In my July 10 blog, I noted the correlation that is being made in some circles between the ethically problematic relativism that has come to exemplify American left-wing politics, and the English department, which has become synonymous with the worst excesses of American left-wing politics. Today I'll begin a series of blogs dedicated to unravelling that association.

As the media fulminates against postmodernism and against Stanley Fish, identifying the one with all that is wrong with American values and the other with all that is wrong with the values of academics, I want to begin with two points of clarification.

The first is that it's not postmodernism that is the problem. The problem is what happens when postmodernism becomes the basis of an ethical system, specifically when it becomes a politics. Andy Warhol's soup cans never hurt anybody. But, as countless critics have pointed out recently, radically equivocal thinking that refuses to make crucial distinctions between, say, terrorism and national defense, or that equates, say, an Israeli scholar with the Nazi psychopath Joseph Mengele, does a lot of harm indeed. It is also the sign of harm already done: people who think this way--who look at the world this way--are walking testaments to the moral erosion that results from organizing one's value system around an ethical vacuum. Postmodernism was never meant to be a politics, and, almost by definition, it cannot be. There is nothing new or particularly threatening about the postmodern critique of "truth" and other categories that pretend to a spuriously transcendant stability (nor is there anything particularly postmodern about such a critique). What is new and threatening, however, is the way postmodernism operates in today's activist academy. When postmodernism stops being a philosophical stance or an aesthetic approach, when it becomes instead the basis for a self-consciously politicized world view, then there's trouble.

I'll develop this point shortly, but first I want to lay out my second point of clarification, which is that Stanley Fish is not the problem, either. Largely because of his own public posturing on the subject of postmodernism, Fish has emerged as the emblem of all that's wrong with the academy in general, and with English in particular (hence Jonah Goldberg's image of the literature professoriate as Fish's terroristic henchmen, busily manufacturing the postmodern poison that infects the left, the media, and a goodly number of well-meaning everyday Americans). But this is misleading. Fish is hardly your representative literature professor. He's fabulously successful, even powerful, for one. But even more fundamentally, he's an outright cynic and a proud chameleon: postmodernism a la Fish does become a rationale for an eternally shifting, always self-serving, bizarrely Macchiavellian brand of power-seeking, one that privileges convenience over consistency and that privileges Fish over all. But Fish is largely unique in this (so much so that he has been unforgettably lionized--and ironized--by David Lodge as the globetrotting, bed-hopping, trendier-than-thou literary theorist, Morris Zapp). Postmodernism a la your average literature professor, by contrast, is a very different sort of thing. Most lit types are terribly earnest. They are deadly serious about themselves and about what they do (often defensively so, because, unlike Zapp--I mean Fish--they are also very insecure). Puritanical earnestness and grinding uncertainty do not mix well with the philosophical playfulness that lies at the heart of postmodernism. They combine to make a lethally slippery form of dogmatism, one whose extraordinary rigidity is bolstered by an equally extraordinary inability to recognize that rigidity for what it is. The problem, in short, is not the cynical amorality exemplified by the author of There's No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It's a Good Thing, Too, but the theoretical self-righteousness exemplified by most of the rest of the politicized postmodernists who populate English departments.

Which brings me to my point, which is that English departments are excellent examples of what happens to individuals and to communities when postmodernism becomes a political and ethical norm.

The English department may be understood as a model postmodern community. With very few exceptions (most of them occurring within the older ranks of professors, those who are nearing retirement and who don't count in the academy's diversity calculus because they are mostly white and mostly male), you have to be a card-carrying politicized postmodernist to exist in English. You might get into grad school without obvious credentials in that line, but only because you strike the admissions committee as a malleable sort with the potential to become a political postmodernist just like them. It's harder to get through grad school without the credential--you're likely to hear a lot about your naivete and your lack of political sophistication, and you're likely to have trouble finding professors who are willing to work closely with you and write you strong letters of support. It's likewise just about impossible to get a job if you aren't talking the talk and walking the walk of the ontologically anointed. We won't even discuss tenure. The bottom line is clear: no praxis, no pose, no dice. Apart from the stultifying sameness this produces, the politicized postmodernism that defines the academic humanities gives rise to some absolutely damning--even suicidal--structural problems. If politicized postmodernism is the defining characteristic of the contemporary English department, it is also its fatal flaw. More than anything else, it is the thing that is killing English, which is no longer a coherent field, and which is no longer willing or able to try to be one.

In upcoming blogs, I'll look at what politicized postmodernism has meant for the content of the discipline and for the quality of the work done within it.

To be continued....