Email: oliver@essame.clara.net sof 71 May 2005 18 Kathleen McPhilemy reviews Against the Flow: Education, the arts and postmodern culture by Peter Abbs Routledge Falmer. London 2003. 173 pages. £24.99. ISBN 0415297923 reviews I approached Peter Abbs’ Against the Flow with eagerness. I hoped it would articulate for me my own unease with the influence of postmodernism on the arts, especially poetry, and on education, as well as somehow supply a rationale for spiritual humanism to set against the absolutes of traditional religion on the one hand, and the reductive materialism of the neo-Darwinists on the other. Certainly, this is a passionately written and erudite work.
In his first chapter, Abbs declares that art is always existential, collaborative and cultural and thus he sets it against the postmodern worldview, which he describes as simply an endorsement of the dehumanising world of global consumerism. He introduces in this chapter the concept of autobiography which he considers central to art and as the process through the Western notion of selfhood has emerged.
While I understand that, without God, spirituality must be located in the human, I am not sure that Abbs does enough to define what he means by spirituality or to justify the identification of spirituality with selfhood.
At times, he seems to see spirituality as a refinement of consciousness, and therefore as a part of the evolutionary process: ‘spirituality can be conceived as part of, as an unplanned outcome of, the natural world, yet opening up within nature new dimensions of reflection, prophecy and possibility’ (p.35) As if himself dissatisfied by this suggestion, he goes on in the next paragraph to suggest, ‘God could be understood, at the very least, as an imaginative necessity, perhaps the ultimate expression of the human need for transcendence; the three-lettered sign denoting alterity.’ Abbs is an ex-Catholic; at a number of points in this book, there is a sense that he has not supplied enough to fill up the god-shaped hole in his argument.
If he had further developed the ideas of collaboration and culture the emphasis on the self might have been more palatable. Similarly, if there had been more attention to self in the world, I might have found the arguments more compatible with my own anxieties. In Chapter 2, he says ‘The best resemblances to the mobile life of consciousness are to be found in significant works of art.’ (p.37) The intransigent actuality of the world seems to be in danger of disappearing or being reduced to the raw material for art objects.
To be fair, the chapter on education is much more grounded, being a response to changes in education policy over the past half century. Abbs shows how the ‘new arts paradigm’, which sought to redress the emphasis on creativity and self-expression of the sixties with the recognition that children as culture-makers ‘are born into history and community’, was overwhelmed by the stultifying demands of the National Curriculum.
Abbs’ comments on current educational policy seem to me to be absolutely right, especially his perception: ‘Education in its dominant institutional form has become training, has become investment, has become business and management…’(p.24) Abbs confronts all the right targets: global consumerism; the flight from meaning and imagination; the reduction of education to training and of poetry to entertainment or advertisement. Many of his touchstones are reference points I would share: Blake, Rilke, Celan. Nevertheless, it seems to me he fails to acknowledge sufficiently the political and physical actualities of the increasingly shrinking world we live in.
For example, he takes almost no account of non-Western history or thought. Nor does he reflect historical events later than the Holocaust, although he does trace developments in thought. Hence, my feeling that the real world is missing. Moreover, there are too many occasions where rhetoric is substituted for argument.
This is to some extent conscious: ‘I have chosen a poetic and philosophical language to pit against the anodyne and functional language of current educational discourse.’ (p.4) However, it does not always work, especially in Chapter 7, Thirty-nine notes towards a new metaphysical poetry, which seems to fall uneasily between Wallace Stevens and Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Poetic language has to ‘make it new’ and Abbs does not always manage to do this. For example: ‘The intense heat which makes such transformation possible is provided by the burning coals of the imagination.’ (p.108) This is an image which belongs to the industrial revolution and could have been lifted from Frankenstein.
It is in our nature to be more critical of our friends than our enemies. This book is well worth reading for its stimulating and controversial attempt to go ‘against the flow’.
Kathleen McPhilemy reviews Against the Flow: Education, the Arts and Postmodern Culture by Peter Abbs, Routledge Falmer, London 2003, 173 pages, £24.99, ISBN 0415297923.