Postmodern Practice Research Articles

Cinemetrics: Embodying architectural representation in the digital age

How can architecture emerge from the prison of its current forms of representation? Grahame Shane1 interprets the concluding diagram of Robin Evans' Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries2 as a critique of postmodern architecture's self-reflection and lack of engagement with the world. Shane argues that Evan's diagram depicts architectural representation as a self-reinforcing, closed, conceptual triangle of mirrored reflections between the human observer, the scopic regime of perspective, orthographic architectural drawing conventions, and designed objects. Shane draws his interpretation from Evans's early work on Victorian prison architecture as well as one of Evan's last public lectures. Shane characterized Evans' critical view of postmodern architectural practice and representation as a “self-correcting means of stabilization and pacification of the physical, built environment.”3 This essay develops a theory of Cinemetrics that demonstrates how contemporary architectural production, with the aid of digital tools, has the capacity to break this closed system with open-ended, embodied cybernetic feed-back loops within a wider public culture engaged in the making and imagining of architecture.4 This essay argues that this break can only be accomplished by embodying architectural representation through a careful engagement with Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of movement and time images derived from cinema,5 Henri Bergson's theories of memory, attention and duration,6 and from Charles Sanders Peirce's pragmatic semiosis.7

A Clinically Useful Artwork?: Between a Dialogical and a Relational Approach to Art in a Clinical Environment

This paper discusses the process of introducing, developing and sustaining an art intervention into a clinical environment (hospital community), and integrating it with a clinical trial being conducted to evaluate its effect on patients. Three key issues needed to be addressed in this process. The first of these was how to implement an artwork in the clinical environment that was accountable in terms that were familiar to the art world and the medical community. The second was how to implement an artwork, which allowed the patient to be the arbiter of their own aesthetic experience and to keep them at the center of the experience in general. The third issue centered on the creation of an artwork that may have a clinically significant impact on the patient. With this in mind, the artist /curator developed a framework that facilitated the introduction of an art intervention into a clinical setting that addressed all three issues successfully. This framework can be regarded as a model for introducing art into any type of health care community context. It brings together the world of art and health care in a way that is accountable, inclusive and above all patient-centered. This approach is contextualized by the emerging dialogue between a post-modern art practice, which has its foundations in both relational and dialogical aesthetics, and the modernist praxis of an Irish teaching hospital.

Meditative dialogue: A tool for engaging students in collaborative learning processes

This paper describes a teaching tool that uses meditation practices and postmodern practices to promote a sense of collaboration and mutual responsibility for learning in a final Master's in Social Work class at the University of New Hampshire. It outlines a process through which students and instructor aim to become equal partners in developing collective knowledges, and participate in the collaborative practices they are learning as they move from positions of inexpert learners to expert colleagues. It includes a discussion of students' evaluation of the meditative dialogue process and its impact on their professional development.

At the Edge of Reason: Teaching Language and Literacy in a Digital Age

Canadian schools are witnessing widening gaps between traditional definitions of literacy, which include reading and writing, and contemporary literacy practices like interactive multimedia use and online communications. Language and literacy teachers are called upon daily to bridge these contradictions through the pedagogical and textual choices they make in their classrooms. This article reports work in a study funded by Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). This study comprised a qualitative inquiry into three teachers' experiences and textual stances of authority within the rapidly evolving environment of language arts classrooms. Situated understandings of the teachers' personal and professionally situated literacies complicated their daily pedagogical and textual choices. Theorized divisions between modernist literacy approaches and evolving postmodern practices emerged as a more complex set of discourses within the contact zone of contemporary language arts classrooms than originally anticipated, including a ‘horizontality’ to the classes' critical literacy practices. These findings have implications for the education of pre-service teachers, the development of literacy pedagogy, and the continuing debate as to what it means to be literate in today's information society.

Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in Postmodernism (review)

Reviewed by: Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in Postmodernism Brian Richardson Christian Moraru , Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in PostmodernismMadison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005, 282 pp. In this new study Christian Moraru takes on the vast and thorny subject of post-modern representation. Taking his central trope from Borges, he argues for post-modernism as memorious discourse. By that he refers to postmodernism's foregrounding of its own reproducing and representing of earlier representations: "Postmodern representation re-presents, recovers—and thereby operates—inter-textually, retrieving texts from our textual archive" (19). Each of the book's five chapters has a different and complementary focus. Chapter 1, centered on Nabokov's Speak, Memory, explores the interpenetration of fact and fiction, invention and intertext, and the nature of what the author calls "post-modern memory" in contemporary self writing. Moraru's superb, nuanced account of the ways in which Nabokov structures the story of his life according to patterns in Proust's novel is followed by compelling studies of Eva Hoffman's intertextual memoir Lost in Translation and David Antin's genre-challenging texts, in [End Page 163] which identity and the self are two different things (79). Chapter 2 is a rich exploration of the power of names, naming, and the unnamable in contemporary texts and includes a section on Kathy Acker, Toni Morrison, and the stories names tell (and retell). Chapter 3 astutely explores the posthuman and goes on to examine the posthumanity narrative and "apocalyptic intertextuality" of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which Moraru suggests may be the most ambitiously memorious in the postmodern canon, as well as posthuman texts by Philip Roth, Joseph McElroy, and Marc Leyner. The final two chapters directly take on the larger theoretical issues of the study, introduce new areas of investigation such as the postmodern sublime, and engage in lively debate with theoreticians like Jameson, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Nancy, and others. Moraru's postmodernism is not ahistorical, culturally oblivious, or politically apathetic. Indeed, it is precisely its insistent citation and recirculation of earlier texts that acknowledge its cultural debt and mount ideological critiques, and he even allows that "postmodernism's self-acknowledged reprises every so often surprise us with their powerful, unorthodox deviations from their 'model,' with their unexpected plot-twists, media mixes, and other deflections, inflections, and irreverent revisions" (16). Overall, this is an astute, carefully reasoned, and delightfully wide-ranging investigation of the theory and practice of postmodernism. It is exemplary both for the number of diverse texts Moraru is able to discuss in a compelling fashion and for its deft theoretical sweep. On page after page, Moraru adds substantially to the interpretation of texts and the refinement of postmodern theory. His assessment of the progressive politics of postmodern practices is particularly effective. While it is probably true that those who are unconvinced by the more extreme claims of poststructuralism on topics such as the inseparability of the fictional and the nonfictional will probably remain unmoved by Moraru's arguments, readers can be expected to admire the way in which the author supplely weaves his many subjects into the intricate and illuminating web of memorious discourse. [End Page 164] Brian Richardson University of Maryland Copyright © 2007 Southern Comparative Literature Association

A Postmodern Approach to Teaching Family Therapy as Community Practice

The purpose of this article is to present some examples of postmodern teaching practices in a graduate family therapy program dedicated to developing a more community-oriented family therapy practitioner. In particular, three postmodern practices are discussed in terms of (a) developing and nurturing a participatory curriculum, (b) assessing the community-mindedness qualities of various family therapy approaches, and (c) approaching research as good practice. These postmodern teaching practices allow us to develop family therapy students who become community-minded in their approach to therapy (to stimulate both family-level and community-level changes). The authors also discuss practices to keep liberation and generativity alive within the academy.

"Who Lets a Big Question Upset His Small, Safe World?": British Postmodern Realism and the Question of Ethics

Abstract Criticism of British postmodern realist fiction has long been marked by an almost'total disregard for ethics. The reason why critics investigating the antirepresentational strategies characterizing the work of such writers as Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Graham Swift have for the most part remained silent about its ethical status is the widespread belief that ethics is incompatible with a questioning stance towards representation. The few academic critics who (claim to) have discovered some sort of ethical value in the self-reflexive, theoretically sophisticated fictions produced by these writers are liberal-humanists working in the ArnoldianLeavisite tradition, who, in their search for moral truths, appear to be oblivious to specifically postmodern textual practices that block easy access to meaning. Taking its cue from the deconstructive type of ethical criticism that came to the fore in the 1990s, this article suggests an alternative to both the textualist neglect and the liberalhumanist misrecognition of the ethics of British postmodern realism. Through a reading of Graham Swift's 1992 novel Ever After, it shows that postmodern realist fiction has an ethical dimension qua' postmodern realist fiction; an ethical dimension that cannot be reduced to the promulgation of traditional moral values but rather has to be conceived as the elaboration of a post-humanist, non-foundational ethics of alterity.

Re-Configuring the Diasporic and Indigenous in the Art Of Zhou Xiaoping

This essay examines the negotiation of the ‘uneasy conversation’ between Indigenous and diasporic identities within the contemporary visual arts in Australia. It focuses on collaborations between Chinese diasporic artist Zhou Xiaoping and Aboriginal artist Jimmy Pike, and situates their relationship within broader debates on the representation of difference in Australian art. Zhou is working within an Australian art discourse grappling with two interconnected issues: a history of colonial representations of Aborigines, and the more recent postmodern artistic practice of the appropriation of Aboriginal imagery. Until recently, both debates that framed the black/white binary have often excluded or negated the possibilities of other cross-cultural representations of difference. This essay investigates how Zhou's art challenges the dominant black/white binary by opening up a range of new questions about the aesthetics, politics and ethics of cross-cultural representations of Aboriginality. The cross-hatching of Chinese diasporic and Indigenous identities in the contemporary visual arts is creating a platform for cultural exchange. Zhou and Pike's joint exhibition Through the Eyes of Two Cultures (1999) is one example of how the contested intersection between Chinese diasporic and Indigenous identities can be mediated by a cross-cultural politics of representation.

The Changing of the Guard: the social and cultural reflections of Community in 1970s Melbourne architecture

[article extract] In Europe and North America, as in Australia, the 1970s were a decade of architectural transition. In the 1950s and 1960s various manifestations of late modernist architecture held sway and in Australia a leading proponent of one type of regional-modernist architecture was the Melbourne architect Kevin Borland. Borland, by the 1970s in mid-career, rose to national prominence with a creative, highly-personal and somewhat romantic form of rough-hewn regional modernist architecture. Throughout the 1970s, his much awarded, widely published and exhibited residential and small-scale institutional commissions were acknowledged as a high point of creative Australian architecture. However, during this decade, a tidal wave of post-modern theory and practice swept through architecture, submerging the various pre-existing manifestations of an apparently vitiated late modernism. In Australia, the tidal wave arrived middecade and the initial focus of postmodern architectural change, and the site of its most vigorous and protracted development, was Melbourne.

Shifting from Developmental to Postmodern Practices in Early Childhood Teacher Education

Changing times and postmodern perspectives have disrupted the taken-for-granted relationship between child development knowledge and the preparation of early childhood teachers. Despite ongoing exchanges about how best to respond to the critique of the developmental knowledge base, few descriptions of how particular teacher educators have gone about reconceptualizing their curriculum exist. Employing postmodern views of knowledge, power, and subjectivity, this article describes three pedagogies employed by the authors to enact a postmodern teacher education. After describing each of these pedagogies—situating knowledge, multiple readings, and engaging with images—an example from classroom practice is given to illustrate how these strategies come together to assist students to understand how teaching enacts power relations. The article concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges involved in trying to shift from developmental to postmodern practices in the preparation of early childhood educators.

A Study of Community Guides: Lessons for Professionals Practicing with and in Communities

A study of 35 nonprofessional helpers, identified as community "guides," focused on the contribution each made to helping marginalized individuals and families become a part of their communities. The lessons learned through these lay helpers can inform a postmodern social work practice that promotes the use of indigenous practice principles appropriate for work with and in culturally distinct communities. The practice wisdom of these guides demonstrates a need for professionals to reposition themselves in the associational life of a community, and to make their practice less visible. It is shown that an effective community-building practice that respects community solutions to individual and community problems requires permeable boundaries on the part of intervening professionals.

Effective Leadership in Postmodern Science/Technology Libraries

SUMMARY Postmodern ideas, practices, and perspectives are being integrated into the organizational cultures of science/technology libraries. Librarians are increasingly likely to be working with other librarians as well as faculty who are more comfortable with ambiguity, integration, collaboration, deconstruction, uncertainty, chaos, and fluid systems. These postmodern professionals are integrators and synthesizers, focused on learning, and uncomfortable with control and rigid or inflexible boundaries. Leadership in science/technology libraries needs this infusion of postmodern influences to be responsive to the dynamic information needs of all customers. This article focuses on the importance and implications of these postmodern influences.

Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice (review)

Reviewed by: Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice Francis A. Beer Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice. Ed. Robert Hariman . University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 337. $65.00, cloth. "Would it be prudent?" The phrase echoes in memory, linking Dana Carvey from Saturday Night Live to the presidency of the first George Bush. Robert Hariman has been wrestling with prudence for over a decade, and he has now produced a powerful volume that brings together not only his thoughts but also those of a number of other distinguished authors. The result is a book that will become a standard reference for those interested in prudence. The subtitle, Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice, and the title of the first chapter, "Theory without Modernity," give some idea of the subtexts that drive the book. This is a book about prudence, and more. It is about virtue in classical, modern, and postmodern settings. It is about the dynamic complexity of practice—decision, judgment, and action in public and private life. Hariman gives us a definition: "Prudence is a mode of reasoning about contingent matters in order to select the best course of action" (5). That would be too easy. He also surrounds prudence with a penumbra of related words to broaden our understanding of the complex lattice of semantic meaning. Our legacy from the Greek and Roman lexicon includes words like phronesis and prudentia. Contemporary nouns involve cautiousness, circumspection, and care. Related adjectives are "careful, judicious, tactful, discerning, sensible, frugal, wise, sage, level-headed, balanced, moderate, politic, practical pragmatic, expedient" (vii). These synonyms, for Hariman, describe a narrow, modern form of prudence, part of the calculative tradition inherited from Aristotle, that ultimately leads to the saddle points of rational choice. They are, however, only a part of the story. Hariman aims to relieve their "stodginess" by recovering the performative tradition of prudence from Cicero. Prudence, from this perspective, is defined not just abstractly as a set of rules but more dynamically as a set of roles. Prudence includes character, and is performed by characters. Pericles in Athens is an iconic example of superb political leadership that blends the honor of the leader with the glory of the state. Prudence combines integrity of the self with respect for others. This is a broad, ambitious interpretation [End Page 176] of prudence. It recuperates not only a classical vision of prudence but also one of politics. It rearranges other virtues to revolve in a constellation around prudence. In this reconstituted form, prudence reemerges to shine as "a crucial element of political leadership," the central political virtue. The book is divided into three parts: "Conceptual Frameworks," "Rhetorical Structures," and "Provisional Networks." All three of the sections are identified in structural terms, which is interesting since Hariman's conception of prudence as a primary political virtue is very agent-centered. The structures, however, provide the settings in which the political observers and actors perform. The first section provides a sample of the rich literature that focuses on philosophical concepts of prudence in earlier times and places. It begins with a chapter by Robert W. Cape Jr. that discusses "Cicero and the Development of Political Practice in Rome." This chapter is critical to the book, since it lays a part of the foundation. It is the first substantive essay and it must also make the case for combining calculative and performative prudence. Cape gives us a fine exposition of prudentia in the Roman context. Interestingly, he suggests that "prudentia is a contraction of providentia, "'foresight.'" (37).The virtue of prudence was typically associated with age and experience. Imprudence, on the other hand, was associated with youth, recklessness, and impropriety (37). Prudence involved knowledge of practical matters, law, and custom as well as proper speech, including rhetoric, and behavior. Prepon mattered. Prudence for Cicero, however, was much more than simply knowing how things work: it was ultimately the extended performance of justice on the public stage. The next chapter, by Eugene Garver, entitled "After Virtù: Rhetoric, Prudence, and Moral Pluralism in Machiavelli," moves the story of prudence from the late classical to the early modern period. As the title indicates, Garver's concern is also with the relation of...

Can Virtue Be Bought?

Articles Anderson, Dana. Questioning the Motives of Habituated Action: Burke and Bordieu on Practice 255 Crick, Nathan. Conquering Our Imagination: Thought Experiments and Enthymemes in Scientific Argument 21 Del Caro, Adrian. Nietzsche's Rhetoric on the Grounds of Philology and Hermeneutics 101 Garver, Eugene. Can Virtue Be Bought? 353 Greene, Ronald Walter. Rhetoric and Production: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor 188 Hansen, Andrew. Dimensions of Agency in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address 223 Harpine, William. What Do You Mean, Rhetoric is Epistemic? 335 Haskins, Ekaterina V. Endoxa, Epistemological Optimism, and Aristotle's Rhetorical Project 1 Jovanovic, Spoma, and Roy V. Wood. Speaking from the Bedrock of Ethics 317 Kimball, Robert. A Plea for Pity 301 Metcalf, Robert. The Philosophical Rhetoric of Socrates' Mission 143 Sapienza, Filipp. Mikhail Bakhtin, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and the Rhetorical Culture of the Russian Third Renaissance 123 Stroud, Scott R. Narrative as Argument in Indian Philosophy: The Asta-vakra Gi-ta as Multivalent Narrative 42 Turnbull, Nick. Rhetorical Agency as a Property of Questioning 207 Yarbrough, Stephen R. Passing Theories through Topical Heuristics: Donald Davidson, Aristotle, and the Conditions of Discursive Competence 72 [End Page 383] Book Reviews Andrejevic, Mark. Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique edited by Jeffrey T. Nealon and Caren Irr 92 Beer, Francis A. Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice edited by Robert Hariman 176 Depew, David. Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice edited by Robert Hariman 167 Swearingen, C. Jan. Plato's Socrates as Educator by Gary Allen Scott 275 Tell, David. On Belief by Slavoj Žižek 96

Ingestion, Elimination, Sex, and Song: Trickster as Premodern Avatar of Postmodern Research Practice

In this article, I argue that the mythological figure of the Trickster may be read as a premodern avatar of postmodern research practice or what Denzin and Lincoln called the sixth and seventh moments of qualitative inquiry. I begin by describing the key imperatives of the sixth and seventh moments. These imperatives include (a) a commitment to morally sound, praxis-oriented research; (b) strategic use of eclectic constellations of theories, methods, and research strategies; (c) production of dialogic, nonrepresentational texts; and (d) conduct of mindful inquiry resulting in sacred texts. In a modest attempt to write not only about but also in the sixth and seventh moments, I offer extensive descriptions and interpretations of the extant narratives of the Winnebago Trickster, Wakdjunkaga, making indirect or oblique connections to sixth and seventh moment imperatives along the way. I return to these connections in the end of the article and make them more explicit.

The other in educational research: some postmodern implications for educational practice, theory, research and professionalism

This article explores various questions through examining such postmodern thinkers as Derrida, Lacan and, in particular, Levinas. Can educational research be an ethical practice? Should educational research be about putting the other first? What is the responsibility of the educational researcher for the educators' responsibility? What is the place of educational research – does it help or hinder an exploration of the most effective expressions of the educationalist desire to help? Is it possible to bring out the good and the goods? Is it possible to have justice and action? Are most theories merely perpetuating violence? Have educational theories and research with fields of knowledge, territories and ownership of educational subject disciplines replaced traditional thinking? Are we part of the new academic police attempting to control language, thought and culture – appropriating differences? Instead, is there a basis on which educational researchers can assist educators to educate in an embodied way so that they help others not do violence to others? Is it possible for researchers and educators ‘not to interrupt their own and other continuity, not to play roles in which they no longer recognise themselves and whereby they betray not only their commitments, but their own substance?’ Can our ethical postmodern practice stop educational research from reverting to technique-orientated mechanism of professional vested interests and, instead, find a better way for us all to put the other first?

Francesca Woodman Reconsidered

The impetus for this round table came from the desire to extend an informal discussion following a screening of Elisabeth Subrin's The Fancy, an experimental film addressing the work and figure of the photographer Francesca Woodman. A student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1970s, Woodman produced a strikingly mature body of work before committing suicide in 1981 at the age of twenty-two. Although during her lifetime she participated in a number of exhibitions in alternative spaces in New York and Rome, Woodman's first significant public exposure came posthumously, through a 1986 exhibition coorganized by the Wellesley College Museum and the Hunter College Art Gallery. An accompanying catalogue featured essays by Rosalind Krauss and Abigail Solomon-Godeau. These texts, particularly the latter, which situated Woodman's work in relation to the postmodern feminist practice of artists such as Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, played a determinate role in her initial art-historical reception. Indeed, it was through this lens that I first encountered her photographs in the early 1990s, and it was, in part, my sense of the limitations of Solomon-Godeau's analysis of Woodman's art as a strategic appropriation and subversion of stereotypes of femininity that motivated my own writing on Woodman.

Reading Relationally: Postmodern Perspectives on Literature and Art

Reading Relationally looks at literary works alongside works of art to enrich our appreciation of what texts do and how texts mean. Laurie Edson's fresh and provocative readings of a range of literature and visual art shed new light on the contributions of writers and artists and the resonances between their work.Reading Relationally is grounded in poststructuralist theory, feminist theory, interdisciplinary studies, and postmodern practice. It proceeds by a series of exemplary comparisons whose purpose is to unsettle habitual, codified terms of analysis and to suggest alternative ways of seeing, thinking, and organizing knowledge. The book explores reverberations between the work of Marguerite Duras and Cindy Sherman; Francis Ponge and Rene Magritte; Mallarme, Duchamp, and Calvino; Apollinaire and Picasso; Lautreamont and Dali; Rimbaud and Matisse; and Duchamp, Miro, Apollinaire, and Lichtenstein.Written in an accessible and lively style, this interdisciplinary study will interest general readers as well as students and specialists in postmodernism and literary criticism, as well as those interested in the relationships between literature and visual art.

Nineteenth-Century United States Literary Culture and Transnationality

The term transnationalism is used frequently in reference to the rapid circulation of “capital, labor, technology, and media images” in the global economy governed by postindustrial capitalism (Sharpe 110). When incorporated into such phrases as transnational capitalism, the term implies a critical view of historically specific late modern or postmodern practices of globalizing production, marketing, distribution, and consumption for neocolonial ends. By the same token, transnationalism is often used to suggest counterhegemonic practices prompted by or accompanying the migrations and diasporas occasioned by these new economic processes of globalization. Thus, Homi Bhabha's privileging of “cultural hybridity” as a way to resist global homogenization is often traceable to his emphasis on “migrant workers,” who are “part of the massive economic and political diaspora of the modern world” and thus “embody […] that moment blasted out of the continuum of history” (8). If these new, exploited cosmopolitans experience every day their dislocation from the familiar boundaries of nation, first language, and citizenship, they may also be particularly able to comprehend how to negotiate transnational situations, even in some cases turning such circumstances to their advantage.

Beautiful impurity: British contextualism as processual postmodern practice

The term ‘contextual art practice’ has been used in recent years as an overarching term to cover categories such as ‘public art’, ‘environmental art’ and ‘community art’. This article contends that such categorizations may obscure rather than illuminate our understanding of these practices. It draws on historical narratives of British contextual art, particularly community and performance art, to illustrate that the inability of British art professionals, such as critics, funders and administrators, to comprehend the processual nature of what became known as postmodernism meant that they imposed an essentially modernist, discipline-based value system on its manifestations. The resultant search for modernist sets of reference, and the resistance this provoked in practitioners, resulted in fragmentation, as illusory specialisms were constantly defined only to be endlessly subverted by disgruntled artists. This confusion arose from a profound paradigm shift where high-modernism, wedded to the art-object as a manifestation of specialist discourse, was confronted by postmodernism, working with the concept of the art-object dematerialized into art-process.