The pleasure of the bottomless: postmodernism, chaos and paradigm shifts

In her paper Reconstructing Nursing: Evidence, Artistry and the Curriculum, Marks-Maran (1999) attempted to outline a new postmodern paradigm for nursing. Whilst I fully support this timely discussion of new insights into nursing theory and practice, Marks-Maran unfortunately presents a very idiosyncratic version of postmodernism which is both simplistic and, at times; inaccurate. My main concern, however, is with her assertion that postmodernism offers a new paradigm for nursing, since she misses the fundamental point that postmodernism is not a critique or replacement for the modernist paradigm, but a challenge to the very notion of paradigms. Rather than attempting to replace the modernist paradigm of nursing, then, postmodernism offers what Spivak called ‘the pleasure of the bottomless’ in which the perceived certainties of science are decentred and the authority by which all knowledge claims are made is questioned.