I just finished reading an interesting book by John Morss called Growing Critical.

Morss is a clear and engaging writer and if you are trying to master the literature on postmodernism, you would do well to read his works.  In this book, however, he is primarily focused on one metanarrative, the metanarrative of natural development that does not pay attention to the social construction of that development.  That is, he deconstructs theories of development that do pay attention to the way in which the direction of the "developmental" change is fostered by cultural forces.

He does a marvelous job in reviewing the relevant literature on this metanarrative.  I particularly like his summary of the way in which Freud (and Lacan) sat on what might be called a postmodern fence, sometimes endorsing the metanarrative of development and sometimes escaping its closure.

I will try to give you some more ideas from his text next week.  You will be interested to learn what he has to say about the work of Fred Newman and Lois Holzman.
 
 

Never seen a Narrative Therapy session?   Want read a transcript? Click here.  When you get to the site, page down a little bit.

This is the kind of therapy invented by David Epston and Michael White.  I think it  is a very political form of therapy.  As you can see, when Narrative Therapy works, the client emerges ready to resist the forces in the world that make them feel bad about themselves. That sounds very political to me.

How NT clients fight the forces that oppress them is controversial.  Should it be with protest?  That's the question we addressed recently when we talked of Kathleen Stacey's article talking about alternatives to protest and Karl Tomm's alternative version of NT.

It is a question worthy of your thought as it is still unsettled in our conversations.
 

I believe it is this kind of sensitivity to language, to the different senses of terms, that we must awaken in ourselves if we are to avoid the traps and closures of modernist thinking.
 
 
 
 

Starting sometime later today this search engine should start picking up more recent PMTH NEWS.  When I installed it on 03/17/99, I understood the search engine would be automatically reindexed to pick up new information on the PMTH NEWS website.  Not so.  It was waiting for me to reindex it.

But now I have done that and learned how to do it, so the PMTH website will have more uptodate information available in its searches.

And, every now and then one of you write me personally to ask where an article on something is.  If you can recall any of the terms in the articles, you should be able to find it in the search engine.

Try it if you haven't done it.  Put in the name of a concept you want to research.  Or put in the name of an author that you would like to study.  Or put in your own name, if you're a frequent poster on PMTH.  .
 

I want to suggest that there are two roots of postmodernism:

Poststructuralism grew out of the critique of Saussure in France.  Derrida was the  pre-eminent poststructuralist, although Lacan was an important transitional figure towards poststructuralism. and, arguably, became poststructuralist rather than structuralist.

Poststructuralism tends to be obscure and difficult to read.  Partly this is because poststructuralists talk a lot about French theorists who are not very accessible, especially to an English speaking audience.  Partly it is because many poststructuralists have believed that it is better to be obscure, to make the reader work to understand, because in working to understand they understand more.

Postpostivism , I am suggesting, is  the other root of postmodernism.  Postpositivism is largely English and it centers (although not exclusively) around the work of later Wittgenstein.  It is a rejection of positivism and the positivist  project of making language more precise and more capable of functioning as a logical calculus.  Postpositivists tend to be much clearer writers than poststructuralists.  They use more ordinary sounding language and speak in shorter and more standard language forms.  One school of postpositivism is even called "ordinary language philosophy."

Poststructuralism and postpositivism come together, it seems to me,  in the flowering of postmodernism.  I am aware of several books that that bring them together (cf.Derrida and Wittgenstein by Garver & Lee, 1994 and Wittgenstein and Derrida by Henry Staten, 1984). Lyotard also seems a bridge to me between postmodernism and poststructuralism.  He references Derrida's ideas and learns from them.  He takes something of his style from the poststructuralists,  but he builds primarily, I think, off of the shoulders of the postpositivism of Wittgenstein.  This negotiation of a common language game between two different systems has made his work distinctive and  particularly powerful, in my opinion.
 

I have added another tool to our site, although I have not added it to our toolbar.  You can find it at the bottom of this website, just above the counter.  It's a webring.  A webring is made up of a group of web authors who collaborate to bring surfers to our sites.  The webowners share something of a common philosophy or purpose.

Our particular webring is a postmodern one.  It is called the Everything is Postmodern Webring. .  All the web authors who belong to this webring have postmodern sites.  If you go to the bottom of the page and click on the webring you will be taken to another postmodern site that is a part of this webring.  A similar tool is on the front page of all the sites that you will go to.  We are the fifteenth site to become a member of this webring.
 

Well, I entered a front page for PMTH NEWS in a couple of search engines.  I felt I could not enter PMTH NEWS directly because it has continuously changing content, so I entered a front page that will stay the same.

This front page will tell a little about our community and it will help to get your ideas out into the public eye.  It is the postmodern way of publishing, and, in my mind, a better way to bring your ideas to public attention, sometimes, than publication in one of the more traditional journals.

As you will see from this front page, I see us as a closed community of people brought together by shared interests and background who are willing to let the world look over our shoulder as we try to talk congenially through issues we find profound.
 
 

You might also know that I have struggled a bit to understand what Stancombe and White meant by post-therapeutics even though I found the concept inspiring enough to lead me to say that there seemed to be two kinds of postmodern evolutions of therapy.

The reason I had such trouble understanding what post-therapeutics meant in the Stancombe and White article was explained as they near the end of the article when they say:
 

However, they add:
 

And, if you have a chance to read their paper in the October 1998 issue of Theory & Psychology, I recommend you do so.
I will certainly be reading it again and I will try to introduce conversation topics about this article in future editions of PMTH NEWS.
 
 

One question that interested me that Holzman never explicitly answered in our conversations on PMTH was answered in this newsletter article.  My unanswered question was whether Newman and Holzman believed that they had found the last word with their form of therapy (which they call social therapy).  My answer is contained in a quotation Holzman makes of Newman saying to a group of graduating therapists:
 

See also:
Lois Holzman's comment on End of Knowing for PMTH
and
Tom Strong's review of End of Knowing for PMTH

Perhaps you recall that Fred Newman and Lois Holzman call what they do, Social Therapy.  I thought you might like to know where Social Therapy is conducted.  Equipped with a new stack of newsletters, I can tell you.  Unfortunately, I do not have the exact names of all the centers,  but if you are local to one of these cities and want to visit, and cannot find the center in your phone book,  I suggest you contact Lois Holzman or  Joyce Dattner.

1. New York City East Side Institute
2. The Long Island Center for Social Therapy Floral Park
3. Philadelphia Center for Social Therapy
4. Boston
5. The Atlanta Center for Short Term Psychotherapy (Center Director Murray Dabby    is a PMTH subscriber)
6. Washington Center for Social Therapy
7. West Coast Center for Social Therapy
8.  San Francisco, CA  (Center Director Joyce Dattner  is a PMTH subscriber)

Here is a question I am not able to answer: Is Social Therapy a post-therapeutic?
 

Of course, Bakhtin did not write on paralogy because Bakhtin wrote half a century before Lyotard coined the current meaning of this important term.  But, still, like Lyotard, Bakhtin noticed that much language is defined contextually.  That is, people in local conversations use terms in specific senses that are negotated locally every time someone says something like, "I mean this term in the sense that..."  Look how clear it is that Bakhtin had noticed something like this happening when he wrote:
 

Honest folks, I don't get a commission for selling you the journal that  I am going to tell you about, but if you are interested in postmodernism, and especially if you want to publish in this area, you really should try to get access to the journal put out by Sage called Theory & Psychology.  I only recently subscribed it after over and over discovering that an article I wanted to read had been published in this journal (which I found impossible to get through the library).

But if you cannot get access to it, know that I will try to keep you posted on its key articles, beginning with this issue of PMTH NEWS.

If you want to purchase it though, I suggest you look at the Sage web site or click here to write them to subscribe if you are in England.

For now, though, let me just type in the names of three key articles from their table of contents:
 

You will notice that there are two articles in todays' issue of PMTH NEWS on the second article above.  One is a past article in which I recounted Parker's criticism of our own PMTH subsubscriber's work, Lois Newman.  See that article by clicking here.
Or, click here to see a new article in today's issue of PMTH NEWS.
 

See also:
Lois Holzman's comment on End of Knowing for PMTH
and
Tom Strong's review of End of Knowing for PMTH
 
 

Parker is critical of postmodernism, but, in my opinion,  his criticism is not like that of Held.  Held's criticism, it seems to me, revolves around her definition of postmodernism.  I think she ends up supporting her own version of social constructionism -- she just puts this old wine in a new bottle and claims it for her own, calling it  'modest realism.'

Parker, on the other hand, seems to be more concerned with practical matters. I believe he really has a gripe with postmodernism although he surrounds his main gripe with fluff arguments that don't reach down to anything important.  It is worthy noticing in this regard, that Parker tells us that  he once tried to join the postmodern movement but has now stepped back "realizing that something is wrong" (p.613).

What is wrong?   As I told you in my last article on Parker's paper, Parker is critical of systems that he feels are insufficiently capable of political action.  I believe this is his central complaint about postmodern, that it fails to support political action as he envisions it.  But let us leave that for another time.  For now, let us glance at another of Parker's criticisms of the postmodern and see if you don't agree this kind of criticism is fluff, that is, it has no bite at all.  At any rate, at the end of this article I'll give you my answer to Parker's criticism.

Parker's Insubstantial Complaints
Against Postmodernism

To illustrate Parker's "insubstantial " complaints, look at what he says about the postmodern call to end dogmatic posturing and inflated presentations of our certainty by saying.  He says:
 

Why is Parker claiming our declaring our uncertainty is bad?   He says:
 

Now, look at the second part of the sentence of parker's.  What do you think about Parker's criticism of postmodernism "not-knowing" that purports that it prevents others from "coming to grips with what the postmodern phenomena is all about?"

Frankly, I think there is a germ of truth to this point.  Yes, some postmodern articles are difficult for newcomers to understand.  And it is important to make our writing more accessible, however. until we can do so on a more regular basis, let us not throw out the baby with the bath.  There is space in the journals (such as this one) for us to have a place to work things out and make them clearer.

Postmodern Habit of Two Voices

But to assist us in this process, I would like you to consider the possibility that postmodern talk of speaking in two voices.  One voice is the voice of uncertainty in which we try to reveal the limits of our understanding.  The other voice I feel should be a rhetorical voice that presents a point of view forcefully as a move in the language game.  I think the rhetorical voice is more accessible and some of this increased ease in understanding will be carried over into discussions of not-knowing or incredulity.

To speak with both voices It would be like Katherine's making her position known and then suddenly suspending her disbelief to make space for the alternative position.  It would be what we do when we make our strongest pitch and then add, "at least that's what I think."

I think learning to speak of our two voices might help our clarity, and I think we do use two voices.  At least, all postmodern theories that hold my attention (such as CLS, social therapy, SFT) seem to say that they speak with both voices.  Either in therapy or in their theoretical treatises, they present their position forcefully, but then, make space for alternative positions, never claiming to have the last word.  They all refuse to shut the other up.  Lyotard would call such "shutting the other up" simply "terrorism."   We postmoderns would be better off if we owned these two different voices, and recognized that they were both critical elements in the postmodern conversation.

At least that is what I think.

All of Parker's quotations were taken from:
Parker, I. (1998).  Against postmodernism:
   psychology in cultural context. Theory &
  Psychology, 8 (5), 601-628.
 

Stancombe and White's
Political Concept of Post-Therapeutics

However, I suspect Stancombe and White think of paralogy and perhaps  post-therapeutics as a conversation in which people try to persuade each other politically.  I have come to this conclusion because I have noticed that they list as one of their examples of postherapeutics a model that seems to me be more designed to persuade listeners to accept unpopular (i.e., nondominant) positions (or discourses).  They suggest such a political model when they present
 

When I first read Stancombe and White I had a different picture of what they were saying.  I thought they were proposing that local and provisional groups or communities establish their own therapeutic self-help process.   I envisioned (imaginatively) that "posttherapists" might be  postmodern therapists who were skilled in deconstructing the model of the expert and thereby capable of helping people overcome being mesmerized by popularized diagnostic literature as well as therapists who converted their problems in living into pathologies which could be cured through expert answers.

Paralogy in Meaning Development

I suppose what this tells us is that there can be more than one sense of "post-therapeutics" and that it sometimes takes two readings (or more) to gather the sense or meaning implied in another author's text.

But, paralogically speaking, it is often this slippage that contributes, in my opinion , to our postmodern creativity.  New ideas can blossom from misunderstanding, and new ideas is, as Lyotard tells us, the quest of postmoderns.

Will White Join Our Conversation ?

At any rate, I contacted Susan White a few days ago.  She responded to my note and seemed interested in joining our discussion.  I hope my re-reading does not discourage her, which she may read because I gave her the URL for PMTH NEWS.  Just in case, let me say to her directly that I would very much welcome her voice here even if she disliked my "creative reading" of the her text.

Whether she joins us or not, I will try to provide additional commentary on this interesting and worthwhile article in days to come.
(This is a slightly edited version of yesterday's article)
The excerpt of White's that Stancombe & S. White give us is in:
Epston, D., & White, M. (1992) Experience,
   contradiction, narrative and imagination.
   Adelaide: Dulwich Centre Publications...