Applied linguistics: no ‘bookish theoric’
WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?
The term postmodernism refers to the contemporary sense of skepticism felt by scholars in the humanities and social sciences with regard to progress, in the validity of knowledge and science and generally in universal explanations and the optimism of the Enlightenment: ‘we begin to see a shift in emphasis away from what we could call scientific knowledge towards what should properly be considered as a form of narrative knowledge’ (Docherty 1993: 25).
Those professing ideas associated with postmodernism speak of rejecting the grand meta narratives of modernity, such as liberalism, Marxism, democracy and the Industrial Revolution, and a championing of the local, the relative and the contingent. It rejects the totalizing idea of reason on the grounds that there is no unique reason, only reasons (Lyotard 1984). This emphasis on cultural relativity has established itself in the soft rather than in the hard sciences, above all in literary and cultural studies, which in some academic settings have merged into an over-arching study of contemporary cultural manifestations, especially film and media. In continental Europe (largely France, Germany and Italy) the influence has also reached into philosophy, in part because the ‘intellectual’ there has always enjoyed greater stature than in the UK (Matthews 1996: 206). Furthermore, the concentration in the UK on linguistic philosophy in the mid-twentieth century was unique to English-speaking countries, leaving continental philosophy to pursue its post-Hegelian interests in the larger questions of knowledge and purpose.
This reflexive concern with the meaning and methodology of the study that one is engaged in, a kind of decentering or reflective awareness (Donaldson 1978), the so called ‘critical turn’ in the social sciences and the humanities, has inevitably affected applied linguistics. The increasing influence there of critical applied linguistics, itself a manifestation of the postmodern surge in the 1970s and 1980s may now be on the wane, but its origins and its meaning demand our close attention.
Postmodernism encompasses post-structuralism, itself a reaction against the paradigm shift of structuralism which brought the Enlightenment up to date for the mid twentieth century. Structuralism rejected the emphasis on the subjective of ‘modern’ grand theories such as existentialism and psychoanalysis in favor of the objective patterning in social life that derives from the work of Saussure and Levi-Strauss. This patterning was found in fields such as: ‘anthropology, linguistics and philosophy, [which] needed to focus on the super-individual structures of language, ritual and kinship which make the individual what he or she is. Simply put, it is not the self that creates culture, but culture that creates the self’ (Cahoone 1996: 5).
Linguistics, both general and applied was influenced by this scientific claim of structuralism, as seen in Bloomfield’s appeal to linguists to ‘wait on science’ and in institutional titles such as Reading University’s Department of Linguistic Sciences; and the landmark volume of Halliday et al. (1964).
In its turn structuralism was rejected by post-structuralism which castigated the scientific aspirations of structuralism as pretensions. The problem with post-structuralism’s rejection was that of the baby and the bath water. It was one thing to reject what was seen to be the pretensions of a scientific linguistics intent on finding out ‘the truth’; it was a very different matter to move on from that to abandon the methods of rational enquiry that linguistics and other social disciplines had developed, on the ostensible grounds that if there was no truth to be found then there really was no appropriate methodology for pursuing the study. This is both a counsel of despair and at the same time an unfortunate linking of the pessimism that is endemic to postmodernism to the age-old clash between nominalism and realism.
Docherty, who is no opponent of postmodernism, points to the basic premise of all scholarly observation and critical study: that the outcome will permit generalization. If there is no appropriate methodology to carry out the observation and the critical study then how is it possible to judge any event or act: ‘how can one legitimize an “event” of judging? With respect to what can one validate what must effectively be a singular act?’ (1993: 25). To this Docherty has no answer except to say that an answer must be found: ‘it is here that the real political burden and trajectory of the postmodern is to be found: the search for a just politics, or the search for just a politics’ (ibid: 26–7).
In his article, ‘Towards a postmodern pedagogy’ (1991/96), Giroux offers nine suggestive principles for a critical pedagogy. In these principles we have a connection between postmodernism and the critical turn. The thrust of these principles is to emphasize the need to challenge existing norms, to value difference, and to regard teachers as transformative individuals; they are ‘cultural workers engaged in the production of ideologies and social practices’ (Cahoone: 1996: 695).
This helpfully takes us on to the postmodern turn as it has affected applied linguistics in the version that has come to be known as critical applied linguistics (CAL). Docherty notes:
[T]here is hardly a single field of intellectual endeavor which has not been touched by the ‘spectre’ of ‘the postmodern’. It leaves its traces in every cultural discipline from architecture to zoology, taking in on the way biology, forestry, geography, history, law, literature and the arts in general, medicine, politics, philosophy, and so on. (1993: 1)
Unsurprisingly, therefore, applied linguistics in its CAL version has also felt the spectre of the postmodern. It has felt the spectre particularly in the importance it ascribes to experience, as attested by Giroux’s acknowledgement of bell hooks’ views on the primacy of experience. This takes us back to earlier in this book where, referring to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), we discussed the experiential approach that has to a large extent characterized applied linguistics in its UK applied-linguistics empiricist version. In other words, it encourages us to view the CAL version of applied linguistics as unlimited reflection on experience, unchecked and unvalidated by its own professional community.
