Postmodernism and the Left Barbara Epstein [from New Politics, vol. 6, no. 2 (new series), whole no. 22, Winter 1997] Robbins goes on to deride critics of postmodernism as "know-nothings of the left [who] delude themselves: Capitalism is screwing people! What goes up must come down! What else do we need to know?" Robbins continues, "It seems likely that what is really expressed by the angry tirades against cultural politics that have accompanied the Sokal affair is a longing for the days when women were back in the kitchen and it was respectable to joke about faggots and other natural objects of humor. These are not the family values I want my children to learn." (p.59) **Presumably Robbins is referring to people who have expressed support for Sokal, such as Ruth Rosen (a feminist historian), Katha Pollitt (a feminist journalist), Jim Weinstein (editor of In These Times), Michael Albert (editor of Z Magazine), myself. Robbins' remark is self-righteous posturing, and unfortunately it is not an isolated example.** **In the arena of postmodernism, left politics is often expressed through striking poses, often conveying moral superiority, greater sophistication, or both. There often seems to be a sneer built into postmodernist discourse, a cooler-than-thou stance. This enrages the critics of postmodernism, and it is one reason why it has been so difficult for supporters and critics of Sokal to discuss their differences calmly.** **THERE ARE SERIOUS PROBLEMS WITHIN THE POSTMODERNIST SUBCULTURE. There is an intense ingroupyness, a concern with who is in and who is out, and an obscurantist vocabulary whose main function often seems to be to mark those on the inside and allow them to feel that they are part of an intellectual elite. This is not to object to the use of a technical vocabulary where it is needed to express ideas precisely. The world of postmodernism has unfortunately come to be flooded with writing in which pretentiousness reigns and intellectual precision appears to have ceased to be a consideration. There is the fetishization of the new: the rapid rise and fall of trends, the collective deference to them while they last.** For a while it seemed that every debate in this arena entailed accusations of essentialism. The exact definition of essentialism was never clear, but it nevertheless seemed that essentialism was the source of all error, and the use of the term as invective was enough to halt discussion. **There is the inflation of language and the habit of self-congratulation: it has become common practice in this arena to advertise one's own work as radical, subversive, transgressive. All this really means is that one hopes one is saying something new. There is the worship of celebrities. This is a culture that encourages and rewards self-aggrandizement and grandiosity. There is intellectual bullying, the use of humiliation, ridicule, implicit threats of ostracism, to silence dissent. All of this stands in direct contrast to the endless talk of difference that takes place in this arena.** **Efforts to raise criticisms from within this arena have not had much effect; those who have made such efforts have been treated with hostility or at best ignored. Those of us who supported Sokal's hoax felt that a public act of mockery was required to open up discussion. Now that postmodernism has lost its aura of invincibility people have begun to laugh, and it does not seem likely that the laughter will stop anytime soon.** For instance, in a review of a book entitled Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line, by Calvin Thomas (University of Illinois Press), reviewer Daniel Harris writes, **In the fast-paced intellectual environment of postmodern cultural studies, the line between ostensibly serious scholarship and outright parody is not just thin but, in many instances, nonexistent, as became embarrassingly evident last month to the editors of one of the house organs of contemporary theoretical discourse, Social Text....One can only hope that Sokal's brilliant act of intellectual terrorism...will be the first of many similar practical jokes. If even a handful of the numerous critics of cultural theory did their part, postmodern journals and academic presses would be swamped with fraudulent manuscripts that would shatter the self-confidence of the entire field. This vast industry would collapse into a state of total disarray were its tightly-knit ranks to become infiltrated by jargon-spewing moles posing as the real McCoy, double agents cloaked in the uniform of the American university's elitist new brand of paper radicals.** Harris goes on to speculate that the book under review must be another hoax. How else, he asks, can one explain the bewildering statements that appear in this book, such as: The excrementalization of alterity as the site/sight of homelessness, of utter outsideness and unsubiatable dispossession figure(s) in...Hegel's metanarrational conception of Enlightenment modernity as the teleological process of totalization leading to absolute knowing. The anal penis...function(s) within a devalued metonmymic continuity, whereas the notion of the phallomorphic turd functions within the realm of metaphorical substitution. If the bodily in masculinity is encountered in all its rectal gravity, the specular mode by which others become shit is disrupted. Harris suggests that if Thomas wants to become an academic success he should follow Sokal's example and proclaim his book to be a prank. Only slightly less tongue in cheek, he speculates that what he describes as the central metaphor of this book, the comparison of writing to "productions" of the body, especially shit, may be apt in a field in which jargon is used as an offensive weapon, to score points against competitors in the battle for tenure and prestige.15 **POSTMODERNISM DID NOT INVENT INTELLECTUAL BULLYING. This is not the first instance of dogmatism on the left. In the 30s people on the left (at least those in or close to the Communist Party) felt considerable pressure not to admit, or even consider the possibility, that the Soviets were anything less than angels. In the late 60s a kind of Maoist politics swept the left, in particular the radical core of the anti-war movement. Under the aegis of "Marxism-Leninism" a politics was put forward that revolved around the assumption that revolution was possible in the U.S. if only people on the left would follow the example set by revolutionaries in the Third World. Strategies were proposed that were utterly inappropriate to the U.S.; questioning these strategies, or for that matter suggesting that a revolution was not very likely in the U.S., was tantamount to labelling oneself a defector from the cause. Similar things took place in the radical wing of the women's movement: extreme conceptions of feminism, such as the belief that having anything to do with men amounted to fraternizing with the enemy, took hold in many circles, and questioning these ideas was likely to earn one a reputation as a friend of the patriarchy. The left in the U.S. seems prone to being seized by ideas which, when recollected a few years later, look somewhat mad. But it is worth asking why particular ideologies take over at particular moments. After all, in the case of postmodernism, it is not clear why culturalism, a social constructionism set in competition with other levels of social analysis, should be equated with radicalism.** **Terry Eagleton, in his article "Where Do Postmodernists Come From?"16 argues that left intellectuals in the U.S. have adopted postmodernism out of a sense of having been badly defeated, a belief that the left as a political tendency has little future. Culturalism, he argues, involves an extreme subjectivism, a view of the intellect as all-powerful, a mindset that might be described as taking the May '68 slogan "all power to the imagination" literally, combined with a deep pessimism, a sense that it isn't worth the effort to learn about the world, to analyze social systems, for instance, because they can't be changed anyway.** I would add two points to Eagleton's analysis. *First, postmodernism takes many of its ideas from the 60s. To some extent it represents a rigidification of ideas that were widespread in movements of that time, especially the voluntarism or hubris of a generational cohort that tended to think that it could accomplish anything. The widespread view among leftists of the 60s that revolution was waiting in the wings, and the fact that so few people openly challenged this, reflected a grandiosity, a loosening of the collective grip on reality. In the heated atmosphere of the late 60s it was possible for radicals to take fairly crazy positions without utterly losing their audience or becoming irrelevant to politics. In the 90s there is considerably less room for extreme voluntarism, or grandiosity, cast as a political position.* There was also a widespread tendency in the movements of the 60s to equate personal and cultural change with broader social change. One of the most important contributions of the movements of the 60s (especially feminism and the countercultural left) was the critique of a culture that promoted consumerism, that equated happiness with individual striving for power and wealth. But in rejecting a politics that left this element out it was easy to fall into the opposite problem of believing that creating communities in which people tried to live according to different values would inevitably move society as a whole in the same direction. This made change seem easier than it was. The prosperity of the late 60s and early 70s allowed alternative communities to flourish, and it seemed plausible that the more egalitarian relationships and humane values developed in them might serve as models. But as it turned out the egalitarian impulse that found expression in these communities was overshadowed by the shift to the right that has taken place in American society as a whole since the mid-to-late 70s. Alternative communities themselves were weakened and destroyed by social changes over which they had no control, especially the depression of the 70s and the withdrawal of support from the public sector in the 80s and 90s. In the 90s it would be very hard to make a convincing case that cultural change equals social change. The equation of the personal or the cultural with the political was a mixed blessing for the movements of the 60s. In the 90s it tends to mean retreating into one's own community and allowing politics to drift further and further to the right. ***POSTMODERNISM SUFFERS NOT ONLY FROM ITS RELIANCE ON a conception of radicalism that made more sense in the 60s than it does now, but also from the fact that it is located in academia and reflects its pressures. The logic of the market is not a new presence in the American academy, but it now seems to be sweeping all other values and considerations aside. There has been a dramatic increase in the pressures toward intellectual specialization and a frantic pace of publication.*** There is intense competition between and within fields. In the years following World War II there was a widespread belief, in government and business circles, that the U.S. economy would benefit if a broad liberal higher education were widely available. In the wake of Sputnik there was a sudden rush of support for science education; this resulted in more government support for universities without diminishing its commitment to the humanities. Through the 60s it was mostly the children of the white middle class who attended universities, public or private. Since the 60s the economy has changed, the values governing public spending have changed, and the composition of university student bodies has changed. In a society increasingly stratified between haves and have-nots, an economy in which technical expertise seems more important than familiarity with history and literature, support for liberal education is hardly reliable. In the 50s and 60s academics could believe that their profession was held in high esteem. They were well paid, and at least some found their opinions sought by the White House or by large corporations. Over the last few decades it has become harder to believe that public esteem of the academy is unqualified. The loss of prestige (and of resources) is felt most sharply in the humanities. **In the 50s the social sciences tried to show that they could be as rigorous, quantitative, and ostensibly value-free, as the natural sciences. This encouraged huge quantities of unimaginative, narrowly-conceived, jargon-ridden papers. Now it seems to be the turn of the humanities to try to raise their stock within academia, though this time the strategy is not to imitate science but to assert the supremacy of a vocabulary and theoretical perspective nurtured in the humanities over all fields of knowledge. But postmodernism only highlights its own weaknesses when it overreaches its scope. I have heard many postmodernists denounce Sokal on grounds that his hoax could lead to funds being withdrawn from Cultural Studies or the humanities generally. It seems more useful to look at postmodernism's internal problems. Sokal's hoax and the laughter it generated shows that the field had become ripe for parody.17** Contd. ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com