By Dr Beth Mitchell
Sokal’s famous paper, detailed in his book, The Hoax, was a swipe at postmodernism and complacency in publishing. Although Sokal was a self-proclaimed novice in the field, he managed to get past peer-reviewers with a paper entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” (Sokal 2010). Neuroscientist Della Salla (2007), also a myth-buster, is equally sceptical and dismissive of the postmodernist turn, particularly the more radical writing that leaves scholars and laypeople alike, baffled. So why do scholars in education and social justice bother with all this fluffy nonsense that most people find impenetrable? My argument is that postmodern and post-structural theories perform an important role in society by scratching the surface of language, discourse and practice. They provide us with a means to articulate the interconnectedness and fluidity of a fast-moving society, pushed on by the relentless march of technology and its ability to record, store and present more and more information. The computer age has developed immeasurably within my lifetime. We are now in an era of ‘big data’, where countless amounts of data can be collected and stored at the click of a button. This has made it easier to measure ‘improvements’, to monitor and compare outcomes for schools, hospitals, businesses and so on. Technological advances have facilitated the spread of ‘performativity’, a way of judging progress and excellence through number-crunching. Whilst there may be much merit in being able to demonstrate positive change on a mass scale, we must also be cautious about how this can also promote reductionist approaches to research. Statistics can be misleading by claiming ‘truths’ that sound credible and robust, and go on to be developed into slogans and discourses (Munday 2010). So how can the meandering ululations of radical post-modern linguistics and the like protect us from the threat of reductionism and performativity? The battle between empiricism and theory resounds, but perhaps those who work in the (battle)field of education can hear something in the clashing of swords. By accepting numbers as facts we are perhaps building a film-set, flimsy and insubstantial, behind which nothing resides; or perhaps it’s turtles all the way down? (Hawking and Jackson 1993). Two-dimensional discourses may be invisible from the side, but this can make them all the more cutting; consider Trump’s Tweets for example. Arguably unimaginative, crass, inelegant perhaps, but unfortunately, resonant. Perhaps the result is that we build a flat, cardboard world that means nothing. In terms of education, this represents the importance of continuously questioning and critiquing the substance of education, to ensure the result is a society with firm foundations. By continuing along a trajectory of ‘improvement’ and ‘excellence’ we run the risk of pushing things forward without investigating ethics, morals and inequalities; this is a serious problem in education that appears to be sliding backwards into decreasing social mobility and a greater gap between the haves and the have-nots. We need to be sceptical of the sceptics, or we can easily end up in Trump’s world, where long words are useless. References Della Sala, S. 2007, Tall tales about the mind and brain: Separating fact from fiction, Oxford University Press. Hawking, S. and Jackson, M., 1993. A brief history of time. Munday, I., 2010. Performativity, statistics and bloody words. In Educational Research-the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics (pp. 177-188). Springer, Dordrecht. Sokal, A. 2010, Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture: Science, Philosophy and Culture, Oxford University Press.
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