Optimistic attempt to explain postmodernism

[Tabouli]

OK, Naama, let me take a shot at answering your (perfectly reasonable) queries about postmodernism.  I've been putting it off, because it really is a tough job...

One warning though - I'm a bit of a pretender in the postmodern department... haven't really studied it properly (one short lecture series on postmodern therapy in 1992 maketh not a postmodern expert), and couldn't honestly claim to understand it all that well.  Postmodernism is enough to make anyone's brain hurt.  My brother did a bit in his Architecture degree, and he used to come crawling shamefaced into my room with his textbook and ask me to "translate" the postmodern stuff... (I should, technically, be stronger on cultural relativism, but we'll have to see how I go)  All assistance from people who've actually studied postmodernism properly in literatuve classes welcome... (Luke??)

Naama:
> Well, here goes. From what I gather, postmodernism basically creates 
or upholds cultural relativism, right? Truth and beauty are regarded 
as specific to cultures or communities (forms of life or whatever). 
Now all this is meant to break the eurocentric, white, male, 
christian cultural dominance, right? Clear room for other voices to 
be heard - Vietnamese women? Bornean hunters? Yappese? etc.?<

My rather sketchy understanding of postmodernism is that its central premise is Jacques Derrida's famous quote "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte."  (roughly, "There is nothing outside the text"). Expanded into less snappy but more explanatory format, what I think this means is as follows.

Every individual's "reality" (point of view, life, whatever) is fundamentally subjective. The only information I have about the world, and the other people in it is the information I take in through my senses and process through my brain into meaningful patterns.  I do not have direct access to any subjective reality other than my own.  There is no way of looking at the world objectively, because there is no way of removing the subjectivity from the process of observation.  *However*...

I can indirectly *infer* things about other people's realities.  How?  By what they communicate to me, using language (verbal and non-verbal). This language forms the "text".  I can also try to communicate things about *my* reality by producing texts of my own for other people.  All the same, under strict postmodernism, there is *no* objective reality which exists independently of the observer (or at least, if there is, we have no way of accessing it because people are inescapably subjective).  All we have are the texts we "read" and produce.  Hence "There is nothing outside the text".

OK, now let's bring in the cultural relativism element (as if it wasn't already complicated enough).

My "subjective reality" does not exist in a vacuum, of course.  It is the product of the "texts" to which I have been exposed throughout my life.  For example, as a small child, my parents taught me how to use a knife and fork.  They read a verbal "text" of appropriate Australian cutlery use to me, in order to shape my behaviour into something which would be acceptable in my society (had I been brought up in the US, their text would of course have told me to use my fork "upside down"...).  I would also have been exposed to countless other "texts" which told me about appropriate behaviour for a girl (as opposed to a boy), prevailing attitudes towards non-Anglo-Saxons in Australian society, how relationships form, how to ask questions in a polite way, what right and wrong were, and so on, and so on.

People who live in the same society will have had their subjective realities shaped by a lot of the same texts.  Their media will hand them a lot of texts explaining what sort of people are beautiful, what sort of behaviour is "cool", what sort of house to aspire to, what people are expected to be doing at different ages, what makes a good parent, and so on.  As a result, there will be a level of commonality (intertextuality?) among people from the same society - they are likely to share a lot of values, and beliefs, and assumptions.

(I don't like this "text" stuff - silly postmodernspeak, ick.  Adds an unnecessary level of confusion.  But anyway)

>What I don't get is, if cultural relativism holds, how is it that a 
person from one culture can hear a person from another culture at 
all? If criteria of truth/beauty are cultural specific, then what are 
we left with other than cultural specific canons that are inherently 
incomprehensible and therefore worthless for other cultures?
In other words, how can true conversations be held between people and 
*particularly* between cultures according to the postmodernist view 
(that is, without accepting the humanist assumption of an underlying, 
common human nature?)<

How can a person hear someone from another culture at all?  Well, the point is, they often can't, or at least, they don't hear the message the other person is trying to send.  And discover that the people in the foreign culture in which they're embedded don't interpret their messages the way they intended.  That's why people get culture shock!

No-one questions that's there's an underlying, common human *biology*.  Regardless of culture, the wake/sleep, birth/death, breed/feed is undeniably universal.  As a result, a large proportion of all human "texts" concern the same subjects, which is a start, surely.  All the same...

I don't think there's any question that the criteria for truth and beauty and so on are culture-specific!  (I studied some very interesting stuff about the acceptable domains of "white lies" across cultures once... for example, if a friend asked you for a lift in his/her car 2min up the road, in some Aboriginal cultures, an acceptable excuse would be "sorry, it's too far."  Read: NO.  In Anglophone cultures, this would be unacceptable and rude, a blatant "lie".  A more appropriate excuse might be "sorry, I'm a bit too busy at the moment", even if it wasn't strictly true.  Different text, same meaning: NO).  However, this doesn't make conversations across cultures (or subcultures, for that matter) worthless or incomprehensible by any means!

Let's steer away from "culture" for a moment and look at languages instead, which provide a good illustration with less potential edgy areas.  Let's take Finnish and Malay, as examples of widely separated languages.  Finnish would have a word for "reindeer", because there are reindeer in Finland; Malay would have a word for "banana", because there are bananas in Malaysia.  Once upon a time, these would have been language-specific words that were inherently incomprehensible and worthless to the other group.  What use would a Finn have for the word banana, when s/he would probably never see such a fruit in his/her entire life??  What use would a Malay have for the word reindeer?

Enter 20th century accessible international transport and mass media.  Somewhere, someone produces a series of TV documentaries which introduce the Malays and Finns to each others' traditional diets.  It's in English, but by means of some English-Finnish and English-Malay bilinguals, the documentaries are broadcast in both countries, subtitled in the local language.

Suddenly, Malays have a use for the concept of a reindeer, as they have become aware of their existence, and aeroplanes mean they are able to visit Finland, if they want.  Their language still has no word for it, but they construct a term from existing words, like "large snow deer" or something (Tabouli regrets not having a Malay-English dictionary).  Likewise, the Finns now need a word for banana, and can now even buy them due to very expensive import deals with Malaysia.  They decide to modify the original word into something which sounds Finnish and call it a "vanan" (Tabouli likewise regrets her lack of a Finnish-English dictionary).  One day, two international students studying in London meet up, one Finnish, one Malay.  They have a lively conversation in English about reindeer and bananas.

(Tabouli wonders if she's getting a long way off track here, and has, figuratively speaking, taken the long way round via Helsinki...)

The point is that the fact that the concept "reindeer" is (geography and) language-specific and therefore superficially incomprehensible and worthless for someone who speaks the language of a tropical country does not mean that a Finn and a Malay could not have a meaningful conversation about reindeer.  It just means that there's a little more involved.

Perhaps our theoretical Finn might have to explain what a reindeer is to our theoretical Malay.  For this to happen, they would need to have (a) a shared language, (b) some shared concepts, and (c) the ability to use these two factors to negotiate a new, shared concept which they can talk about.

Conversation between Finn and Malay in English (second language for both)

Finn: Do you have deer in Malaysia?
Malay: Deer?  What are they?
Finn: They're a sort of hoofed animal, like... like a cow, or a sheep, but thinner, with longer legs.  And antlers, you know, horns branched like a tree (mimes horns with index fingers either side of head).
Malay: Ah yes!  A (insert Malay word for antelope)!  We have those in Malaysia.
Finn: A reindeer is a very large deer, about as tall as a small horse.  It lives on moss in the tundra, the cold place with no trees in the north of Finland.  Here, come to the computer, I'll find a picture on the Internet to show you.

(etc.)

(Tabouli feels that her hypothetical situation is getting more and more bizarre, but never mind).

Hence the Finn, through comparing shared concepts like "cow" and "horse" and "tree", miming, quantifying words like "thinner", pictures and so on, has now established a new concept with the Malay, and they can now run into the sunset and eat curry together in Soho while having a long, involved conversation about reindeer.

The main difference between "reindeer" and "the Finnish concept of truth" is that it's obvious to any Finn (a) that a Malay may well not know what a reindeer is, and (b) why this is the case.  When it comes to things like "right and wrong" and "truth" and "how to ask for something nicely", a lot of people don't realise that *these* concepts are just as culture-specific as the concept "reindeer" is region-specific.  They just assume that everyone has the same concepts of these things as they do themselves.  Another issue is that it's easier to describe something physical and concrete than it is to explain an abstract concept, as anyone who has played Pictionary or charades knows well...

(I sometimes use charades exercises in my training sessions for this reason)

If I may blow a small riff on my own trumpet, this is where cross-cultural trainers come in... they help people understand that their values regarding human behaviour are culturally defined not universal, and act as an interpreter between cultures, teaching people the differences between how "truth" is defined in Finland and Malaysia, to prepare their Malay clients for their trip to Finland.

Tabouli
who is not sure about the post she has just written (whether it makes any sense at all, whether it answers Naama's queries, etc.) but has decided to shut her eyes and send it anyway, bizarre Finno-Malay case study and all...


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