After postmodernism: A dialogical paradigm

Postmodernism is a counter-Enlightenment discourse against the subject-centered reason of the Enlightenment, i.e. the rationality based on ‘the belief that there is objective truth and that appropriate methods of inquiry [employed by the autonomous subject] can bring us accurate and certain knowledge of that truth’ (Crotty, 2003, p. 42). The subject is considered sovereign and capable of finding objective truth through ‘scientific’ methods. This subject-centered epistemological paradigm prevalent in the age of the Enlightenment is what postmodernism was critical of and deconstructed. While it is difficult to find an agreed-upon meaning of postmodernism, it is usually characterized as ‘contingent, pluralistic, ambiguous, freed (or jettisoned) from the certainties of yesterday, decentered, [and] noisy with previously unheard voices’ (Lincoln & Denzin, 2003, p. 632). The postmodernist thought is employed to challenge claims to absolutism and universalism. Therefore, the long-taken-for-granted authorities and metanarratives are called into question. Postmodernism is not without criticism. ‘Ludic postmodernism,’ for example, was coined by Ebert (1991) in her critique of the mode of postmodernism ‘in which reality becomes a theater of simulation marked by the free play of images, disembodied signifiers, and the heterogeneity of differences (hence the term “ludic”)’ (p. 115). Elbert lamented the fact that ludic postmodernists of the American culture studies focus only on the ‘play’ of linguistic textuality and rhetoric while the historical and social reality is ignored. In the world of ludic postmodernism, real social inequalities are not taken to be ‘real,’ and thus analysis and research are no longer directed toward real changes to better society. In addition, postmodernism does not provide us with criteria to evaluate various discourses. Without criteria, how can we, for example, possibly tell the dominant from the oppressed? Doxc (2011) argues ‘that by removing all criteria, we are left with nothing but the market. The opposite of what postmodernism originally intended’ (para. 23). Although postmodernism deconstructed the subject-centered rationality, it did not offer a way out but succumbed to relativism. The question is: what role should the subject play in our search for knowledge? At this crossroads, Jurgen Habermas (1987) offers a direction, ‘The paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness [or the philosophy of the subject] is exhausted. If this is so, the symptoms of exhaustion should dissolve with the transition to the paradigm of mutual understanding’ (p. 296). Specifically, unlike a subject-centered rationality, Habermas’s paradigm of mutual understanding, or theory of communicative action (TCA), steps beyond the scene of a lone, passive subject/observer and replaces it with that of two or more sentient beings communicating with each other. The subject in the dialogical paradigm is no longer a sovereign, authoritative figure, but an actor who communicates with other subjects and whose being as an actor requires other subjects and the internalization of other subject positions. TCA circumvents not only the impasse of the self-centered rationality of modernity but also the relativistic playfulness of postmodernism. Knowledge, relocated in TCA, is neither the grant narrative dictated by the dominant, nor the rhetoric of ‘everything goes,’ but subject to the contestation among actors/participants in a democratic setting.