Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey

By Larry A. Hickman

Larry A. Hickman presents John Dewey as very much at home in the busy mix of contemporary philosophy—as a thinker whose work now, more than fifty years after his death, still furnishes fresh insights into cutting-edge philosophical debates. Hickman argues that it is precisely the rich, pluralistic mix of contemporary philosophical discourse, with its competing research programs in French-inspired postmodernism, phenomenology, Critical Theory, Heidegger studies, analytic philosophy, and neopragmatism—all busily engaging, challenging, and informing one another—that invites renewed examination of Dewey’s central ideas.

Hickman offers a Dewey who both anticipated some of the central insights of French-inspired postmodernism and, if he were alive today, would certainly be one of its most committed critics, a Dewey who foresaw some of the most trenchant problems associated with fostering global citizenship, and a Dewey whose core ideas are often at odds with those of some of his most ardent neopragmatist interpreters.

In the trio of essays that launch this book, Dewey is an observer and critic of some of the central features of French-inspired postmodernism and its American cousin, neopragmatism. In the next four, Dewey enters into dialogue with contemporary critics of technology, including Jürgen Habermas, Andrew Feenberg, and Albert Borgmann. The next two essays establish Dewey as an environmental philosopher of the first rank—a worthy conversation partner for Holmes Ralston, III, Baird Callicott, Bryan G. Norton, and Aldo Leopold. The concluding essays provide novel interpretations of Dewey’s views of religious belief, the psychology of habit, philosophical anthropology, and what he termed “the epistemology industry.”

Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Sep 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9780823283071

Larry A. Hickman

Larry A. Hickman is director of the Center for Dewey Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Book preview

Preface and Acknowledgments

For the most part, the essays in this volume were written with the aim of extending the reach of John Dewey’s insights into areas where they have so far had little or no recognition. The underlying claim is that his work still offers much that is fresh, and that when properly understood, it is capable of making important contributions to contemporary philosophical debates.

Following the practice advised by the fifteenth edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (section 8.85), I have capitalized Pragmatism and its cognates throughout to distinguish them from the generic words used in everyday speech. I have done the same for Instrumentalism and its cognates.

References to John Dewey’s works are to the standard (print) edition, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953, edited by. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969–1991) and published in three series as The Early Works (EW), The Middle Works (MW), and The Later Works (LW). These designations are followed by volume and page number. LW 2.235, for example, refers to The Later Works, volume 2, page 235. An electronic edition, based on the print edition, is available from the InteLex Corporation, Charlottesville, Virginia. The electronic edition preserves the line and page breaks of the print edition.

Special thanks are due to James Downhour for the diligence and patience that he brought to the preparation of the typescript for this volume. Special thanks, also, to the entire staff of the Center for Dewey Studies: James Downhour, Barbara Levine, Michael McNally, Paula McNally, Karen Mylan, and Harriet Simon for the energy and care they bring to the task of collecting and editing the research materials that make volumes of this type possible.

During the final stages of the preparation of this volume, I received the sad news that Richard Rorty had passed away. In several of the following chapters I have taken issue with Rorty’s reading of Dewey, and even argued that his version of neopragmatism did not always avail itself of the full range of philosophical tools that the classical Pragmatists offered us.

Nevertheless, I think it important to point out that during the last quarter of the twentieth century American Pragmatism broadly conceived, as a way of thinking about the complex problems and prospects of human life, had no more dedicated champion than Richard Rorty. If there is to be a Rorty biography, I hope it will tell the story of his many efforts to place Dewey’s books in places where they were greatly needed. For more than twenty years, Richard Rorty was a dedicated supporter and friend of the Center for Dewey Studies. He will be missed.

PRAGMATISM AS POST-POSTMODERNISM

INTRODUCTION

Philosophy in America is enjoying a period of unprecedented pluralism. The gradual erosion of the hegemony of Anglo-American analytic philosophy that began in the late 1970s has created enlarged spaces for new interests, new ideas, and new debates. New research programs in French postmodernism, phenomenology, Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Heidegger studies, analytic philosophy, neopragmatism, and classical Pragmatism are now happily (and energetically) engaging, challenging, and informing one another. New fields such as the philosophy of technology, environmental philosophy, biomedical ethics, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of geography—to name but a few—have established themselves as legitimate participants in the great philosophical debates of our time.

The essays in this volume are offered as a contribution to these ongoing debates. They are premised on the conviction that the innovations of the founding Pragmatists—introduced and refined over some eighty years, from Charles Peirce’s Popular Science Monthly publications of the 1870s until the final essay John Dewey published before his death in 1952—have still not been sufficiently understood or appropriated by contemporary philosophers.

I. Postmodernism

Chapter 1, Classical Pragmatism: Waiting at the End of the Road, identifies some of the main advances of French-inspired postmodernist philosophers over their modernist predecessors. But it also documents the fact that well over a half century before the term postmodernism came into currency as a philosophical idea, classical Pragmatism had already adopted most of those advances, including antifoundationalism and a deflationary attitude toward traditional metaphysics that amounted to a rejection of what Jean-François Lyotard would later call a grand narrative. From the vantage point of classical Pragmatism, however, postmodernism continues to suffer from two great difficulties that the Pragmatists had already resolved: how to account for and use objectivity; and how to terminate processes of infinite self-referentiality, redescription, and reinterpretation in ways that can produce reliable platforms for action. The founding Pragmatists are thus presented as waiting at the end of the road—to use Richard Rorty’s felicitous phrase—that postmodern philosophy is traveling. It is in this sense that I cast classical Pragmatism as a form of post–postmodernism.

These matters receive further development in the next two chapters. Chapter 2, Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and Global Citizenship, argues that some of the key ideas of the classical Pragmatists are ideally suited for application to problems of knowledge and valuation that are related to defining and promoting global citizenship. For one thing, Pragmatism claims to discover a strain of human commonality that trumps the postmodernist emphasis on difference and discontinuity. For another, when classical Pragmatism’s mature theory of truth is coupled with its moderate version of cultural relativism, the more skeptical postmodernist version known as cognitive relativism is undercut. On the surface, cognitive relativism might appear to oppose ideas and practices that militate against global citizenship by allowing that no standpoint is uniquely privileged above all others, thus leveling the cross-cultural playing field and fostering pluralism. The actual consequences of cognitive relativism have been the opposite: Postmodernist relativism has in fact been used to provide cover for various forms of religious fundamentalism and racist politics, including the Hindu fundamentalist defense of the caste system in India and the racist programs of the political Right in France. Pragmatism, on the other hand, by holding that there are objective results of inquiry in the social sciences as well as in the physical sciences, would not provide cover to oppressive ideas. Even though these results may not have been universalized, they are nevertheless universalizable in ways that provide firm platforms for the development of global citizenship at the same time that they honor cultural pluralism.

Chapter 3, Classical Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and Neopragmatism, continues the discussion of Pragmatism and postmodernism begun in the two previous chapters by examining the postmodernist themes that have been taken up and woven into some forms of neopragmatism, such as the one advanced by Rorty. I argue that Rorty’s neopragmatism differs from Dewey’s classical Pragmatism in several important ways—ways that reveal neopragmatism’s debt to postmodernism. Whereas Dewey honored the distinct roles that the arts and the sciences can play in social reconstruction, for example, Rorty tends to alternate between blurring that distinction, on the one hand, and maintaining the distinction but privileging literature over the technosciences, on the other. It also appears that the type of relativism found in neopragmatism—a type that is also found in the writings of some postmodernists—does not allow us to hope for anything more solid than personal and cultural preferences. Neopragmatism of this variety thus appears to be an attempt to displace classical Pragmatism’s thick program of active experimental analysis and social reconstruction with thinner projects that present hoping and coping as the best available outcome.

II. Technology

In the next four chapters I turn to a discussion of some of the major themes in the philosophy of technology. Chapter 4, Classical Pragmatism and Communicative Action: Jürgen Habermas, presents a Deweyan critique of the work of Jürgen Habermas. Despite his important contributions as a major public intellectual, from the vantage point of his Pragmatist critics Habermas’s project appears to rest on an unstable dualism of strategic action versus communicative action. In the view of his Pragmatist critics, Habermas’s project places so much weight on the noninstrumentalist side of the breach that it consequently fails to give experimentation its proper place in human doing and making. Dewey’s project, in contrast, being richer and more flexible than Habermas’s, avoids some of its pitfalls by avoiding its explicit dualism as well as the quasi-transcendentalism nested within it. I close this chapter with an invitation to Habermas to engage Dewey’s work more systematically.

Chapter 5, From Critical Theory to Pragmatism: Andrew Feenberg, engages one of the most insightful and productive philosophers of technology working today. I present the trajectory of Andrew Feenberg’s career as moving away from the Critical Theory of his teacher, Herbert Marcuse, toward the critique of technology advanced by Dewey. I argue that in Questioning Technology Feenberg follows Dewey on several important points: he moves from an essentialist to a functionalist understanding of technology; he develops a vigorous form of social constructivism; he rejects a Heideggerian type of romanticism in favor of a naturalized technology; he rejectes the Critical Theorists’ notion of technology as ideology; he accepts the idea that the project of Enlightenment rationality is not as much of a threat as the Critical Theorists had imagined; he proposes the idea that technical decisions are made within a network of competing factors in which one weighs various desired ends against one another; he warns against the reification of the results of inquiry as if they had existed prior to inquiry (Dewey’s philosophic fallacy); and he recasts technology in a way that bridges the traditional split between artifacts and social relations. In all this, I suggest, Feenberg’s progress toward a Pragmatic reading of the philosophy of technology is the right move at the right time.

Chapter 6, A Neo-Heideggerian Critique of Technology: Albert Borgmann, continues a conversation that I have had with Albert Borgmann for some fifteen years. Borgmann’s books, including Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, Across the Postmodern Divide, and Holding On to Reality, advance what is arguably one of the best neo-Heideggerian critiques of technology currently available. Whereas Borgmann’s arguments against hyperconsumerism and commodification are unassailable, I suggest that his project suffers from the same sort of dualism that has plagued the projects of the first and second generations of the Critical Theorists. For both Borgmann and Heidegger, technology tends to distract us from the great embodiments of meaning. For both Borgmann and Heidegger, technology has been responsible for a diaspora of focal things and practices. For both Borgmann and Heidegger, the vacuity of technology provides the grounds for a negative kind of hope, for an opening or clearing where focal things can once more be clearly and purposefully engaged. To his credit, however, Borgmann also parts company with Heidegger on a number of points, including Heidegger’s apparent desire to return to a kind of pretechnological romanticism and (of course) Heidegger’s disastrous social and political ideas. Borgmann attempts to introduce an agenda of social and political reform that is in many ways quite salutary. Nevertheless, to Borgmann’s Pragmatist critics he appears to be enmeshed in a fatal dualism and an uncritical acceptance of what he terms ultimate concerns.

Chapter 7, Doing and Making in a Democracy: John Dewey goes beyond the oblique presentations of Dewey’s critique of technology presented in the previous three chapters. In this chapter I present Dewey’s critique directly. I present his reading of the history of philosophical treatments of technology and his proposals for naturalizing technology, that is, locating it in a realm that is neither supernatural nor extranatural and in which the only telic elements are the natural ends of objects, individuals, and events, all of which in turn may become means to further ends. Dewey rejected the notion that technology is no more than applied science and argued that technology is prior to science historically and functionally. In Dewey’s view, technology can form a buffer between the forces of antiscience and science and function as a means by which science can be appropriated by the scientifically uninformed. He had little sympathy for those who attack technology in the name of humanism for usurping a place that is more legitimately held by abstract moral precepts. For Dewey, unlike Heidegger and the first- and second-generation Critical Theorists, technology was never the problem. Instead, he thought that what is called for in a world of constant change is intelligence, especially as it is exhibited in democratic practices. What is called for is no more or less than determined and systematic inquiry into our tools and techniques, or in his words, technology.

III. The Environment

The two essays in this section locate Dewey’s work within the past and present of environmental philosophy. Chapter 8, Nature as Culture: John Dewey and Aldo Leopold, argues that Dewey’s environmental naturalism allows him to accept and defend the central tenets of Leopold’s land ethic without the appeal to an idealized, nonhuman nature that occasionally surfaces within Leopold’s work. I argue that Leopold’s attempt to provide a foundation for his ethic by that means is the least workable and the least defensible feature of his otherwise excellent project. Dewey’s alternative locates itself in the thick of current debates regarding the relations between human beings and nonhuman nature. It offers the promise of continuing insights within this arena of human experience.

Chapter 9, Green Pragmatism: Reals without Realism, Ideals without Idealism, builds on the material presented in the previous chapter. I discuss the relevance of Dewey’s ideas to more recent philosophical debates among environmental philosophers such as Bryan Norton, Holmes Ralston III, J. Baird Callicott, and Michael Zimmerman. I argue that Dewey’s work anticipated some of the central concepts of the work of Callicott and Norton, such as source versus locus of value and felt versus considered values. On the other hand, Dewey’s Pragmatism stands in sharp contrast to Ralston’s idealism and some of the mystic strains encountered in the work of Zimmerman. I suggest that a careful reading of Dewey’s 1909 essay Nature and Its Good: A Conversation provides an interesting and informative foil against which to read the works of these four environmental philosophers and serves as a wedge by means of which Dewey is able to enter into their conversation. When taken with the 1896 essay Evolution and Ethics, it bears witness to Dewey’s concern, almost a century ago, with matters that today we term environmental.

IV. Classical Pragmatism

The final section comprises six essays devoted to some of the central ideas and figures of classical Pragmatism. Chapter 10, What Was Dewey’s Magic Number? probes the substructure of Dewey’s philosophical method. Taking my cue from Abraham Kaplan, who once suggested that Dewey’s magic number was two, I suggest that he thought more basically in terms of threes, even though the titles of Dewey’s books—such as Experience and Nature, The School and Society, and Human Nature and Conduct—and his goal of reconstructing disparate elements into new wholes might support Kaplan’s thesis. Some of his cases seem to be inspired by Hegel’s dialectic, while others recall Peirce’s categories, especially as they are related to Peirce’s method of fixing belief. In order to make my case, I discuss Dewey’s treatments of three areas of philosophical interest: the arts, ethics, and inquiry.

Chapter 11, Cultivating a Common Faith: Dewey’s Religion, takes up the highly controversial matter of Dewey’s analysis of religious belief. Dewey argued that there is no such thing as religion in general—that there is nothing that all religions qua religions have in common. Moreover, given the wide variety of the world’s religions, he argued, and given differences in cultural background and temperament, how is it possible to choose a religion from among them? What sort of criteria are available? Rejecting claims that ideals must be grounded in absolutes, justified by objects and events that transcend experience, or warranted by history or tradition, Dewey invites us to exhibit a particular type of religious faith. This religious faith—this common faith—would be one that takes experience seriously as a source of values, that tests values and ideals experimentally, and that honors the religious qualities of experiences of many types, including aesthetic, ethical, scientific, and educational types. It is this religious attitude that Dewey thinks can drive, inform, and refresh religious institutions. It is this common faith that can insure the continuing relevance of religious institutions in a changing world and provide a platform for their cooperation on matters that transcend narrow sectarian interest.

Chapter 12, Beyond the Epistemology Industry: Dewey’s Theory of Inquiry, presents a succinct overview of Dewey’s theory of inquiry. I discuss his criticisms of what he termed the epistemology industry and his notion of warranted assertibility. Topics discussed in this essay include Dewey’s idea of inquiry as organic and instrumental behavior, the role of the a priori in inquiry, the relation of common sense and science, the status of logical objects, the nature and function of abstraction, the relation of matter and form in inquiry, the role of judgments in inquiry, propositions and their relations, and the social dimensions of inquiry. Dewey rejected the idea that logic, or the theory of inquiry, is a strictly formal discipline complete in itself and devoid of relevance to the affairs of public life.

Chapter 13, "The Homo Faber Debate in Dewey and Max Scheler," begins by identifying some of the significant personal and professional differences between Dewey and Max Scheler. One of these differences was that Dewey accepted the homo faber thesis as it had been advanced by Henri Bergson, according to which intelligence is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make other tools. Scheler, on the other hand, rejected what he regarded as the primary features of the homo faber thesis, namely that human beings can make signs and tools because they have a larger and more powerful cortex than other animals. Scheler opted instead for a discontinuity thesis, according to which human life possesses a uniquely new characteristic best termed spirit. Despite these and other differences, however, and despite Scheler’s attacks on the Pragmatists, he and Dewey articulated remarkably similar views regarding the function of tools in intelligent adaptation. The fact that Dewey held a version of the homo faber thesis that Scheler rejected should not obscure their fundamental agreements regarding the issues that vitalize that thesis.

Chapter 14, Productive Pragmatism: Habits as Artifacts in Peirce and Dewey, returns to a question that was central to the first section of this book: To what extent can we expect the outcome of inquiry to provide anything more than infinite processes of redescription and reinterpretation? Critics of the Pragmatists, including Bertrand Russell, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, have accused Pragmatism of making action an end in itself. If this criticism were justified, then one of the key differences between classical Pragmatism and neopragmatism would evaporate. In this chapter I argue that neither Peirce nor Dewey thought that action—except incidentally—is the end of inquiry. The function of inquiry is instead the production of new artifacts, including new habits. It is true that early in his career Peirce held the view that there is an infinite continuum of signs, and that there is neither a first nor a last object that is not a sign of something further. But he eventually abandoned this view and began to write of logical interpretants that are ultimate, final, and veritable. When Peirce’s later doctrine of signs and Dewey’s Instrumentalism are taken together, I argue, then it becomes clear that these versions of classical Pragmatism should not simply be termed praxis philosophies. They are philosophies of production.

PART ONE

POSTMODERNISM

ONE

CLASSICAL PRAGMATISM

Waiting at the End of the Road

I take as my point of departure the now famous remark by Richard Rorty, that when certain of the postmodernists reach the end of the road they are traveling they will find Dewey there waiting for them.¹ The precise text I have in mind is from the introduction to The Consequences of Pragmatism. It goes like this: On my view, James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the road which, for example, Foucault and Deleuze are currently traveling.²

I freely admit that when Rorty wrote this sentence he probably had something different in mind than what I will suggest here. That much is clear from his remarks on Foucault and Dewey several hundred pages later. He tells us there that the burden of his argument is that we should see Dewey as having already gone the route Foucault is traveling, and as having arrived at the point Foucault is still trying to reach—the point at which we can make philosophical and historical (‘genealogical’) reflection useful to those, in Foucault’s phrase, ‘whose fight is located in the fine meshes of the webs of power.’³ Rorty fleshes this point out in an admirable manner when he writes that although Foucault’s philosophy of language and his analysis of power relations seem new, Dewey anticipated both. Even further, he suggests that Foucault’s structures of power are not much different from what Dewey described as structures of culture.

Just taken as they stand, however, these remarks only allow us to conclude that Dewey is on the same road and has reached the same point that the others have traveled. In what sense is he, as Rorty put it, waiting at the end of the road? Rorty thinks that this is a matter of Dewey’s superior vocabulary, which allows room for unjustifiable hope, and an ungroundable but vital sense of human solidarity.⁴

In what follows I want to indicate some of the ways in which Dewey’s version of Pragmatism can be viewed as having advanced beyond the positions held by some of the authors commonly identified as postmodernists. In other words, I will suggest that Dewey’s Pragmatism can and should be viewed as a form of post-postmodernism. Of course I do not intend to argue that there is any sort of linear progress in philosophy, or that Dewey has somehow leapfrogged postmodernism. There are in fact several important senses in which Dewey is a postmodern thinker. Kwame Anthony Appiah and James Livingston, among others, have called attention to elements of postmodernism in Dewey’s thought, and Livingston has even identified some of those elements as already well formed during the first decades of the twentieth century.⁵ What I intend to do instead is identify some of the problems postmodernism leaves unresolved, and then indicate how I think Dewey had already dealt with them early in the twentieth century. It is in this sense that I am terming his variety of Pragmatism post-postmodernism. To put matters another way, it is postmodernism without some of its problems. To put this in some sort of perspective, however, it would probably be good to say something about how I understand the term postmodernism.⁶

What precisely is postmodern about postmodernism? Precision is difficult here, since the term is notoriously slippery. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, who has written an admirable book on the subject,⁷ has even gone as far as to suggest that the word may not function so much as a term of reference as a way to hold open a space for that which exceeds expression.⁸ Postmodernism does refer to specific ideas, although they must be stated negatively. It is fair to say that postmodernism rejects some of the key assumptions, methods, and conclusions of the period from Descartes to Hegel and beyond. In doing so, of course, it also rejects many of the assumptions, methods, and conclusions of the philosophical tradition going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. In Appiah’s book, this involves the rejection of foundationalism and other forms of epistemological exclusivism, the rejection of metaphysical realism and other forms of ontological exclusivism, and the celebration of such figures as Nietzsche and Dewey.⁹

Ermarth has provided us with what is probably one of the best summary statements of the movement, if indeed that is what we wish to call it. She suggests that postmodernism can be recognized by two key assumptions. First, the assumption that there is no common denominator—in ‘nature’ or ‘God’ or ‘the future’—that guarantees either the One-ness of the world or the possibility of neutral or objective thought. Second, the assumption that all human systems operate like language, being self-reflexive rather than referential systems—systems of differential function which are powerful but finite, and which construct and maintain meaning and value.¹⁰

I find it extremely helpful that she is keen to differentiate postmodernism from its near relative, deconstruction. The latter, she argues, often gets caught up in its own circularity because of its preoccupation with what a text is not, rather than what it is. On the other hand, postmodernism is characterized by its positive efforts to construct meaning in the absence of transcendent value and to find ways of acting in the absence of absolute truth. Despite the fact that some may find this view controversial, I hope that I will be allowed to stipulate it and move on.¹¹

While Ermarth provides a tight characterization of what the varieties of postmodernism have in common, Appiah offers a similarly precise characterization of how they differ by discipline. In technical philosophy, as I have already indicated, Appiah thinks that postmodernism involves the rejection of epistemological and ontological exclusivism and the celebration of such figures as Nietzsche and Dewey. In architecture, postmodernism rejects the exclusivism of function (the styles of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe) in favor of playfulness and pastiche. Postmodernist architects would include the great Antonio Gaudí of Catalonia, as well as the less accomplished but equally playful designers of taco restaurants in the American Southwest that resemble giant sombreros. And then of course there is the incomparable postmodernist architecture of Las Vegas. A third type of postmodernism is encountered in literature, where, Appiah tells us, it is a reaction against the high seriousness of authors such as Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. This, I suppose, implies a turn toward the self-reflexive playfulness of authors such as James Joyce and Donald Barthelme. In addition, given the preoccupation of some French and American philosophers with the permutations of the trope, perhaps their work should be considered literary, rather than philosophical, postmodernism. Rorty, a neopragmatist trained in philosophy, was most recently a professor of comparative literature. Appiah finds a fourth type of postmodernism exhibited in political theory. In this case it rejects scientific Marxism and other monolithic enterprises and turns instead to a celebration of pluralism and perspectivism. The evolution of the Frankfurt School, to take one important example, supports Appiah’s characterization of political postmodernism. First-generation Critical Theorists, such as Adorno, regarded technoscience as reified ideology, operating apart from and opposed to the activities of the lifeworld. Second-generation Critical Theorists, such as Habermas, focused on social problems of constitutionality and consensus-making. And their third-generation heirs, such as Feenberg and Axel Honneth, by regarding technoscience as embedded in society, thus concentrate on problems of globalization, pluralism, and multiculturalism. (See chapters 4 and 5.)

What all of this boils down to for Appiah is space: postmodernism is, in his view, a new way of understanding the multiplication of distinctions that flows from the need to clear oneself a space; the need that drives the underlying dynamic of cultural modernity. Modernism, he writes, saw the economization of the world as the triumph of reason; postmodernism rejects that claim, allowing in the realm of theory the same multiplication of distinctions we see in the cultures it seeks to understand.¹² For Appiah, a close observer of modernism in the form of colonialism, postmodernism is culturally liberating. In fact, in various manifestations, postmodernism puts the individual front and center. As a system of communication, postmodernism is more or less the celebration of individual and group differences under an overarching communications superstructure that eventually replaces many of the functions of the nation-state, as Marshall McLuhan¹³ described in great detail during the 1960s. In its commercial, and even in its educational, manifestations, it may well turn out to be what some entrepreneurs are