An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

2 WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?
The term postmodernism refers to the contemporary sense of scepticism 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 totalising 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 conti -
nental 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
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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 decentring 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 para -
digm 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 favour 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
(see below).
Docherty, who is no opponent of postmodernism, points to the basic premise of
all scholarly observation and critical study: that the outcome will permit general -
isation. 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 legitimise
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
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between postmodernism and the critical turn. The thrust of these principles is to
emphasise 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 endeavour 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, sexuality, 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 (Chapter 2)
where, referring to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), we discussed the
experiential approach that has to a large extent characterised 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.