COMM 386: Oh, let's get this postmodernism stuff out of the way now ...

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of ... revolutionary avant-gardism. -- Terry Eagleton, "Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism" (1985).

I like the postmodernism quote by Terry Eagleton that I posted to this blog a couple of days ago. You see, Eagleton is considered a postmodernist. And he's an avant-garde literary critic. (You probably already know this but "avant-garde" is French for an advance guard, i.e. pickets or soldiers who went out ahead of the main body of troops. Now it means something more like "artsy-fartsy" or "trendy.") So he's being self-referential when he talks that way, and he's acknowledging that maybe, just maybe this stuff he writes about is no more than a sick joke.

One way of looking at postmodernism is to understand it's an offshoot of a French philosophy called post-structuralism, and it got to be popular at a time when thinkers in the West were deeply pessimistic about society. (And still are.) Is it possible to know the truth when so many institutions we used to look up to (including government, the academy, the publishing industry and, yes, the media) have shown themselves to be deeply flawed? Just asking a question like that implies an answer.

But there's also been a lot of pretentious nonsense written in the name of postmodernism.

A conservative international relations expert named Philip Gold wrote a good story about postmodernist journalism that explains the phenomenon pretty well for those who aren't already familiar with it. And for those who've heard quite enough about postmodernism already, thank you, Gold has a delightfully irreverent attitude about it.

"In essence," says Gold, "postmodernism is a shtick -- a fine old Yiddish word with several meanings. When it first entered English, shtick meant an entertainer's routine. ... More broadly, it can describe any human activity that, although possessing some nuggets of truth and authenticity, also partakes Of the antic, the phony and the scam."

"The postmodernist shtick," he adds, "has four elements." They are:

• First, it denies the existence of objective reality, as opposed to saying that reality's out there but we never can get fully at it. To the postmodernist, everything in the universe, from comic books to galaxies, is "text" to be "interpreted" by the "self-referent," that is, people whose only frame of reference ... is themselves."
  
• Second, postmodernism denies the existence of firm boundaries. Everything flows into, affects and becomes everything else. ("The personal is political"; "The planetary is personal"; "Insanity is just another lifestyle"; etc.)
  
• Third, postmodernism denies the validity of standards -- of truth, morality, excellence, competence. All are arbitrary at best and tyrannical at worst.
  
• Finally, postmodernism views all human relationships as power struggles. Words are weapons, not carriers of truth or meaning.

There's no such thing as truth, in other words, and everybody gets to decide for himself. So everything's up for grabs, including the canons of jouralism.

"Now, let's talk shtick in the newsroom," Gold continues. "Three sets of forces drive the media, especially the so-called prestige media, into de facto acceptance of much of postmodernism."

Have I told you about numbered lists? They do tend to come up on finals. But the postmodernists would say they're bogus. Right? So what if the postmodernists are right?

Gold doesn't think they're right.

"In the end, our civilization will junk postmodernism," he concludes. "Neither truth, boundaries nor standards can be denied forever, and life is more than power games. ... So, in the short term, perhaps the interesting question is not 'How will journalism escape from postmodernism?' but, 'How will it cover the demise?'"

So why bother with this stuff? One: You hear a lot about it. And. Two: There's a grain of truth, I think, underlying it in spite of all the airy-fairy literary theory and French poststructuralist philosophizing.

A couple of examples that aren't too terribly pretentious:

Nikkie posted a link to the website for a book by Andrew Boyd. It's called "Life's Little Deconstruction Book: Self-Help for the Post-Hip" (deconstruction is one of the techniques used by some especially pretentious, artsy postmodernist literary critics, which I think is all you need to know about it). It's cute, and you'll learn something about postmodernism from it.

Here's something else, and I honestly don't know if it's a hoax or not. The Onion, the satirical newspaper, has an election blog that purports to be by postmodern novelist Don De Lillio. A sample:

Marketing men in sharp, crisp ties gaze impotently from their offices at spectacular Midtown Views. There is nothing at this point left for them to do. The Day has come. This is the Day itself.

Feet set, purposeful and resolute, on the lime-green tiles. In the toneless acoustics of the school gymnasiums and school cafeterias and dual-use school gymnasium/cafeterias the low steady roar of raw electoral mass forms a background of white noise. Mathematics steadily accumulate around them.

Gibberish? De Lillio? A sendup on De Lillio? A hoax? No one seems to know. Postmodernist? Or something else? Well, it sure doesn't make any sense.

Now let's move onto the next question. A lot of the election coverage didn't seem to make any particular sense, either. Take some of the coverage of our favorite moose-hunting Wasilla hillbilly in her $150,000 outfits from Nieman-Marcus, for example. Postmodernist, or something else? You betcha, as your average moose-hunter might say. But what is it?