by C.J.Wansbrough unpublished

"Postmodernism, then, is a mode of consciousness (and not, it should be emphasised, a historical period) that is highly suspicious of the belief in shared speech, shared values, and shared perceptions that some would like to believe form our culture but which in fact may be no more than empty, if necessary, fictions." (Olsen 143)

Before I engage in a theoretical discussion about the present paradigm of classical homeopathy, I will try to expand and explain further the post-modernist perspective. One dictionary of cultural criticism(3) refers to post-modernism as a highly disputed term that is limited to the period of twentieth-century Western culture that immediately followed high modernism. For many, the beginning of the post-modern era corresponds to the use of atomic weapons and the rapid development of technology that followed. The post-modern outlook accepts whether indifferently or, with celebration the indeterminacy of meaning and the decenteredness of existence. The result in post-modern literature is a twist to the conventions of the novel—authors often chat with characters, plots do not unfold as expected and viable alternative realities exist within the pages of the text.

Post-modernism calls into question enlightenment values such as rationality, truth and progress,(4) arguing that these merely serve to secure the monolithic structures of modern capitalistic society by concealing or excluding any forces that might challenge its cultural dominance. To counter this authority, post-modernist thought exposes the significance of power and prejudice and uncovers how those in authority construct their own terms and conditions for the sake of maintaining that power.

Such criticism of apparent cultural dominance then reveals its own blindness and gives voices to those people or ideologies previously excluded. The post-modern attitude tends to value heterogeneity over purity, diversity over unity, the local over the universal and the popular over the elite culture.

As a theory it is associated with a group of 20^th century French philosophers including Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and others. They all tend to focus on a number of basic criticisms of Western values, which have been cursorily summarised above. Post-modernism has no faith in the progressivist and speculative discourses of modernity and the assumptions of enlightenment. It abandons all absolute points of view that could legitimise foundations of truth and claims that individual narratives are the sole arbitrators of truth.

In a book by Brenda K. Marshall ‘Teaching the Post-modern’, she says

"Postmodernism is about how we are defined within specific historical, social, and cultural matrices. It's about race, class gender, erotic identity and practice, nationality, age, and ethnicity. It's about power and powerlessness, and about empowerment. It's about threads we trace, and trace, and trace. But not to a conclusion. To increase knowledge, yes. But never to innocent knowledge. To better understanding, yes. But never to pure insight. Postmodernism is about history. But not the kind of 'History' that lets us think we can know the past. History in the post-modern moment becomes histories and questions. It asks: Whose history gets told? In whose name? For what purpose? Postmodernism is about histories not told, retold, untold. Histories forgotten , hidden, invisible, considered unimportant, changed, eradicated. It's about the refusal to see history as linear, as leading straight up to today in some recognisable pattern - all set for us to make sense of...The post-modern moment is not something that is to be defined chronologically; rather, it is a rupture in our consciousness".(5)

In the light of the brief synopsis of this complex theory, I will now try and ask some questions and perhaps expose some underlying tensions in our present model.

Despite the obvious interpretation the practitioner must make in deciding on a remedy, there is another level of uncertainty in this process, and that lies in the actual relationship between the original prover of the remedy and the interpreting process of the practitioner. Before I explain this, I would like to introduce one of the most important and yet disturbing insights of the Post-modernist movement, a form of analysis known as Deconstructivism, originally developed by a French philosopher called Jacques Derrida. Although he remains one of the most awesome iconoclasts of this century, and is exceedingly difficult to read, his main arguments can be summarised as follows.

‘His work focuses on language and he contends that the traditional way of reading makes a number of false assumptions about the nature of texts. A traditional reader believes that language is capable of expressing ideas without changing them, that in the hierarchy of language writing is secondary to speech and that the author of a text is the source of its meaning. Derrida’s deconstructive style of reading subverts these assumptions and challenges the idea that a text has an unchanging unified meaning. Western culture has tended to assume that speech is a clear and direct way to communicate. Drawing on Psychoanalysis and Linguistics, Derrida questions this assumption. As a result, the author’s intentions in speaking cannot be unconditionally accepted. This multiplies the number of legitimate interpretations of a text.’ (8) In other words the objective quality of a remedy picture has a number of levels of interpretation to contend with. On the one hand, the practitioner has to be free of prejudice, an oxymoron if there ever was one, since the only perspective available to a practitioner is his own(9), then comes his own interpretation of the remedy picture, and finally an interpretation of a materia medica that may be yet another source of interpretation. Perhaps materia medica is not unlike poetry in that when you write a poem, you write with a specific meaning but when it is published or shared with others, it becomes free of your own perspective, and people may not extract the same meaning that you originally intended. Your voice is an active medium that together with your gestures and intonations can help to clarify any messages, but once written down, the text looses that clarity on becoming separated from that person and in a sense becomes the reader’s. To further compound these multiple levels of interpretation, a further one arises from the post-modern ethos. In so far as, the dynamic between the interpreter and the interpreted (practitioner/patient) may well be a shifting relationship based on the interplay of an evolving cosmos.

The ever-increasing complexity of our present society, together with the increasing levels of pollution and a significant increasing rate of evolution may well add another level of interpretation to that healing perspective. An example of this evolving frenzy and the phenomenal pressures involved, was noted recently in the Lancet (10)when it was found that a bacteria Enterococcus Faecium , a common species found in the gut, has managed not only to become resistant to the antibiotic vancomycin, but also mutated so that a strain became dependent on the drug for its survival. It is extremely rare for bacteria to go through such enormous evolutionary change in such a short period of time and bodes ill for the singular approach to the healing crises presented by such an awesome mutation rate. The historian R. Porter makes a similar point in his recently published history of medicine, when he says that the history of pestilence and disease is intimately connected to the evolving history of society. The ongoing and ceaseless dialectic between health and disease presents itself ‘as an evolutionary struggle for the survival of the fittest, which have no master plot and grants mankind no privileges’. (11)Such an evolving scenario will naturally add further to the struggles felt in such a sea of multiple interpretations, nevertheless within this complex narrative of shifting cognitive allegiances, the practitioner must be able to develop the skill and necessary clarity to focus on what needs to be cured.

Whether it is possible to ever know the materia medica?

Conclusion