- “[T]he preservation of the belief that the student writer is a rational, autonomous individual…is maintained by a fiction of textual coherence. The student writer’s skill in representing his or her life experience as complete and noncontradictory is taken as confirmation that the rational subjectivity of the author is identical with the autonomous individual” (225).
- The critiques to community and consensus (think Bruffee’s collaborative learning and Harris’ critique of our though on community) “suggest that the appeal to community is a means of relocating the wholeness of the self-aware subject within a coherent group. A holistic and closed notion of community encourages a simplified view of a discursive field, where the influences of the contradictory and multiple discourses that one encounters in everyday life are minimal. The subject becomes a participant within a language game on a contained filed of play” (226).
- “By divorcing the subject from prevailing notions of the individual,…postmodern theory understands subjectivity as heterogeneous and constantly in flux” (227). This fragmentary and in flux subject is in line with the electronic age. “Because a printed book is a physical artifact, a reader typically approaches a printed book with the expectation that it will present itself as a unified whole with a consistent persona of an authoritative author. An electronic text such as a database or hypertext allows the reader to participate in the construction of the text and thus creates a very different relation between author and reader… Because an electronic text facilitates many different readings and thus changes each time it is read, it lacks the authority of a unified persona. Instead, the persona in an electronic text necessarily appears to be fragmented and partial in perspective” (228-9).
Failey also defines postmodernism:
“The modernist conception of the subject is frequently traced to Descartes and is characterized as the final reduction of the corporeal, ethical self of classical philosophy to the state of pure consciousness detached from the world” (8). This comes along with the “corollary assumption that language provides an unproblematic access to reality” (8). Failey does argue that “there [isn’t] any satisfactory definition of postmodernism” (3). However, he tries to share some general understandings of postmodern theory. For instance, “postmodern discourses ‘throw into radial doubt beliefs still prevalent in (especially American) culture but derived from the Enlightenment” (7). “[T]he key assumption that motivations [postmodern] critique[s] is that there is nothing outside contingent discourses to which a discourse of values can be grounded – no eternal truths, no universal human experience, no universal human rights, no overriding narrative of human progress” (8). “Postmodern theory decisively rejects the primacy of consciousness and instead has consciousness originating in language, thus arguing that the subject tis an effect rather than a cause of discourse. Because the subject is the locus of overlapping and competing discourses, it is a temporary stitching together of a series of often contradictory subject positions. In other words, what a person does, thinks, says, and writes cannot be interpreted unambiguously because any human action does not rise out of a unified consciousness but rather from a momentary identity that is always multiple and in some respects incoherent” (9).