mersault, a Frenchman in Algeria, have casually killed anyone but an Arab?

Traditional teaching of The Stranger talks about the coldness and anomie of Mersault’s psychology, links it to technology, the emergence of mass man/mass culture, the lack of worth of the individual in our huge impersonal cities. The traditional version essentially ends by lamenting the passing of towns and villages. Postmodernism points out the unstated racism at the centre of the situation. The lack of emotion or even reason for the killing has already been built into the social structure, into what postmodernism would call the signifiers or coding, of 'Arab'. The postmodernist reading does not end up in a wank of nostalgia.

At its best, postmodernism reveals the assumptions behind the work or the world depicted in the work. That's what makes it interesting. That's what makes it dangerous.

The Age included the syllabus from this year's VCE. So let's take a Postmodernist look at what the Prime Minister would see if were doing the VCE this year:

Popcult:

  • Gattaca - a film about a caste-ridden, totalitarian society, and the prison it maintains
  • Baghdad Blog - the Iraq war from the Iraqi side

Now for the traditional texts:

  • Oedipus Rex - a country blighted by the hidden sins of its ruler(s)
  • Hamlet - a ruling dynasty so concerned with its own internal/incestuous power-struggles that it ignores the advance of hostile neighbours
  • Tess of the D'Urbervilles - a novel about the cruely and insanity of the lack of divorce laws

 

The Prime Minister is well-known for his support of:

  • the Iraq war - Abu Ghreib, Guantanamo Bay and other secret prisons (North Africa, Uzbekistan, the practice of rendition)

 

and his opposition to:

  • divorce - even to working wives (effctive income-splitting)
  • alternative points of points of view and civil dissent (the sedition laws)
  • industrial dissent (the IR legislation)

 

So it's clear that the Prime Minister's problem with the Eng. Lit. syllabus is as political as all get-out. Who, if he is John Howard, wants the kids studying justified dissent, the unjustifiability of your current war, the corruption of the ruling class, the with-a-little-action thoroughly avoidable miseries of being on the whip-end of autocracy, theocracy, or royalty narcisistically demented?

"Postmodernism" and "political correctness" are buzz-words from Hate Week.

They - their Howard-Craven versions - are there to distract academics, letter-writers, Mums and Dads and playwrights from the two points that matter:

  • a postmodern approach to the current syllabus is a devastating analysis of contemporary Australia;
  • in his characteristically indirect way, the Prime Minister is beginning to establish his right to interfere with what gets taught.

 

And for the future of Australian intellectual freedom, that indirectly-announced intention is as radical and wrong as everything else he has done.

left
right
[ category: ]
spacer

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Howard, Bush, Blair, Folly

How much more plainly can I say it?

The issue is Howard's intention to control what is taught in schools.

"Postmodernism" as a method of analysis points out the political critique of his own policies implicity or explicit in what's being studied there now.

I'm sure you all saw in Age not too long ago the articles, one by a professor of law at Curtin University, to the effect that the IR case currently beore the Supreme Court is a power-grab by the Federal Government on the pretext that Federal power to make laws with respect to trading corporations constitutes a claim to regulate all aspects of all corporations in Australia - and that all universities and state public schools in Australia are corporations. (No link because those pieces are in the pay-for-it archive.)

As for many truths - yes, there are many truths. Tacitus gives the British war-band leader a speech to his warriors just before their losing battle against Agricola. The British reason for rebelling against the Romans? "You make a desolation and call it peace."

But never mind. Democracy may not be for everybody. Even Greece had its Colonels, and under them no Plato, Aristotle, Hamlet, Kazantzakis...

Bush, Blair and Howards Folly.

ABC report on Howard’s trip to the US Here: http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200605/s1637677.htm

“Mr Howard has arrived in Washington for an official visit, which will include a rare White House dinner with President George W Bush.

Earlier this week, the White House praised Australia as "one of America's closest allies and partners".

It said the governments of the two countries are united in "the common goals of promoting peace, freedom and prosperity through fighting terrorism, stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and promoting an open international economic order".

How is it possible to promote peace with war?

How can we stop the proliferation of WMD’S without complete nuclear disarmament?

This is the folly of Bush, Blair and Howard.

Post modernists say there are many “truths”  I say war is not peace, and the proliferation of WMD’s cannot be prevented as long as one country holds on to nuclear weapons

postpoliticalcorrectnessmodernism?

It's intriguing that Howard conflates 'Post Modernism' with 'Political Correctness’, banding them together as part of the values of the chattering classes (I take it he considers as superior the wisdom of the 'grunting' classes.)

Coming to adulthood in the 90's, at the height of political correctness, my experience was that p. c'ness was an anti-intellectual force. As an outspoken artist (read 'scruffy dick joke comedian') I found disapproval or attempts to censor my more ribald work – even when using irony or in support of humanitarian, egalitarian causes. Political Correctness mutated into a zealotry that attacked both left and right, and which disregarded the post-modern empirical importance of context.

For Howard to put Political Correctness in the same basket as Post Modernism just shows the depths of his anti-intellectualism.

Thanks for the offer

Malcolm, thanks for the offer. I worked for a while in King’s Cross (no, not that kind of work). From my memories of walking from the station to the office, and the things I used to see on the footpaths along the way, you’d never get me swandiving onto any one of them.

Let's hear it for post-classicism

Firstly, I usually agree with what Arundhati Roy writes, until now. What does she mean - 'ugly'? She's not ugly. Not by a long shot.

Secondly, I am a product of a 'classical' literature schooling, and many’s the time I remember when I felt like running screaming to the classroom window and jumping out. It gave me a thorough aversion to the classics and if that makes me a post-modernist, then so be it. My high school literature itinerary was made up mostly of this kind of stuff:

Hamlet – a self-absorbed misogynist neurotic (SAMN) treats his girlfriend despicably simply because his widowed mother had the nerve to marry again (randy old bitch). The girlfriend – not too keen on SAMN’s advice to get herself to a nunnery - tops herself (silly cow – no man’s worth it), then the SAMN tops her father for telling him he’s a SAMN, then he runs around joking about how much the corpse smells. We’re supposed to feel sorry for the SAMN – which is why he’s called a ‘sweet prince’ at the end of the play, after causing the deaths of almost everybody in it, including (thankfully) himself.

Henry V – about a self-absorbed French-hating neurotic (SAFHN), who decides to invade a country because he’s got nothing better to do (sound familiar?), and because the other country has got more wine that his country (and they’ve probably got weapons of mass destruction lying around somewhere too). His arrogance and total lack of ethics are very infectious, however, and his men manage to pull off a stunning victory, in which the French fatality count outnumbers the English by 10:1. (The play doesn’t bother to mention that most of the French died AFTER the surrender.)

The Fire on the Snow – oh, lawd!! A laugh a minute. Five men freezing to death on the way to the South Pole (or was it on the way back?) And all for the glory of England. Oh damn and blast – that beastly Norwegian got there first. The nerve! And they don’t even have an empire. Oh well, tiddly pip. What would Biggles have done?

The Mayor of Casterbridge – about another SAMN who sells his wife and daughter in order to become prosperous, and then we’re supposed to feel sorry for him when, later on, a younger man starts taking all his business away (all’s fair in a free market, mate). Some woman dies of consumption because all nineteenth century novels have to include a woman who dies of consumption – and they also have to be longer than the bible.

Anna Karenina – another very long novel, about the most boring woman that ever lived. She tops herself because a man (wisely) dumps her. La Karenina was the inspiration for all those masochistic love-gone-wrong songs later recorded by Billy Holiday, Patsy Kline and Dusty Springfield.

Assorted Australian poetry – Crikey! The city’s for poofters and women, mate. Let’s all be boys in the bush together! Let’s go rovin’ and a-drovin’ across the Queensland border. Biff all those blacks out of the way (you’d think they owned the place!) and put the billy on. We’re the future Anzacs, so we got to learn to make a cup of tea in hazardous conditions.

I could go on … and on … but you get the drift. Whenever I’m in a bookshop I still give the classical literature section a wide berth and, I notice, so does everyone else.

Be my guest

For some considerable time, living and born in Kings Cross as I am, I have been a self-confessed lesbian.  Sorry if I'm letting the sisterhood down, jane lahey (LOVE the e.e. cummings approach) but, for you, my window will always be open.  We're on the 7th floor so the swan-dive is the quickest and most effective method.

Long live kids and their mobiles

I guess these pseudo academic intellectually self indulgent post modernists would have real difficulty texting each other on their mobiles. Thank God for kids. They show us how to communicate.

As for literature in schools. Well nothing changes really. When young, I and most of my classmates resented having Shakespeare, MiIlton and Herodotus and their ilk crammed down our collective necks to the exclusion of Henry, Banjo and their ilk. So when the class was yet again assigned for homework the task of dissecting some incomprehensible English essay framed in a language that distantly resembled the language I thought it was time to draw the line. So instead I handed in an essay challenging the whole English syllabus. Muggins me! I cannot remember whether I got caned, or got detention but it was one of the two. (Yes they did cane girls in my day and I copped my share). Fair enough I thought at the time as I was a bit of a disruptive influence on the orderly running of that girl's school. Now I thank God that I was. It heightened my crap detector no end.

But what I did not count on was that English teacher's long memory. I was good at telling stories, so no one was surprised that I won the annual short story prize. The prize? A bloody book on English verse. See, they try to get to you one way or another. Well thankfully most kids are no more fools today than they were in my day. A few will get caught and go on to make a career out of this post modernist rubbish and spend their lives pretending to understand the literature it spawns. But most, again thankfully will not.

Towards a hermeneutics of the emergent totality

For starters, let’s do a bit of a deconstruction of MF McAuliffe’s post. (I have put some words into bold type.)

So it's clear that the Prime Minister's problem with the Eng. Lit. syllabus is as political as all get-out. Who, if he is John Howard, wants the kids studying justified dissent, the unjustifiability of your current war, the corruption of the ruling class, the with-a-little-action thoroughly avoidable miseries of being on the whip-end of autocracy, theocracy, or royalty narcissistically demented?

"Postmodernism" and "political correctness" are buzz-words from Hate Week.

They - their Howard-Craven versions - are there to distract academics, letter-writers, Mums and Dads and playwrights from the two points that matter: A postmodern approach to the current syllabus is a devastating analysis of contemporary Australia; In his characteristically indirect way, the Prime Minister is beginning to establish his right to interfere with what gets taught.

And for the future of Australian intellectual freedom, that indirectly-announced intention is as radical and wrong as everything else he has done.”

There are 148 words in the above quotation. We could spend, or waste, a great deal of time discussing the hermeneutics embedded in it, and the significance and meaning of its words, particularly those I have featured in bold. MF McAuliffe rightly describes ‘postmodernism’, as used by the politician John Howard, as a ‘buzz-word from Hate Week’. The intent is to stimulate a shock-horror response from Howard’s audience.

OK. That is the sort of thing politicians are noted for. It would not occur to Howard to define ‘postmodernism’, partly because his purpose is better served by leaving its meaning vague: postmodernism emerges as just another problem that the average battlers have to contend with. Nasty people are ramming it (whatever it is) down the necks of their kids. But whatever it means, and whatever it threatens, Honest John is there to back up the battlers.

Trouble is, MF McAuliffe uses the same term without ever defining it, which is a pity. However, he or she does say what ‘postmodernism’ says:

The basis of that assertion is "the postmodernist notion that everything is relative."

Postmodernism of course, says no such thing.

Postmodernism says that some texts are privileged over others, just as some people, castes and classes are. For example: Arundhati Roy often says that she is everything a woman should not be - small, ugly and clever. In colonial India, could she ever have published a book? What publishing house would have let her past the front door, a small, dark, ugly, native woman?

Some thinkers, presumably labeled ‘postmodernist’ in some fashion might say these things. But postmodernism? Can ‘it’ talk? This is no idle semantic game here. ‘Postmodernism’ as used this way emerges not as an approach, or even a method, but as a school of thought. If we now consider the statement, “Who, if he is John Howard, wants the kids studying… the unjustifiability of your current war…?” (That is, presumably, the current Iraq War, which also presumably, ‘postmodernism’ says is unjustified.) Postmodernism is emerging here as a body of doctrine. Postmodernist teachers will presumably lead students to certain predetermined conclusions, such as ‘your current war cannot be justified’. Whatever it is, ‘postmodernism’ is thus not a science. It’s not a method. It’s more like a religion.

Which leaves us asking: exactly what is postmodernism?

Postmodernist thinkers can of course ‘deconstruct’ attempted justifications of the Iraq War, such as Tony Blair’s, Christopher Hitchens’, Norman Geras’ and John Howard’s, and play ‘spot the privilege’ and other such diversions. But those sorts of philosophical methods can soon be turned on themselves, as has been known in philosophy since at least the time of the Sophists of ancient Greece.

In my view, a major landmark in the history of postmodernism was the publication of the widely cited article by the physicist Alan Sokal, entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," published in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of the postmodernist journal Social Text, without review from another physicist. On the same day of its publication, Sokal announced that the article was a hoax.

In 1944, the Australian poets James MacAuley and Harold Stewart pulled a similar stunt on the avant garde poetry journal Angry Penguins. As described by Peter Porter:

Ern Malley was the poet-monster created by two Doctors Frankenstein, Harold Stewart and James Macauley. They concocted a set of verses entitled The Darkening Ecliptic, and fooled Max Harris, editor of Angry Penguins, that these were written by a working-class genius who died young. By now the legend has gone into reverse and it is the fakers who are held in derision: the Malley poems are judged better than their authors' serious works.

Or as described by David Lehman:

In a single rollicking afternoon McAuley and Stewart cooked up the collected works of Ernest Lalor Malley. Imitating the modern poets they most despised (‘not Max Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, and others’), they rapidly wrote the sixteen poems that constitute Ern Malley’s ‘tragic lifework.’ They lifted lines at random from the books and papers on their desks (Shakespeare, a dictionary of quotations, an American report on the breeding grounds of mosquitoes, etc.). They mixed in false allusions and misquotations, dropped ‘confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning’ in place of a coherent theme, and deliberately produced what they thought was bad verse. They called their creation Malley because mal in French means bad. He was Ernest because they were not.

Later, the hoaxers added a high-sounding ‘preface and statement,’ outfitted Malley with a tearjerking biography, and created his suburban sister Ethel. The invention of Ethel was a masterstroke. It was she who sent Malley’s posthumous opus, ‘The Darkening Ecliptic’, to Max Harris along with a cover letter tinged with her disapproval of her brother’s bohemian ways and proclaiming her own ignorance of poetry.

A postmodernist author seeking to undermine or ‘deconstruct’ physics in the same manner would probably have a hard time getting published in a serious physics journal. The hoaxers showed not only the weakness of the (‘modernist’) Angry Penguins and the (“postmodernist’) Social Text, but the fundamental hollowness of the approaches and assessment criteria of both journals. Spoofs are only possible on the spoofable. Spoofers rely on the ambiguities and penchant for text dense in highly abstract strings of polysyllabic latinisms and such in their quarry.

The other weakness, as MF McAuliffe unintentionally shows, is the essential simplicity of the ideas translated out of the regulation turgid metatwaddlic prose. Postmodernism's fundamental problem is its banality. Why it has to be set out in such a way as to make it inaccessible to the average battler one can only guess, though a few possibilities spring to mind, including protection of the lives of privilege led by its academic churn turners. That word again.

OK. Now let’s get a few obvious links out and down:

First we have another spoof: the postmodernism generator.

From the liberal centre, the critique by Richard Dawkins:

From the left, Bob Gould’s noteworthy observations, and his homage to Ghassan Hage.

Finally from the right, Keith Windschuttle (some of whose arguments on other topics I disagree with)

Enjoy.

Post-Modernism

I think the HSC English curriculum is strong on interpretation, weak on content. Much is made of how to read, rather than what to read. I think it does deny young students a proper grounding in the classics, which is why I'm so glad I ventured out on my own.

There is nothing wrong with learning about post-modernism, in fact I think it's beneficial, but it shouldn't be at the expense of exposing students to quality literature. This piece cites Hardy and Camus - two authors that should be read by high school students, but who aren't.

The Prime Minister is broadly right in his “critique” of literature, though it strikes me as shallow populism, rather than informed criticism. My understanding of the PM is that he isn't too well-read, except in history and economics.

Generational intolerance

Perhaps it's naive of me but I suspect it's more the 'things were better in my day' factor that JWH is appealing to - and given the demographics this is what makes it a savvy political move.

It taps into all those fears about our changing society. (What parent hasn't puzzled over something their child now does differently? For me, it was subtraction, which now uses trading (how free market!) instead of the familiar borrowing/paying back.)

And he can bag all the (Labor) states and territories in one go by criticising 'new' (and, by implication, inferior) education methods!

Loose ends

A few things:   Malcolm Bradbury's Mensonge (now out of print and difficult to obtain yet hilarious) and To the Hermitage (his last and finally redeeming novel); thinking actually happens; crap is crap; and morons should be confined to institutions that can care for them adequately.   Now, MF McAuliffe, bugger off before I set the Widow of Bath onto you or hit you with an otherwise perfectly serviceable astrolabe.

The Reality of Postmodernism

MF McAuliffe...personally, I'm heartily sick of the tacit assumptions which underlie all such political defences of postmodernism. Which are that 1/effective analyses of the political tenor of cultural productions are somehow something new, and therefore that an attack on postmodernism is effectively an attack on the very possibility of such analyses, and that 2/the best way to undertake such analyses is via the ridiculously circumscribed theoretical stance - and ludicrously jargon-ridden and semantically-clotted prose - that totally dominates the work of this school of "thought".

Because, neither are straightforward assumptions, and I'll be damned if I can see how they're defensible, to be blunt. This has nothing to do w/Howard's usual bait and switch tactics...and EVERYTHING to do with honest scholarship, clear and fair argumentation, and a proper theoretical pluralism for the humanities - postmodernism being the main obstacle in the way of its fruitful development...

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.
© 2005-2011, Webdiary Pty Ltd
Disclaimer: This site is home to many debates, and the views expressed on this site are not necessarily those of the site editors.
Contributors submit comments on their own responsibility: if you believe that a comment is incorrect or offensive in any way,
please submit a comment to that effect and we will make corrections or deletions as necessary.
Margo Kingston Photo © Elaine Campaner

Recent Comments

David Roffey: {whimper} in Not with a bang ... 12 weeks 6 days ago
Jenny Hume: So long mate in Not with a bang ... 13 weeks 14 hours ago
Fiona Reynolds: Reds (under beds?) in Not with a bang ... 13 weeks 2 days ago
Justin Obodie: Why not, with a bang? in Not with a bang ... 13 weeks 2 days ago
Fiona Reynolds: Dear Albatross in Not with a bang ... 13 weeks 2 days ago
Michael Talbot-Wilson: Good luck in Not with a bang ... 13 weeks 2 days ago
Fiona Reynolds: Goodnight and good luck in Not with a bang ... 13 weeks 3 days ago
Margo Kingston: bye, babe in Not with a bang ... 14 weeks 14 hours ago