When you say you're hurt by
postmodernism you've got to make clear which postmodernism is doing the hurting
and where it hurts. Because I
didn't do that in Post #233 (Regrets of an Anti-Postmodernist Bore), I'd like
to do it here. There are too many
people — architects, painters, interior designers — who aren't hurting anybody for
me to give the impression that there's a general plague of abuse.
What hurt me was the manifestation of postmodernism in English departments,
poststructuralism. In one respect,
its insistence on the many voices in a literary work
("multivocality"), poststructuralism had much in common with what I
was used to, with what anybody of my generation was used to. We were weaned on Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, cynosure of
the New Criticism, and a most loving display of multivocality. So in one way poststructuralism did not
look so revolutionary — though its first advocate in our department made it
appear so, setting it against the "univocal" New Critics. (Just the way we distorted the Old
Criticism when we had to give the New Criticism its revolutionary steam.)
In another respect, though,
poststructuralism knocked the props out from under us. It attacked the objectivity that we
thought was necessary in the teaching of our courses. How could we claim a place in the academic tradition if we
weren't objective? How could we
claim tenure which (in the AAUP statement of 1940) was won from administrations
and boards of trustees almost entirely by the promise to avoid advocacy (in
those days, advocacy of communism) and present our material objectively.
Poststructuralism's treatment of
objectivity can now be seen as complicated and nuanced, but in the eighties it
came to the Ohio University English Department in a pretty simple way, though
our chair did his best to give us the full picture. He set aside two years for instruction by specialists in the
new approach, with plenty of time — time needed by a department so full of
traditionalists — for discussion.
For me the whole two years can be
summed up in one reply to one question, asked of one specialist (his areas of
concentration were critical theory and cultural studies), late one
afternoon. He had gone over our
earlier ideas of objectivity and shown, after poststructuralist critique, how
little was left of them. There was
no such thing as objectivity.
Is there, he was then asked, such a thing as relative objectivity,
"No," said.
"There is no relative objectivity."
"Surely, you cannot mean what
you are saying," said one of our traditionalists.
"Yes, I mean it," he
said. "There is not even a
relative objectivity."
This was no young instructor, this
was no graduate student, this was no sophomore. This was a professor at the University of Californian,
Irvine, who had just published a notable book, Interpretive Conventions, and would go on to publish several more
in the field. It wasn't till I was
on the stairs heading out that I thought of the question that would have made
sure he wasn't pulling our legs: "Do you mean that there is no difference
between the statement, 'You are five feet six and weigh two hundred pounds' and
the statement, 'You are fat'?"
But alas, I (no doubt along with others) was too late. What was left dominating our minds was
the notion that because of defects in our ideas of objectivity the subjectivity
of social construction was justified.
"It all depends on which person, in which culture, is delivering
the stuff to you, including the stuff you are accustomed to calling 'facts.'"
You can see how that is going to
drive scientists up the wall.
"Look, it doesn't matter who is doing the experiment. Are the needles in the same place when
I lower the magnesium as they were when she lowered it? Is the setup the same? If so then her experiment is replicated
and what she has discovered we'll call reliable knowledge, more reliable than
what we had before. Our gender,
race, culture, politics, religion, and power relation to each other don't
matter shit. It's the needle
position, you idiots, the objectively (or intersubjectively) verifiable
position of the goddam needles."
This fury turned to laughter when
the physicist Alan Sokal produced a jargon-filled manuscript that suggested
that pi — you know, 3.14159, the relation of the circumference of a circle to
its diameter — was culturally (i.e., not physically, not mathematically)
determined, and had the manuscript accepted by the editors of the leading
journal in [postmodern] cultural studies.
All right, I could accept that as
just more shouting over the gulf between science and the humanities if it
weren't for the fact that half of what I taught in my part of the humanities
was indistinguishable from science.
Aside from all the supporting historical and linguistic scholarship
there was this, right at the heart of our discipline: reading a poem. In the early stages of that crucial
activity an inexperienced student had
to be a scientist, a good scientist, or he wouldn't get anyplace. Not any place that paid off,
anyway. To get to that place he
first simply had to construe the sentences. In that task everything depends on his making good (i.e.,
probable) inferences.
"There's a word I haven't seen before. It's in a position in a structure I have seen before,
though, so it's probably a verb.
I'll proceed on the assumption that that's what it is. Now here's a word that has two
meanings. One goes with the others
I have already decided on, and one doesn't — especially since it's not a verb. So I'll take the first one."
Note how he follows the precept
given biology students learning to identify what they see under a microscope:
when you hear hoof beats think horses, not zebras (i.e., first make the most
probable inference). Note more
importantly that what he recognizes as a given, the grammatical conventions
that tell him a word is a verb, is like what the scientist recognizes as a
given, the nature that determines the position of the needles. Neither one can be changed by the
observer and both are independent of the observer — his gender, race, religion,
politics, etc. They are
"objective entities."
By taking them so the
inexperienced student is able to put the poem together — much more quickly, of
course, than in my spell-out.
Before he's finished his similarity to the scientist will be clear: both
advance into the unknown by making inferences from the known. Both use the word "fact" for
what they have established, or find established, as known.
How much did this change when I
moved from first-year "Introduction to Literature" to fourth-year
honors seminar? The students there
could construe sentences more easily, and we could start at a higher level, but
still, if I were to hold to Socratic teaching, we had to inquire, and build,
and establish beliefs much in the way of the scientist — which was, indeed, the
way (though disguised by its unscientific, non-empirical premises) of the
Platonic dialogue. Make each step
carefully, checking, testing, ordering, and if you avoided fallacy and stayed
coherent you could credit yourself with an advance.
And what was the payoff? With a poem you advanced onto the
ground where the imagination, the freely ranging imagination, could take off,
making all the bells of image, metaphor, and symbol ring. Ring with ways that could vary with
each reader. With a piece of DNA
you advanced onto the ground where conjecture could take off, making a whole
line of future experiments light up the sky (and the NSF). With lights that could vary with each
scientist. Even in the payoff the
two were similar.
The way we each got into that
happy, free land of the imagination was the way of Socrates and that, I take
it, is the way of the academic tradition.
And that's what I saw postmodernism knocking the props out from under. When I faced my students I felt I would
have no ground to stand on, no theoretical foundation. If a student, preferring a noun to a
verb, said, "Grammatical conventions are what I see them as," I had
no supported way to deny him. Horses
could become zebras any time he wanted them to.
Richard Rorty or Stanley Fish (I
forget which) calls that student an "obliging" student, meaning the
rare one who gives attacking traditionalists the extreme example they need, but
still he's the kind of student I felt facing me after postmodern literary
theorists, represented most vividly in my mind by the California professor, had
removed the ground of objectivity from under me.
And, by what my postmodernist
colleagues soon were writing in the journals, I saw I would have to feel the
same groundlessness when I faced the administration or board of trustees. Say they wanted to move against
tenure. In 1940 I could oppose
their move on the ground that tenure was necessary to academic freedom, which
was supported by a promise of objectivity, or disinterestedness. And, looking at academic writing at
that time, no administrator or trustee could find reason to doubt that
promise. But in 1990? Look at what a trustee might see. The two below are from College English, the teacher's journal
with the largest circulation.
[For equality and democracy] the
teacher must recognize that he or she must influence (perhaps manipulate is the
more accurate word) students' values through charisma or power — he or she must
accept the role as manipulator.
Therefore it is of course reasonable to try to inculcate into our
students the conviction that the dominant order is repressive. (Lead article.)
I would argue that political
commitment — especially feminist commitment — is a legitimate classroom
strategy and rhetorical imperative.
The feminist agenda offers a goal toward our students' conversions to
emancipatory critical action.
If the trustee had said to me then,
"It looks to me as if you in the English Department have broken your
promise," I'd be hard pressed to say him nay. Statements of the same kind, advocating advocacy courses,
could be found in Rhetoric Review,
College Composition and Communication, and the Journal of Advanced Composition. And if he said to me now, "You are still, on the
evidence of those courses in Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality
Studies at UCLA, breaking your promise, I'd be hard pressed to deny it. I'd have to establish that, in the
teaching of those courses, there was no advocacy, and I doubt that I could do
that.
Even if I'm speaking ing from some
distance up the wall, my friends in fine arts can see, I hope, how what
postmodernism meant to me (a tectonic philosophical shift that deprived me of
my foundation, my tradition, even my calling) is different from what it meant
to them. Their postmodernism, I
take it (though I haven't looked carefully), knocks far fewer props out from
under them, and does its knocking less forthrightly, with fewer words.
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