Postmodernity/postmodernism – WTF

Some readers may feel that these labels are pointless and, generally, I would agree..But, on this occasion, it seems rather important to know if we are in a new era - where the old assumptions which served us well in the past no longer work

So allow me to pursue these personal recollections – to see where they lead…… 

I don’t think too many of us – if asked - would be able to give a convincing account of “postmodernity”. And that certainly includes me.

Until recently I would have muttered something like “incoherent gibberish” as a comment and “anything goes” as an epitaph – except that it hasn’t really gone away. Arguably, with “post-truth”, it is only now reaching its zenith….

As Postmodernity is presumed to have revealed itself just as I was starting university (1960) and I didn’t notice anything all that unusual until sometime in the new millennium, this suggests a certain carelessness – if not insouciance - on my part.

Although I can always plead that I haven’t lived in Western Europe for the past 30 years!  

But did we ever understand what “modernity” was about? And when did we first become aware that it was no more?

It’s interesting that it was 1982 before clear explanation was published - with Marshall Berman’s  “All that is Solid Melts into Air”  – a quotation, of course, from Karl Marx whose “Communist Manifesto” launched the age of modernity. But I for one didn’t came across the book until the last decade or so. Oh - and modernity, for him, was the combustion engine, electricity, trains, speed, ideology etc 

In 1972 I set up a Local Government Unit at Paisley College of Technology which basically allowed me to use my position as a reforming politician in a shipbuilding town to present and explore the odd mixture of ideas about rationality, participation, positive discrimination which were wafting their way across the Atlantic…..The very phrase “maximum feasible participation” of the poor indicated how radical the efforts were…

The Unit’s papers and seminars achieved sufficient success to allow the powers-that- be to give me a sabbatical for 4 years to try to consolidate its position.

I have to confess that I repaid their faith with lethargy – the powerful position I held as one of the leaders of Strathclyde Region (which had half of the Scottish Office budget and managed half of the professional employed in Scotland) just took up too much of my time.    

Recognising in 1982 or so that I would need to go back to real academic work, I was in the first group to enrol in Britain’s first (part-time) Masters’ degree in Policy Analysis set up by Professor Lewis Gunn at the University of Strathclyde whose staff included people such as Michael Keating, Arthur Midwinter and Gavin Kennedy.

Lewis Gunn delivered traditional lectures about the fascinating exchanges which had been taking place in the postwar period in the USA about rationality and the decision-making process involving people such as Herbert Simon and Charles Lindblom…..

The session on “Frame Analysis” (originating from Erving Goffman in 1974) made such a vivid impression on me that I still have memories of my reaction as it was being delivered. The technique simply demonstrates how different “stories” are used to make sense of complex social events. But I had no occasion to use it - little did I realize that it was to become a central part of post-modernism’s encouragement of diverse realities…  It took more than a decade before political scientist Chris Hood’s The Art of the State (1998­) brought it all home to me. The book uses Mary Douglas’ grid-group theory to offer a brilliant analysis of 4 basic “world views” (individualist, hierarchical, fatalist and egalitarian) and their strengths and weaknesses in particular contexts.

Michael Thompson is an anthropologist who has used Mary Douglas’ cultural theory to make The case for clumsiness (2004) which, again, sets out the various stories which sustain the different positions people take on various key policy issues – such as the ecological disaster with which we are now confronted. There is a good interview with the author here

Three short reports give an excellent summary of all this literature; and its political significance – Keith Grint’s Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions (2008); Common Cause (2010); and Finding Frames (2010) 

But geographer Michael Hulme’s Why We Disagree About Climate Change (2009) is probably the most thorough and satisfying use of the approach - applying seven different lenses (or perspectives) to make sense of climate change: viz those of “science, economics, religion, psychology, media, development, and governance”. His argument is basically that –

·       We understand science and scientific knowledge in different ways

·       We value things differently

·       We believe different things about ourselves, the universe and our place in the universe

·       We fear different things

·       We receive multiple and conflicting messages about climate change – and interpret them differently

·       We understand “development” differently

·       We seek to govern in different ways (eg top-down “green governmentality”; market environmentalism; or “civic environmentalism”) 

It’s a pity that so few authors have tried to apply this approach to the global economic crisis. Most people who write about that are stuck in their own particular “quadrant” (to use the language of grid-group writing) and fail to do justice to the range of other ways of seeing the crisis. This diagram of mine tries to offer an example of the sort of humility we need from our writers 

The previous post and this one have involved a romp down memory lane. I’ve inflicted this on my readers simply because it seems to take us a long time to recognise what’s staring us in the face. I’m sure I remember George Orwell saying something to that effect. It’s like boiling a frog – something I’ve never done – but Charles Handy uses the story to make the point about the dangers of being left behind by social change