Reading Images Critically: Toward a Postmodern Pedagogy

Abstract

Modernity is interpreted as both the best and worst of things. It has been characterized in terms of progressive advances over premodern, or traditional, societies, and as a motor of innovation, creativity, change, and progress. Modernity has been identified with individuality, enlightenment, science and technology, the industrial and political revolutions, and thus with democracy and freedom (Berman, 1982; Cahoone, 1988; Habermas, 1987; Kolb, 1986). More negative critiques, however, associate modernity with repression, homogeneity, and a totalitarian domination which has epistemological, sexual, political, and cultural dimensions. Postmodern theorists, such as Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Arthur Kroker, and David Cook, claim that we have left modernity behind for a new condition or scene. An extreme version of theory (Baudrillard, Kroker/Cook) claims that postmodernity constitutes a fundamental break or rupture in history which forms an entirely new society, while Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and others simply recommend new ways of knowing, doing, and being which Lyotard characterizes as knowledge, or a postmodern condition.1 These theorists recommend positions over modern ones and thus positively valorize the discourse of the postmodern, while it is presented in more negative terms and images in the pessimistic writings of Baudrillard and some of his followers.