Non-sense, absurdity, textuality: a critique of post-modernist bullshit

"If one examines the postcultural paradigm of consensus, one is faced with a choice: either reject Lyotardist narrative or conclude that the task of the poet is deconstruction, but only if the premise of Batailleist `powerful communication’ is invalid; if that is not the case, Baudrillard’s model of Lyotardist narrative is one of “textual Marxism”, and therefore fundamentally dead. It could be said that the subject is interpolated into a subdialectic destructuralism that includes narrativity as a totality. The characteristic theme of Abian’s analysis of nationalism is the bridge between sexual identity and class."

This quote is from the essay 'Feminism, conceptualist feminism and nationalism' by Barbara I.L. Tilton, Department of Literature, Cambridge University. If you can make head or tail of this passage, you are lucky, but I am among the majority, I presume, who are baffled after reading these, jargon-packed, syntactically correct sentences that signify nothing. I must confess that during my college days as student of English Literature I was attracted to postmodernist ideas that I did not understand. At that time, modish poststructuralist, postmodernist and culture studies-driven theories were starting to destory literary studies in the English Departments of universities in India as elsewhere. Now that the destruction is over, very few English Literature teachers in colleges and universities can write with clarity about anything in good English that others can understand. Anything they write is filled with obscurantist jargons such as textuality, narrativity, linearity, inter-disciplinarity, paradigm shift, hegemony, hemeneutics, discursive, transgressive, subculture, postcolonial, postcultural, post-Marxist...

'Good English? What is that?' You can anticipate this question from a postmodernist English professor if s/he happens to read the above paragraph. 'Good and bad are social and linguistic constructs and your privileging of good over bad reveals an ideology of domination', s/he may retort. For the postmodernist, good or bad and other such binary opposition concepts are part of the Western Englightnment thought that needs to be dismantled or, to use a term that will endear me to the postmodernist sect, deconstructed. Translated in English that many of us can understand, what they mean (no offence meant) is that the meaninglessness of 'postmodern metatwaddle' (courtesy Richard Dawkins) is the result of your privileging of meaning over absence of meaning. Good and bad or meaning and meaninglessness, for example, are just descriptions of representation and any representation is mediated by language, culture and ideology, they will add.

Gone are the days when English professors would laboriously teach us tools and methods of appreciating literature which enabled literature students to cultivate an interest in books and reading as also in creative writing in English language. They would also introduce the students to a world of other literary traditions including Greek drama, European literature and Americal literature, among others. The character of English Departments in this part of the world has changed significantly. The Department of English Literature at the local university in my region, for example, has been renamed Department of Studies in English. That changeover allowed the professors influenced by postmodernist and Marxist critical theories to look at literature as a (battle) field where one can observe one dominant meaning trying to dominate multiple other meanings, one dominant ideology trying to dominate multiple other ideologies, and so on and so forth. Literary works, for the postmodernists, are textual discourses no different from laundry lists. (Please don't accuse me of misrepresenting the postmodernists. For them, every representation is a misrepresentation - since there is no representation unmediated by language - and an attempt to enforce the dominant ideology's hegemony in a perpetual power play among competing ideologies).

During my college days, I was also passionate about the fashionable French philosophers and writers such as Michel Foucault, Jaques Lacan, Jaques Derrida and other postmodern, poststructuralist writers and philosophers. Their ideas, as they are taught by our postmodernist professors, have an attraction because they are nihilistic. There is no absolute truth for the postmodernists, no universal values either. The idea that there are universal norms, they say, is a product of the Enlightenment which they seek to demolish. Can't we call Osama bin Laden a postmodernist because he also has a nihilistic world view and he is also a proponent of the theory deconstruction which he converted into a philosophy of praxis on September 11, 2001?

The bubble of postmodernist nonsense, however, burst with l'affaire Alan sokal. In 1996, Prof. Sokal, a physicist at the New York University, submitted a paper with a postmodernist title 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern culture studies. The paper was crafted as a spoof of fashionable postmodern writings. It was a hoax article written in trendy postmodernist style full of scientific blunders that even a student of physics could have found out. The editors of the journal, though, were so engrossed by the right-sounding postmodernist and leftish jargons in the paper that they could not see it was a hoax. In a detailed article that was published in Lingua Franca, Prof. Sokal exposed the hoax saying that the paper was "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense". Not surprisingly, the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for literature was rightfully bestowed on the Social Text editors, Andrew Ross and others.

In 1998, Prof. Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Physics profesor at the University of Louvain in Belgium, pubished their book Intellectual Imposture, which blows up the intellectual credentials of postmodernist thinkers including Lacan, feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray and sociologist and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard. The book as well as the hoax was a wake up call that literature and other humanities departments of the universities and colleges cannot afford to ignore.

The passage that I quoted at the beginning of this piece is taken from a meaningless essay randomly generated by a computer programme, Postmodernism Generator, developed by Andrew C. Bulhak of Melbourne. The author of the essay, Barbara I.L. Tilton, is fictitious. Whenever you visit the programme at http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/, it generates an essay in postmodernist style. If you want to bamboozle editors of another postmodern journal, you can submit one of the 4414335 (last count) essays generated by the computer programme since its installation on February 25, 2000. Good luck.

(I found the cartoon posted above when I google-searched for an image to go with this piece. I don't know where it was originally published.)

The Myth of Ancient Wisdom

"Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence then this worship of the past?" Ralph Waldo Emerson

Human tendency to adore ancient wisdom as sacrosanct often comes up as innocuous attempts to idealise the past as pristine and wholesome when compared to contemporary life. One often hears people authoritatively declaring that science is skin-deep while wisdom bequeathed to us by our ancient traditions is far richer than what science and technology and modernity have bestowed us. The best way to overcome the problems wrought us by scientific advances, says the apologist of ancient wisdom, is to reconnect ourseves with our traditions and traditional knowledge which science has sidelined in its march to enforce its hegemony of rationality.

The portrayal of science as just one way of understanding the reality and its corollary argument that there are multiple ways of understanding it often gain credence in social circles. Such a depiction of science is based on the argument that the ancient wisdom that represents different modes of understanding is no less important than the rational way of understanding that makes science what it is. It is well said, except that it is not true. Let us see why.

The fetishism of ancient wisdom runs deep even in the minds of people who are otherwise so passionate about their dependence on gadgets that science and technology has produced. In everyday life we can't even imagine what life would have been, had there been no science and technology. But many of us have no problem rubbishing science and technology for all the wrong reasons. Their criticism of science stems from a wrong idea that science is supposed or claims to know everything.

If you criticise science for not knowing everything, you are barking up the wrong tree, because science has never claimed that it knows everything. It is true to say that science does not know everything, but it is equally true that science has made us know many things which we did not know in the past. Calling science skin-deep is just a rhetorical exercise because science is not known to have ever claimed that it can or does know everything. Knowing everything is not the business of science. Science is not a religious dogma that claims to know everything.

The love of ancient wisdom and suspicion of science stem from the general human inclination to show fascination towards the unknown. Science is always sought to be confronted by the question of the unknown just to make it seem helpless and powerless while trying to unravel the unknown even as science has unravelled many unknown phenomena and continues to do so. Since scientists are generally not polemicists, the vociferous pseudo-scientific arguments built on the idea of the unknown always seem to receive high prominence.

Is ancient wisdom worth our paying serious attention to? Let us face the facts. Very little was known in ancient times about our universe or human anatomy or anything that was very useful for the mankind. It was scientists who unravelled the unknown and unknowable mysteries that defined people's understanding of life and universe in the ancient times. If ancient wisdom is to be taken as a sacred truth, we will still be living on a flat earth, burning witches for our real and imagined problems, practising blood-letting to cure our diseases and happy with an average life expectancy of 40.

Fifty million people died of the Spanish flu at the end of the World War II. Smallpox is believed to have killed half a billion during the 20 th century alone. In the 20th century, tuberculosis killed an estimated 100 million people. If we were still practising ancient healing methods that are part of what we call ancient wisdom, millions of people would still be dying of diseases caused by deadly viruses and bacteria. Discovery of penicillin, and not the folklore ancient wisdom, saved from death or amputations tens of thousands of soldiers with infected wounds during the World War II.

Giving too much importance to tradition and culture that are integral to the idea of ancient wisdom is a futile exercise. We have to look at the present problems as challenges that can be solved by applying our knowledge based on rational inquiry and empirical experiments, and not by what we have been bestowed by our forefathers. Don't think that ancient wisdom is a key to understanding all or any of our contemporary problems. The only key to unlock the mysteries and the unknown is the rational inquiry and experiments which have made our life easier, happier and more livable than what life was in a hunter-gatherer society.