Smart and highly relevant. This makes perfect sense historically -- comparative literature departments were the gateway through which postmodernism entered the universities starting in the late 1960s. Edward Said, noted for post-colonialism, taught at Columbia from 1963. Gayatri Spivak: Joined the English and Comparative Literature department there in the late 1970s. She was Jacque Derrida's translator and a major force in PoMo herself. In Yascha Mounk's latest book, The Identity Trap, he credits Spivak with saying:
“My search is not a search for coherence,” Spivak replied. In theoretical terms, she admitted, “it’s absolutely on target to take a stand against the discourses of essentialism. . . . But strategically we cannot.”
That rationalization of essentialism, he believes, was necessary to rationalize Kimberle Crenshaw's introduction of "intersectionality" in 1989, which is the basis of today's Identity Politics.
My point is that what we see today flows from the '60s. It's actually a merger of Black Power, Critical Theory and Postmodernism. It's been gaining strength the whole time. Its ideology is now systemic wokeism, and it's not going away without a hell of a fight. Now is the time for the Persuasion Community learn to fight back.
Thanks. I was just trying to keep the comment short. Yes, Marcuse was important. I believe it was his book I had in hand (but never read) when I was arrested for protesting the Vietnam War. "Critical Theory" is my shorthand way of summing up Marcuse, the direct link to Critical Theory that the Frankfurt School left behind, Angela Davis, his student at Brandeis and UCSD, and Judith Butler the godmother of Queer Theory.
He induced Davis to go to Frankfurt where she studied under Adorno (#2 Crit Theorist) before returning and buying the guns for the Marin Courthouse kidnapping. Her shotgun blew the judge's brains out---so she became a political prisoner and hero. I have a screen shot of Judith Butler's Critical Theory Program's home page with the two of them taking up half the page.
But I think the Rufo's trope of "the long march through the institutions" is not accurate. What he and Dutschka discussed was a bit different. The actual long march that took over our institutions was started by the Black Panthers and continued by the Black Power movement.
So there you have it. The story of Marcuse, the "New Left's Guru."
I agree. I feel like these terrible ideas were at first repeatedly batted down but they just kept coming back with different names. With each cycle the ideas kept getting dumber but the people pushing them kept improving their tactics. First deconstructionism, then relativism, then social constructivism and so on. In the 90's they made a tactical blunder by launching a full frontal assault on the physical sciences. In the name of relativism they trotted out the usual accusations like "so called 'hard' science is just a patriarchal oligarchic phalo-hegemonic colonialist construct that has no more claim on objectivity than any other modality such as dirka dirk dirk dirk" They were repelled, humorously and with wit and satire...culminating in Sokol's hysterical ruse. Sooooo they pouted off into their pseudo intellectual pillow forts and devised a flank assault-- through the soft underbelly of social sciences. Sadly, they succeeded. I wonder to this day what opportunity cost we have suffered as a result of all these fads. Imagine if the same number of professors had spent the same amount of tax money, time and energy sorting out the types of questions that that have been taken up as extracurricular side activities by people like Weinstein, Harris, Peterson, Dawkins etc.. Only a tiny number of philosophers worked on legitimate questions of symbols, metaphors and meaning, how should we best describe the major swaths of science that presently lie far outside our comprehension, and so on. It seems to me that the few philosophers doing the real yeoman's work were mostly ignored because meaning is actually pretty complicated and difficult, and also they were drowned out by the hubbub created by all that faddish stuff. (Hello class today we are going to begin a radical deconstructionist feminist reading of [fill in the blank..pulp romance novels?]) So sad. I just watched Dawkins and Peterson trading punches over stuff that probably should have been sorted out by moral philosophy and philosophy of science--it was frustrating to watch and it all seems so unnecessary. But I greatly respect them both for taking time out of all their other work to fill in the giant hole left by by poorly run humanities departments. Each time I see conversation like that I wish Walter Kaufmann would come back from the dead to moderate, or maybe just knock their heads together--metaphorically speaking of course (i want to be perfectly clear that i am NOT, and NEVER have been an advocate of forced head-knocking between esteemed members of our public intellectual industrial complex--if i want to bash my own head against a wall that's my business and mine alone) But seriously...ahem... I feel like there should be hundreds of scholars with intellectual roots to guys like Kaufmann but they just seem to have been pushed aside by all these pretentious goons that are presently destabilizing our entire collective consciousness.
I have to wonder the extent to which this is driven by being in a hyper-competitive ivy like Columbia. I graduated with a degree in English Lit 25 years ago, but from a middle-brow liberal arts school that churned out pre-meds and theatre folk for its competitive side. English Lit was mostly the purview of future gradeschool teachers with a smattering of editor's assistants and PhDs, and while the profs were certainly aware of Marxist readings, they mostly focused on much more what I would consider literary concerns: can you make an effective argument for the interpretation you have based in the text itself?
We did our senior seminar on Ulysses, and our prof had a distinct point of view on the novel as world literature, but several of us who'd been steeped in several Irish lit electives couldn't read Ulysses without seeing a deeply Irish novel. That wasn't the interpretation he was interested in, but still graded us all fairly and never held it against us. What this essay describes is a bizarre semi-totalitarian order.
I remember writing an analysis of The Lord of the Flies freshman year. My instructor said that I was basically a complete idiot, that I did not understand the book at all, but still gave me an "A" because I constructed a plausible (and alternate) perspective, and then complimented my writing in front of the entire class.
You're absolutely right--"a bizarre semi-totalitarian order." And it has most successfully infected our most elite institutions, from the NY Times newsroom, to ivy-league schools, to the transgender cult controlling the cultural part of the American Association of Pediatrics.
And the danger, as BLM founder Alicia Garza explains (without seeing the danger), is that "When culture change happens, it is because movements have infiltrated the cultural arena." As she tells us she is explain Gramsci, her go-to political philosopher, co-founder of the Italian Communist Party (~1920) and the second root of Critical Theory, for which Critical Race Theory was named.
Jeee-ee-zus, Liza Libes, you are brilliant. As husband of a career English teacher who taught me more about poetry, literature, Shakespeare, and humankind than I learned studying, then teaching, history for four decades. She did the same for our three English major kids, each of whom was published before they could vote.
Excellent essay. I tried, and largely succeeded, in evading the one sided, theory-driven bent of literary scholarship although I did earn a Ph.D. from Duke. I did so by focusing rigorously on the history of ideas and sneaking in aesthetic appreciation regularly into my scholarship. And I didn't care about joining an academic clique. Instead, I founded the kinds of organizations I would rather be associated with, like the International Rebecca West Society. But, yes, the hermeneutics of suspicion has poisoned literary studies for over a generation now. We are reaping the results of this prosecutorial critical attitude now--young readers dissecting beautiful literary texts looking for social justice themes, unable to tell a literary masterpiece from hack work.
I am saddened by this fine essay. I too find myself trying to defend the humanities from business and tech types who see no value in it. I suppose that schools such as Columbia have enough reputation and enough money to be unaffected by the decline in the study of what truly makes us human. I can no longer defend it either.
Literary “theory”? I think not. Were it theory, the academy would welcome a process of ongoing testing akin to the scientific method. Elements of a theory or the entire framework would be challenged by new ideas. A successful challenge would refine the theory or perhaps even topple it. What’s described here is better termed literary dogma.
That word doesn't mean in English Lit what it means in science. Lit theory is not the amalgamation of a long series of successful hypotheses that fairly well explain a phenomenon. Lit theory is a framework for analysis, typically highly ideological. They are simply two different concepts that use the same word.
You're 100% right. Lit theory, is a close kin of critical race theory, which Kimberle Crenshaw explicitly said was named after Critical Theory. The foundational paper for that was called Traditional and Critical Theory, and Horkheimer defined Traditional theory to include both the hard sciences and the social sciences. His point was that for analyzing society we needed Critical Theory and NOT traditional theory because objectivity was not possible for social analysis. All that was needed was to be critical of the existing system in all respects. The source of this?
"It is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: a ruthless critique of everything established." —Karl Marx, 1943. Translation by Judith Butler, Director, Critical Theory Program, UC Berkeley.
And of course Butler is hard-core postmodernist, and the godmother of Queer theory. This stuff is all one big movement.
I'm a pretty hard-core postmodernist myself, but I'm generally embarrassed of how people apply postmodern ideas. Instability of meaning? Skepticism of meta-narratives and their tendency to self-reinforce? Yep, I think those are fairly obviously correct ideas. Use those to destabilize pragmatic meaning in ways that grant oneself power? Ugly and wrongheaded. I feel like critical theorists learned every possible wrong lesson from the ideas of postmodernism, using it to create their own new metanarrative by destabilizing the old ones, rather than engaging in a healthy skepticism of any existing or new metanarratives, seeing how they operate and evaluating their usefulness. I also generally think that critical theory isn't postmodernism at all; simply another metanarrative. Though perhaps I'm kidding myself, and postmodernism is little more than another metanarrative.
Hi Andrew, nice to meet an actual postmodernist. But I'm skeptical that you qualify. You're way too sensible. "Those are fairly obviously correct ideas." I think you've heard their gibberish and attached your own good ideas to some of their words. And yes, I've found that anything sensible that they might mean, is obvious.
Take Lyotard's book introducing meta-narratives. In an interview for the Italian magazine, Lotta Poetica, Lyotard explained: "I referred to a number of books I'd never read. Apparently, it impressed people. It's all a bit of a parody ... I wanted to say first that it's simply the worst of my books, they're almost all bad, but that one's the worst ... it belongs to the satirical genre.”
Lyotard’s target was the Enlightenment—and its crown jewel, science. Science, he said, couldn’t legitimatize itself. “What we have here is a process of delegitimation fueled by the demand for legitimation itself ... There is no other proof that the rules are good than the consensus of the experts."
Of course, science "legitimates" itself with experiments, which are never mentioned because Lyotard had no understanding of science. Your cell phone is what proves science. But I know you know that--you're way too smart to be a real postmodernist. But I think you've missed one important fact. You say, "I feel like critical theorists learned every possible wrong lesson from the ideas of postmodernism." But Critical Theory was formulated in 1937, and Lyotard didn't discuss meta-narratives till 42 years later. Pomos, I think, learned to reject objectivity from crit theorists, not the other way around. Pomo Jacques Derrida won the Adorno prize and said he owed him a great debt. (Adorno is the #2 crit theorist)
To understand the depth of Pomo ignorance, read "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." Published as the capstone of their 15 article "Science Wars" issue, the only article by an actual scientist, in Social Text (1996), a leading PoMo journal. The article is actually a hilarious mad-magazine-of-physics satire on PoMo science criticism. I recognized this by reading it's title. The editors of the journal were unable to notice after reading the whole article. They are simply frauds.
I appreciate having someone very politely nudge me in the right direction when I embarrass myself. (And Jesus, "Transgressing the Boundaries" is hilarious.)
So do I. So feel free to reciprocate when I go off track. I'm sure we'll meet again. "Transgressing" was my first hint of Pomo, back in the 1990s, and I was shocked when I found that it was not simply humor. When I read about its purpose, I naively thought, "Well that's the end of that journal and this little pseudo-science movement." Little did I know.
(Well, I guess my comment won't make much sense now since the original it was responding to was edited. It was in response to a query if this was now dogma.)
Cripes, is this the direction lit crit has taken? When I was an undergraduate it was all the New Criticism. We read the Metaphysical Poets and worked out the puzzles. I liked that. Maybe what happened was that the 'Continental' so-called 'Philosophers' were, deservedly, driven out of philosophy departments and landed in lit crit.
What an incredibly great article. Thanks for writing this!! When I was studying engineering(in the early 80's) at Cornell I happened to be living in a house that was a cut up of the single family house that Nabokov lived in when he was a professor at Cornell. One of my apartment mates had a dad who was a comparative literature professor at an Ivy league institution...which at the time was one of the most rigorous and difficult disciplines in all of the humanities. I got wind that this professor had done a deep dive into the whole then new business of 'deconstructionist reading THE TEXT' and like a good soldier he gave it a good old college try. My possibly flawed recollection is that he seriously and in good faith engaged with and embraced that mode of analysis and at the end of his project found it terribly wanting. But before he dismissed it he seriously, diligently and in good faith embraced it with everything he had in him to determine if there was any there there. I got my hands on his personal copy of Lolita which was replete with his hand written notes relating to his deconstructionist reading of that text. For me it was a mind blowing trip to sit in Nabokov's old house and at the same time read the worlds best ever attempt, by a historical world class intellect, to determine if there is any actual value to deconstructionist "readings of th[at] text". It's really hard to convey how bizarre the result was so i will just give an example. One one page of the book the letters "au" were circled and there was a side note that said "see page xx" and then on page xx there was another set of circled words that completed a phrase in French that I absolutely cannot remember but I do remember that it had something to do with French proclivity to sexualize ...basically everything. Anyway the whole thing amounted to an epic attempt by this world class scholar to determine if there was any validity whatsoever to this mode of analysis, and instead of dismissing the whole thing as being...you know...completely ridiculous on the face of it.. .he actually seriously spent YEARS of his life, at the prime of his career, attempting it....and then...and only then...dismissed it as being...you know...what it really is. That's my funny story. Again...absolutely terrific article and thank you for writing it!!
What a great piece. We've all read about the ideological infiltration into the university, but I've never seen it better portrayed than this. The only problem? It's too short. I hope the writer has taken plenty of notes to turn this into a book.
The serious worry about this garbage in academia--from 'critical theory' to DEI 'trainings'--is that a new respectable Right is exploiting academics' irritation to recruit them--with some success.
I'm thinking of Heterodox Academy, FIRE, the University of Austin and such. I attended a Heterodox Academy conference a couple of years ago when I had travel money that had to be used because my session at a legitimate academic conference went online. Heterodox Academy looked good in principle but when I got to the conference it was pretty clear what the agenda was. I'm still on their mailing list so I follow their slickly packaged propaganda.
And just for curiousity when I was visiting a friend in Austin I went to an open house for prospective students at the University of Austin, which occupies the third floor of a downtown office building, above a taco shop. The good news for students is that they get a 4-year free ride. The bad news is that the University of Austin is not accredited. The very good news is that students are nevertheless promised jobs after graduation at firms with which the university 'networks'.
Hope you don’t fall into the trap laid by the right-wing overreaction, such as the opposing ideology that animates such organizations as the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College. Bad as the politically-correct abuses of the left.
It's important not to confuse the program and political commitments with the terminology and rhetoric. There's a misperception by lit crit people and kin that analytic philosophers are conservative because of a disdain for critical theory talk--and commitment to clarity, which some imagine is ipso facto white-western-male-patriarchical-capitalist-linear-blah-blah-blah. Remember during the rise of the Nazi regime members of the Vienna Circle fled because all were either of Jewish extraction or left wing or both while Heidegger signed on the the Nazis and got a cushy job.
Thank you for writing this. I was thinking of pursuing an english degree, but was disheartened by the same issues, and then discovered linguistics. the perfect blend of language and math. i have a feeling you might have liked (or do like) that field. I pursued a PhD in that, and taught linguistics for over 40 years, although I'm housed in an English department, and have suffered the isolation that that brings, when your colleagues have no interest in your work, cannot evaluate it, and hate your bullet-pointed or numbers-supported reports. But I managed, and have wonderful linguistics colleagues, just not in my department. And the comment below on literary "theory" is right on. A theory is refutable with evidence, it makes predictions, which can be tested. Literary theory has none of those attributes. 'literary dogma" is much more apt.
I was at Columbia for my MA in Classics from 2011 to 2013, and I completely relate to your experience as well. While I loved most of the faculty and formed closer bonds with fellow grad students than I have with most people since, I was really crushed by how little the academic experience aligned with my expectations. Like you, my long-held dream of becoming a professor—a goal I’d spent a lifetime carefully polishing—was also shattered during that time. It’s sad, and honestly I still haven’t fully recovered. Now I feel like I’ve been relegated to being just an intellectual hobbyist.
Smart and highly relevant. This makes perfect sense historically -- comparative literature departments were the gateway through which postmodernism entered the universities starting in the late 1960s. Edward Said, noted for post-colonialism, taught at Columbia from 1963. Gayatri Spivak: Joined the English and Comparative Literature department there in the late 1970s. She was Jacque Derrida's translator and a major force in PoMo herself. In Yascha Mounk's latest book, The Identity Trap, he credits Spivak with saying:
“My search is not a search for coherence,” Spivak replied. In theoretical terms, she admitted, “it’s absolutely on target to take a stand against the discourses of essentialism. . . . But strategically we cannot.”
That rationalization of essentialism, he believes, was necessary to rationalize Kimberle Crenshaw's introduction of "intersectionality" in 1989, which is the basis of today's Identity Politics.
My point is that what we see today flows from the '60s. It's actually a merger of Black Power, Critical Theory and Postmodernism. It's been gaining strength the whole time. Its ideology is now systemic wokeism, and it's not going away without a hell of a fight. Now is the time for the Persuasion Community learn to fight back.
@Steve Stott: You forgot to mention the seminal role of Marcuse (or were you limiting your purview to Comparative Lit?). ;-)
Thanks. I was just trying to keep the comment short. Yes, Marcuse was important. I believe it was his book I had in hand (but never read) when I was arrested for protesting the Vietnam War. "Critical Theory" is my shorthand way of summing up Marcuse, the direct link to Critical Theory that the Frankfurt School left behind, Angela Davis, his student at Brandeis and UCSD, and Judith Butler the godmother of Queer Theory.
He induced Davis to go to Frankfurt where she studied under Adorno (#2 Crit Theorist) before returning and buying the guns for the Marin Courthouse kidnapping. Her shotgun blew the judge's brains out---so she became a political prisoner and hero. I have a screen shot of Judith Butler's Critical Theory Program's home page with the two of them taking up half the page.
But Davis was, in the end, more of a Communist. UC Berkeley still features them on the page explaining how to add Critical Theory as an emphasis to the PhD of your choice. https://guide.berkeley.edu/graduate/degree-programs/critical-theory/
But I think the Rufo's trope of "the long march through the institutions" is not accurate. What he and Dutschka discussed was a bit different. The actual long march that took over our institutions was started by the Black Panthers and continued by the Black Power movement.
So there you have it. The story of Marcuse, the "New Left's Guru."
Steve in Berkeley
When Gregory Bateson and Norman O. Brown were replaced at the UC Santa Cruz "History of Consciousness" program by Angela Davis, I was ready to puke!
What truly galls me about Marcuse (in particular) is his notion of "repressive tolerance."
I agree. I feel like these terrible ideas were at first repeatedly batted down but they just kept coming back with different names. With each cycle the ideas kept getting dumber but the people pushing them kept improving their tactics. First deconstructionism, then relativism, then social constructivism and so on. In the 90's they made a tactical blunder by launching a full frontal assault on the physical sciences. In the name of relativism they trotted out the usual accusations like "so called 'hard' science is just a patriarchal oligarchic phalo-hegemonic colonialist construct that has no more claim on objectivity than any other modality such as dirka dirk dirk dirk" They were repelled, humorously and with wit and satire...culminating in Sokol's hysterical ruse. Sooooo they pouted off into their pseudo intellectual pillow forts and devised a flank assault-- through the soft underbelly of social sciences. Sadly, they succeeded. I wonder to this day what opportunity cost we have suffered as a result of all these fads. Imagine if the same number of professors had spent the same amount of tax money, time and energy sorting out the types of questions that that have been taken up as extracurricular side activities by people like Weinstein, Harris, Peterson, Dawkins etc.. Only a tiny number of philosophers worked on legitimate questions of symbols, metaphors and meaning, how should we best describe the major swaths of science that presently lie far outside our comprehension, and so on. It seems to me that the few philosophers doing the real yeoman's work were mostly ignored because meaning is actually pretty complicated and difficult, and also they were drowned out by the hubbub created by all that faddish stuff. (Hello class today we are going to begin a radical deconstructionist feminist reading of [fill in the blank..pulp romance novels?]) So sad. I just watched Dawkins and Peterson trading punches over stuff that probably should have been sorted out by moral philosophy and philosophy of science--it was frustrating to watch and it all seems so unnecessary. But I greatly respect them both for taking time out of all their other work to fill in the giant hole left by by poorly run humanities departments. Each time I see conversation like that I wish Walter Kaufmann would come back from the dead to moderate, or maybe just knock their heads together--metaphorically speaking of course (i want to be perfectly clear that i am NOT, and NEVER have been an advocate of forced head-knocking between esteemed members of our public intellectual industrial complex--if i want to bash my own head against a wall that's my business and mine alone) But seriously...ahem... I feel like there should be hundreds of scholars with intellectual roots to guys like Kaufmann but they just seem to have been pushed aside by all these pretentious goons that are presently destabilizing our entire collective consciousness.
I have to wonder the extent to which this is driven by being in a hyper-competitive ivy like Columbia. I graduated with a degree in English Lit 25 years ago, but from a middle-brow liberal arts school that churned out pre-meds and theatre folk for its competitive side. English Lit was mostly the purview of future gradeschool teachers with a smattering of editor's assistants and PhDs, and while the profs were certainly aware of Marxist readings, they mostly focused on much more what I would consider literary concerns: can you make an effective argument for the interpretation you have based in the text itself?
We did our senior seminar on Ulysses, and our prof had a distinct point of view on the novel as world literature, but several of us who'd been steeped in several Irish lit electives couldn't read Ulysses without seeing a deeply Irish novel. That wasn't the interpretation he was interested in, but still graded us all fairly and never held it against us. What this essay describes is a bizarre semi-totalitarian order.
I remember writing an analysis of The Lord of the Flies freshman year. My instructor said that I was basically a complete idiot, that I did not understand the book at all, but still gave me an "A" because I constructed a plausible (and alternate) perspective, and then complimented my writing in front of the entire class.
That was in 1974.
You're absolutely right--"a bizarre semi-totalitarian order." And it has most successfully infected our most elite institutions, from the NY Times newsroom, to ivy-league schools, to the transgender cult controlling the cultural part of the American Association of Pediatrics.
And the danger, as BLM founder Alicia Garza explains (without seeing the danger), is that "When culture change happens, it is because movements have infiltrated the cultural arena." As she tells us she is explain Gramsci, her go-to political philosopher, co-founder of the Italian Communist Party (~1920) and the second root of Critical Theory, for which Critical Race Theory was named.
Jeee-ee-zus, Liza Libes, you are brilliant. As husband of a career English teacher who taught me more about poetry, literature, Shakespeare, and humankind than I learned studying, then teaching, history for four decades. She did the same for our three English major kids, each of whom was published before they could vote.
Your essay thrilled me. Thank you, thank you.
Excellent essay. I tried, and largely succeeded, in evading the one sided, theory-driven bent of literary scholarship although I did earn a Ph.D. from Duke. I did so by focusing rigorously on the history of ideas and sneaking in aesthetic appreciation regularly into my scholarship. And I didn't care about joining an academic clique. Instead, I founded the kinds of organizations I would rather be associated with, like the International Rebecca West Society. But, yes, the hermeneutics of suspicion has poisoned literary studies for over a generation now. We are reaping the results of this prosecutorial critical attitude now--young readers dissecting beautiful literary texts looking for social justice themes, unable to tell a literary masterpiece from hack work.
I am saddened by this fine essay. I too find myself trying to defend the humanities from business and tech types who see no value in it. I suppose that schools such as Columbia have enough reputation and enough money to be unaffected by the decline in the study of what truly makes us human. I can no longer defend it either.
Terrific essay. It captures the essence of the current environment in the social sciences.
Literary “theory”? I think not. Were it theory, the academy would welcome a process of ongoing testing akin to the scientific method. Elements of a theory or the entire framework would be challenged by new ideas. A successful challenge would refine the theory or perhaps even topple it. What’s described here is better termed literary dogma.
That word doesn't mean in English Lit what it means in science. Lit theory is not the amalgamation of a long series of successful hypotheses that fairly well explain a phenomenon. Lit theory is a framework for analysis, typically highly ideological. They are simply two different concepts that use the same word.
You're 100% right. Lit theory, is a close kin of critical race theory, which Kimberle Crenshaw explicitly said was named after Critical Theory. The foundational paper for that was called Traditional and Critical Theory, and Horkheimer defined Traditional theory to include both the hard sciences and the social sciences. His point was that for analyzing society we needed Critical Theory and NOT traditional theory because objectivity was not possible for social analysis. All that was needed was to be critical of the existing system in all respects. The source of this?
"It is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: a ruthless critique of everything established." —Karl Marx, 1943. Translation by Judith Butler, Director, Critical Theory Program, UC Berkeley.
And of course Butler is hard-core postmodernist, and the godmother of Queer theory. This stuff is all one big movement.
I'm a pretty hard-core postmodernist myself, but I'm generally embarrassed of how people apply postmodern ideas. Instability of meaning? Skepticism of meta-narratives and their tendency to self-reinforce? Yep, I think those are fairly obviously correct ideas. Use those to destabilize pragmatic meaning in ways that grant oneself power? Ugly and wrongheaded. I feel like critical theorists learned every possible wrong lesson from the ideas of postmodernism, using it to create their own new metanarrative by destabilizing the old ones, rather than engaging in a healthy skepticism of any existing or new metanarratives, seeing how they operate and evaluating their usefulness. I also generally think that critical theory isn't postmodernism at all; simply another metanarrative. Though perhaps I'm kidding myself, and postmodernism is little more than another metanarrative.
Hi Andrew, nice to meet an actual postmodernist. But I'm skeptical that you qualify. You're way too sensible. "Those are fairly obviously correct ideas." I think you've heard their gibberish and attached your own good ideas to some of their words. And yes, I've found that anything sensible that they might mean, is obvious.
Take Lyotard's book introducing meta-narratives. In an interview for the Italian magazine, Lotta Poetica, Lyotard explained: "I referred to a number of books I'd never read. Apparently, it impressed people. It's all a bit of a parody ... I wanted to say first that it's simply the worst of my books, they're almost all bad, but that one's the worst ... it belongs to the satirical genre.”
Lyotard’s target was the Enlightenment—and its crown jewel, science. Science, he said, couldn’t legitimatize itself. “What we have here is a process of delegitimation fueled by the demand for legitimation itself ... There is no other proof that the rules are good than the consensus of the experts."
Of course, science "legitimates" itself with experiments, which are never mentioned because Lyotard had no understanding of science. Your cell phone is what proves science. But I know you know that--you're way too smart to be a real postmodernist. But I think you've missed one important fact. You say, "I feel like critical theorists learned every possible wrong lesson from the ideas of postmodernism." But Critical Theory was formulated in 1937, and Lyotard didn't discuss meta-narratives till 42 years later. Pomos, I think, learned to reject objectivity from crit theorists, not the other way around. Pomo Jacques Derrida won the Adorno prize and said he owed him a great debt. (Adorno is the #2 crit theorist)
To understand the depth of Pomo ignorance, read "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." Published as the capstone of their 15 article "Science Wars" issue, the only article by an actual scientist, in Social Text (1996), a leading PoMo journal. The article is actually a hilarious mad-magazine-of-physics satire on PoMo science criticism. I recognized this by reading it's title. The editors of the journal were unable to notice after reading the whole article. They are simply frauds.
I appreciate having someone very politely nudge me in the right direction when I embarrass myself. (And Jesus, "Transgressing the Boundaries" is hilarious.)
So do I. So feel free to reciprocate when I go off track. I'm sure we'll meet again. "Transgressing" was my first hint of Pomo, back in the 1990s, and I was shocked when I found that it was not simply humor. When I read about its purpose, I naively thought, "Well that's the end of that journal and this little pseudo-science movement." Little did I know.
Thank you both for an excellent summary of this form of theory, its intellectual history and its flaws. Great to have it in one place.
Postmodernism? No. Critical theory? Arguably yes.
(Well, I guess my comment won't make much sense now since the original it was responding to was edited. It was in response to a query if this was now dogma.)
Cripes, is this the direction lit crit has taken? When I was an undergraduate it was all the New Criticism. We read the Metaphysical Poets and worked out the puzzles. I liked that. Maybe what happened was that the 'Continental' so-called 'Philosophers' were, deservedly, driven out of philosophy departments and landed in lit crit.
A pox on all philosophers!
What an incredibly great article. Thanks for writing this!! When I was studying engineering(in the early 80's) at Cornell I happened to be living in a house that was a cut up of the single family house that Nabokov lived in when he was a professor at Cornell. One of my apartment mates had a dad who was a comparative literature professor at an Ivy league institution...which at the time was one of the most rigorous and difficult disciplines in all of the humanities. I got wind that this professor had done a deep dive into the whole then new business of 'deconstructionist reading THE TEXT' and like a good soldier he gave it a good old college try. My possibly flawed recollection is that he seriously and in good faith engaged with and embraced that mode of analysis and at the end of his project found it terribly wanting. But before he dismissed it he seriously, diligently and in good faith embraced it with everything he had in him to determine if there was any there there. I got my hands on his personal copy of Lolita which was replete with his hand written notes relating to his deconstructionist reading of that text. For me it was a mind blowing trip to sit in Nabokov's old house and at the same time read the worlds best ever attempt, by a historical world class intellect, to determine if there is any actual value to deconstructionist "readings of th[at] text". It's really hard to convey how bizarre the result was so i will just give an example. One one page of the book the letters "au" were circled and there was a side note that said "see page xx" and then on page xx there was another set of circled words that completed a phrase in French that I absolutely cannot remember but I do remember that it had something to do with French proclivity to sexualize ...basically everything. Anyway the whole thing amounted to an epic attempt by this world class scholar to determine if there was any validity whatsoever to this mode of analysis, and instead of dismissing the whole thing as being...you know...completely ridiculous on the face of it.. .he actually seriously spent YEARS of his life, at the prime of his career, attempting it....and then...and only then...dismissed it as being...you know...what it really is. That's my funny story. Again...absolutely terrific article and thank you for writing it!!
What a great piece. We've all read about the ideological infiltration into the university, but I've never seen it better portrayed than this. The only problem? It's too short. I hope the writer has taken plenty of notes to turn this into a book.
Fantastic, well put. Thank you.
The serious worry about this garbage in academia--from 'critical theory' to DEI 'trainings'--is that a new respectable Right is exploiting academics' irritation to recruit them--with some success.
I'm thinking of Heterodox Academy, FIRE, the University of Austin and such. I attended a Heterodox Academy conference a couple of years ago when I had travel money that had to be used because my session at a legitimate academic conference went online. Heterodox Academy looked good in principle but when I got to the conference it was pretty clear what the agenda was. I'm still on their mailing list so I follow their slickly packaged propaganda.
And just for curiousity when I was visiting a friend in Austin I went to an open house for prospective students at the University of Austin, which occupies the third floor of a downtown office building, above a taco shop. The good news for students is that they get a 4-year free ride. The bad news is that the University of Austin is not accredited. The very good news is that students are nevertheless promised jobs after graduation at firms with which the university 'networks'.
Thank You!!
Hope you don’t fall into the trap laid by the right-wing overreaction, such as the opposing ideology that animates such organizations as the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College. Bad as the politically-correct abuses of the left.
It's important not to confuse the program and political commitments with the terminology and rhetoric. There's a misperception by lit crit people and kin that analytic philosophers are conservative because of a disdain for critical theory talk--and commitment to clarity, which some imagine is ipso facto white-western-male-patriarchical-capitalist-linear-blah-blah-blah. Remember during the rise of the Nazi regime members of the Vienna Circle fled because all were either of Jewish extraction or left wing or both while Heidegger signed on the the Nazis and got a cushy job.
Thank you for writing this. I was thinking of pursuing an english degree, but was disheartened by the same issues, and then discovered linguistics. the perfect blend of language and math. i have a feeling you might have liked (or do like) that field. I pursued a PhD in that, and taught linguistics for over 40 years, although I'm housed in an English department, and have suffered the isolation that that brings, when your colleagues have no interest in your work, cannot evaluate it, and hate your bullet-pointed or numbers-supported reports. But I managed, and have wonderful linguistics colleagues, just not in my department. And the comment below on literary "theory" is right on. A theory is refutable with evidence, it makes predictions, which can be tested. Literary theory has none of those attributes. 'literary dogma" is much more apt.
I was at Columbia for my MA in Classics from 2011 to 2013, and I completely relate to your experience as well. While I loved most of the faculty and formed closer bonds with fellow grad students than I have with most people since, I was really crushed by how little the academic experience aligned with my expectations. Like you, my long-held dream of becoming a professor—a goal I’d spent a lifetime carefully polishing—was also shattered during that time. It’s sad, and honestly I still haven’t fully recovered. Now I feel like I’ve been relegated to being just an intellectual hobbyist.