THE PROGRAMME seeks evidence of the practical manifestations of postmodern critical theory in organizational and operational structures. Practice is not an idea but a social activity. This activity typically crystallizes into institutionalized forms. These have missions and strategies and organized protocols for executing their strategic objectives. Single institutions with the same or similar missions come together to create larger structures of practice, local, regional, national, or international. Such superstructures of practice evolve a history and culture of their own.
One of the interesting ways to think about postmodernism is to consider how it penetrates the established culture of institutions. Nearly every old established institutionalized field of human practice is currently in a stage of significant disequilibrium. For what may be the most dramatic example, look at the attempt by the Congress to redistribute governmental responsibility from national to state levels. The conditions of postmodernity, which we apprehend in the theoretical work, we find dramatically relevant to this dynamic situation. If we could understand the nature of the dynamics of contemporary institutional stress through a postmodern critique, then we could conceivably identify the tools and tactics that would reshape institutions more effectively in the conditions of postmodernity--and of that era which lies beyond it, waiting to come into sight.
Let THE PROGRAMME modestly say that it lacks the arsenal needed to undertake the massive campaign to understand "praxis" this broadly. It pecks away at particular aspects of practice, however, on the assumption that its work, in small, contributes pieces to this broad picture of institutional praxis in postmodernism.
Below is a working list of fields of institutionalized endeavor which we find of interest. As we examine them, we will create links to that work.
We categorize literature and the arts as "creative expression" and treat them outside the fields of theory and praxis. We explain this categorical strategy in the section on the creative expression of postmodern sensibility.
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