PoMo: immeasurably frustrating

Go over to Jeff Hodges's blog and read his latest post, which describes the rejection of one of the articles he had submitted for publication in a literary journal. The critiques accompanying that rejection—unsurprisingly drenched in the putrid muck of postmodernist "thinking"—are why I'm none too interested in moving on to Ph.D. work in the humanities. All the PoMo buzzwords are there in those critiques: Foucault, ahistoricality, privilege, power, appropriation, etc. It's frightening to see how deep and pervasive the PoMo brainwashing is, and it's obvious that the idiots who wrote their critiques of Jeff's article are circling the wagons and reacting in knee-jerk fashion to Jeff's having written in a very different mode, from a very different Weltanschauung. The Borg collective at work.

Jeff correctly notes one fundamental irony of postmodernism: in its rush to kill all metanarratives, PoMo fails to realize that it is itself a metanarrative, thus subject to its own critique. PoMo is often inadvertently self-eviscerating that way, which is what makes it absolutely useless as a philosophy or as a legitimate form of critical, social, or historical theory. I say: confine PoMo to art and literary criticism/performance, where it belongs, and where it actually seems to work (Tarantino is very PoMo, and I like his movies). Keep it the hell out of the rest of humanities academe, where it has done nothing but create intellectual drones and polarize scholarship by turning everything into a left-biased ideological battle—one in which the West must always throw the match in the fifth round.


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