ABSTRACT
An adequate response to the question of what follows for educational theory from the demise of postmodernism requires attention to the way the question is framed. This is especially true when, as with some authors, we are invited to view the situation as one in which one ‘dominant cultural logic’ is being replaced by another (Gibbons 2017)—as if a change to human sensibility on some global scale is underway. Here, the ambition for educational theory somehow to anticipate what the form of this new sensibility will be is highly perilous and perhaps misguided, particularly when it is recognized that postmodernism has only ever been one—sometimes not very significant—dimension of quotidian sensibility. In addition, no matter how many caveats and ‘under definitions’ are employed, it is hard not to see an ambition to specify an incipient sensibility as fundamentally a totalizing exercise of the kind the implausibility of which it was one of the great virtues of postmodernism to bring to our attention. Such an enterprise expresses an arrogance to which intellectuality has frequently shown itself to be vulnerable, and its determinations are likely to reflect particular (predominantly Western) high status ways of thinking whose focus is both limited and highly self-referential.
