You have quite a thing about post-modernism, a movement that I have little or no time for. I actually criticise it very strongly in my PhD thesis* A Critique of Critical Discourse Analysis *, which I am pleased to say is quite well advanced in the process (a rather lengthy process) of being published by one of Britain’s leading university presses.
When I return to the office on Monday, given your interest in the subject, I’ll even snip a bit of my text for you.
Incidentally, you are badly mistaken, or simply don’t understand what post-moderism is, if you think that looking closely at the sources of corpora is postmodern. The concern here is with how representative a given corpus is. None is without a bias one way or the other.
No, it is a fund for Negro colleges*, specifically the 39 private institutions featured on this page. The UNCF was never intended to finance black people’s educations at “historically white” schools which were open to students of minority races, nor at such publicly-financed historically black institutions as Virginia State and Florida A&M.
*of course, these colleges are now generally open to people of any race, although Morehouse’s site (available by clicking on line #19 on the page linked above) still specifies that the college is “for African-American men”.
But if you follow Sternvogel’s link and click on the “About Us” page, they provide the following paragraphs (and more) describing their role and history
So, while they do provide money for operating expenses at the Historically Black Colleges and Unviersities–they also provide money for students at many other institutions.
Oh, you don’t think your bit about “alternative voices” sounded a bit postmodern? Because it did, dear. You might as well have described the mainstream media as perpetuating a “discourse” that excludes black people. The fact that you brought it up when it was completely irrelevant was also pretty postmodern - that is, it was a good demonstration of the postmodernist’s habit of using fact only when it’s a convenient tool to cloud discussion, rather than as a way to approach the truth. In fact, your evasiveness in this whole discussion could be read as a postmodern “text” - one that disclaims the possibility of any real truth. That’s it! You’re not ignoring the truth about your assertion here! Because you don’t believe in truth at all!
I broke the code!
A couple of brief extracts from my thesis/book on two areas of special interest to Excalibre (and possibly others): postmodernism, which I most certainly am no supporter of, and (objective) truth, which I very certainly believe in, though I do not believe in “manifest” (or “revelatory”) truth [the theory (supported by Bacon and Descartes) that although truth may be hard to find, ‘once it stands revealed before us, it is impossible for us not to recognize it as truth’ (Popper 1994a: 202)].
On postmodernism/poststructuralism*
CDA practitioners using a theoretical framework derived from poststructuralist/postmodernist thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida run the risk of offering, as Carroll (1995: 23) puts it, no ‘distinct cognitive, ethical and social alternatives to the norms they seek to disrupt’ if they seek ‘only to delegitimize the norms that constitute the elementary components of the Western cultural heritage’. As Geoff Jordan (2004: 79) writes, postmodernism’s ‘radically relativist epistemology’ that rules out the possibility of data collection, empirical tests with the potential to observe events in the world that contradict theories, and any rational criterion for judging between rival explanations makes it inimical for those ‘interested in doing research and building theories’.
My view, in common with Popper, is that while a critical attitude to tradition, which may result either in acceptance or in rejection, or perhaps in a compromise, is laudable, it is worth reminding ourselves of the inescapable debt that we owe to tradition. For Fairclough and others, it may represent the enemy; but it is as well to ensure that it is an enemy that we know, so that, if nothing else, we can be sure of making our attacks hit home. As Popper (1989: 122) puts it, ‘we have to know of and to understand a tradition before we can criticize it, before we can say: “We reject this tradition on rational grounds”’. I would suggest that the challenge for CDA, as it is to all involved in the quest for knowledge, understanding and truth, is not merely to adopt a critical attitude towards tradition, but to challenge dogma and orthodoxy. Popper (1994a: 34) summarizes his position thus:
A former student of Popper’s, Joseph Agassi, in a talk on academic freedom given at the University of Hong Kong on 31 October 2000, picked up on the theme of orthodoxy when he argued that academic tenure had nothing to do with academic freedom. His conclusion was to the point: ‘if you conform for a few years, you become a conformist, whether you like it or not’. Reflecting on the situation in the United States, where, he averred, there were no art or music schools outside the universities, and every serious writer and poet was an academic, the result was that academics had forgotten that they should be critics of conformity and of the system. His concerns for academic freedom centred on the fact that it was designed to protect the different, but that this was difficult whenever there existed a cosy relationship among like-minded people.
The dividing line between poststructuralism and postmodernism is far from clear. They certainly share a good number of premises and principles – for instance, the centrality of discourse for modern life, the relativist distrust of truth, the discursive constitution of the subject, and so on…While for poststructuralism ideology critique is replaced by the articulating discourse which creates ideologically active subject positions, for postmodernism ideology critique is replaced by the end of ideology.
According to Jordan (2004: 78), it is ‘the deliberate confusion of two separate issues: claims about the existence or non-existence of particular things, facts and events, and claims about how one arrives at beliefs and opinions’ that characterizes a radically relativist idea-set such as postmodernism.
On truth
The spectre of ‘hidden truth’ – revelatory CDA – looms large in Popper’s (1966b: 235) vision of communalist thinking as a symptom of the abandonment of the rationalist attitude:
Those who abandon reason, Popper (1966b: 236) argues, ‘split mankind in to friends and foes…into the few who stand near and the many who stand far’. The situation regarding dialogue between mainstream CDA practitioners, such as Fairclough, and others who do not share their socio-political position, is by no means a desperate one, however. It is a myth, ‘the myth of the framework’, Popper (1994a: 34-35) calls it, that ‘a rational and fruitful discussion is impossible unless the participants share a common framework of basic assumptions or, at least, unless they have agreed on such a framework for the purpose of the discussion’. Popper (1994a: 44) believes this myth is responsible for the problems caused when the hope that discussion can lead to a clear victory of truth over falsity is disappointed:
Popper’s contention is that by dispensing with the myth of the framework, and by remembering at all times that truth is hard to come by, we can benefit from critical discussions. But we should not aim at victory, nor at conversion, but rather to clarify the matters at hand, which means for Popper (1994a: 44) that ‘no change of mind should be made surreptitiously, but it should always be stressed and its consequences be explored’. Although a movement or social group such as that represented by mainstream CDA, which provides a way of viewing things in tune with a worldview, may constitute a social bond for some of its exponents, this need not be of any consequence. This is because it is irrelevant whether two worldviews are incommensurable, since it is problems and theories that are paramount, and two theories that try to solve the same family of problems need not be incommensurable.
References
Carroll, J. (1995) Evolution and Literary Theory, Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
Jordan, G. (2004) Theory Construction in Second Language Acquisition, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Larrain, J. (1994) ‘The postmodern critique of ideology’, in Sociology Review 4, 289-314.
Popper, K.R. (1966b) The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume 2: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath (5th ed), London: Routledge.
Popper, K.R. (1989) Conjectures and Refutations: the Growth of Scientific Knowledge (5th ed), London: Routledge.
Popper, K.R. (1994a) The Myth of the Framework: in Defence of Science and Rationality (edited by M. Notturno), London: Routledge.
Uh huh.
That’s research time you could have spent learning the usage of “Negro” in the 1960s.
My dear chap, the research was done over the past ten years. As Dr Johnson once said, it takes half a library to make one book. A simple copy and paste job from the book that is the product of the research process takes no time at all.
Well done! You must be quite bright!
Granted, that’s what one might reasonably assume ceteris paribus. However, if you look at some of the riff-raff that they’ve published in the Edinburgh Textbooks in Applied Linguistics Series (NB pdf file) so far, you might be tempted to challenge that assumption!
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I think Tom’s suggestion is the best solution.
This question has been answered and has moved into GD territory. But instead of moving it, I’d like to see Roger open his own GD thread and start the debate that way.
This thread is closed.
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