Post-Modernism?!
Michael Albert
A little over two years ago, preparing to ride from Boston to New York to attend the Socialist Scholars Conference, I asked a scholar friend to explain "post-modernism" in the four to five hours we would spend on the road. He accepted, and we rode—he lecturing and me listening.
When we got to New York if someone had walked up and asked, "What is post-modernism?" I could not have answered. Four hours and I still didn't know what "post-modernism" referred to. Three interpretations spring to mind.
My tutor was an idiot incapable of explaining one concept in four hours.
I am an idiot incapable of understanding one concept in four hours.
The concept is idiotic, a vague pastiche of mush covering a range too broad to clarify in four hours.
The third possibility, as you might guess, is my favorite. But how could a concept which engenders shelves of books be nearly empty? Here's my hypothesis: Literary theory is largely a sham literary theorists use to cajole regal treatment from their professional cohorts, bosses, students, and broader intellectual community.
How can I commit such blasphemy?
First, calling an academic discipline phony is often common sense, not blasphemy.
Take mainstream economics. Nearly the entire "neoclassical" economic edifice is constructed to legitimate the rewards of economists by pleasing the corporate piper who pays the bills. Thus, mainstream economists mainly "prove" capitalism's worth or indicate how capitalists can better pursue their own ends and rarely try to understand how the system works, who benefits, who loses, and why.
Or take academic political science. Again, the idea is not actually to understand the government—who would pay scholars to do this?—but to "theorize government" in ways that justify official behavior.
I doubt that Z readers would recoil in horror at these condemnations of mainstream economics and politics. I even think most Z readers would probably find supporting evidence quite convincing. For example, surveys reveal that economics graduate students accept these horrible assertions about their own profession, and the best first-hand documentation of the inner workings of the U.S. government, such as the Pentagon Papers, are exactly the materials that political science departments never bother to study.
But literary theory? Surely this can't be phony. After all, the most obscure practitioners of literary theory are often radicals and self-serving mystification is never radical.
Nonetheless, suppose you are an English literature teacher and you want a high salary, intellectual status, and tenure. How does reading and discussing literature warrant receipt of such goodies? Wouldn't admitting that such matter-of-fact activity was the essence of teaching English literature make it hard to justify big bucks, big status, tenure, and paid trips to distant conferences? To justify these rewards there must be a "theory" that takes years to master and that some people employ better than others, at least in their own eyes.
Enter literary theory, an incomprehensible tangle of concepts and phrases made so dense and vague that:
No one who isn't willing to suspend rationality can use it.
No one can possibly get enough of a grip on it to counter or refute it.
Anyone who attempts to can be ridiculed on the grounds of not understanding the theory in the first place.
Thus, with their incomprehensible "discourse" in place, literary theorists have a defensible academic niche. The fact that many students feel like dummies because they don't have a clue what's going on is apparently insufficient reason for anyone in the club to rock the boat.
Now I admit that the above is very harsh and no more than an undefended hypothesis. And I also admit that the reason for the lack of supporting textual evidence is because my attempts to find a literary theory book that I can comprehend sufficiently to assess have been futile. Here's the kind of "discourse" you have to comprehend to read even what the less obscure literary theorists say about novels, movies, MTV, modern architecture, pop songs, and modern literature: post-modern moment, binarisms, overdetermined conflict, pure systematicity, post-structuralism, hermeneutic, metanarrative, deconstruction, irreducible materiality, semiotics, and dialogism.
Not understanding these tangled terms and doubting the need to use them to comment sensibly on pop music's Talking Heads, TV's "The Young and the Restless," Hollywood's Star Wars, baseball's Dodgers Stadium, or literature's Ishmael Reed, I more than happily grant that my hypothesis that these terms mean nothing may be wrong. Perhaps "irreducible materiality" and "pure systematicity" are exactly the concepts needed to "theorize" Madonna. But if so, it still ought to be possible for literary theorists to describe, popularize, and generally make understandable what their results are so the rest of us can know there is something real going on behind all the obscure terminology. Even the most difficult physics can be described so average persons get a good idea of the main results and questions. If it can be done for theories about quarks, gluons, big bangs, and black holes, it ought to be able to be done for theories about everyday culture and communication.
So, please, someone tell me what I can read to understand literary theory so that I can withdraw my hypothesis and write an informative summary. I'll bet not one percent of Z's readers can define the earlier listed terms. So wouldn't it be sensible to let the rest of us in on the action, assuming there is any?