This is Part Four of my ongoing blog series on the English department as a model politicized postmodern community. In my July 17 installment I wrote about how politicized postmodernisn degrades graduate education. Today, I begin a two-part conclusion to this series dedicated to the proposition that for all its pretensions to be radical, transgressive, and revolutionary, politicized postmodernism is first and foremost a profoundly conservative, even reactionary force. English departments demonstrate this beautifully. Any proper sociology of English will notice how nicely postmodernism assists the essentially conservative aims of the English department, and, by extension, of the university itself.

The main goal of an English department is not to be radical, or postmodern, or even political, but to keep being an English department. People in English want to keep their departments as autonomous as possible (they want to control their curriculum, hires, admissions, promotions, and fires); they also want to continue to expand as much as possible (to attract and graduate as many English majors as possible; to hire ever more faculty working in ever more arcane and unusual areas to teach those undergrads; to admit ever better graduate students, to graduate them at ever higher rates, and to place them in ever more, ever better jobs). Academic departments are little bureaucratic machines; in the case of English, politicized postmodernism is the grease that keeps the gears grinding smoothly along.

If you go to your average English department, you will not find there a bunch of leftist dissidents plotting for the revolution, or even a bunch of dedicated postmodernists playing with their signifiers. What you will find is a group of well-fed, leisured yuppies drinking cappucino and plotting their next career move. These folks theorize the ills of capital, the institutionalized oppression of western culture, and the discursive dimensions of power first and foremost because it is their livelihood, their ticket to job security and the comfortable lifestyle that comes with it. If theorizing corn starch would get them tenure and earn them professional glory, then they'd do that. They do what's rewarded, they do what they are told, they do what it pays to do. And then, seeing how the rest of the world mocks and reviles them, they call themselves radical and get off on how subversive they are. The reality: what may seem subversive--or just stupid--to the rest of the world is a badge of membership in academic circles (this is not to discount the corrosive psychological impact politicized postmodernism has on many of those who imbibe it; it is simply to note that this impact is not, in most cases, the principal aim of politicized postmodernism so much as it is a devastating effect). My point is that most of the academy's so-called radical critics are about as rebellious as the members of high school cliques, and about as desperate for the feeling of group belonging.

Politicized postmodernism ministers to this need for group identity. By isolating its practitioners--whose beliefs are alien to outsiders and whose jargon seals them off from all but those who speak the lingo--politicized postmodernism creates a strong us/them mentality. Utterly irrelevant to everyone but themselves, mocked and derided when they are acknowleged at all, radical academics in English and other departments defiantly define themselves as "oppositional critics" whose subversive thought works to undermine the racist, sexist, and homophobic worlds of science, of corporate capitalism, even of the traditional home. "They" are unenlightened agents of an oppressive social order; "we" know better. "They" serve the status quo, seeking only to better their selfish little lot; "we" serve critique, making a better world possible by exposing ideology in all its varied, invidious forms. "They" are blind; "we" see. "They" are the enemy; "We" are the forces of good. (Contrary to popular opinion, the politicized postmodernist does not disbelieve in moral absolutes; she just disbelieves in absolutes that are not her own.) George Lucas does a better job with it, but English and Star Wars basically have the same plot.

Politicized postmodernism thus also regulates those who belong to the "us" part of the us/them binary, controlling what "we" write, teach, and think so tightly that the likelihood of genuine innovation or serious dissent is basically nil. So strong is the stranglehold that politicized postmodernism exerts on English departments--it's generally only the aging, increasingly marginal white male professors (cruelly known as "dinosaurs") who aren't on board--that the ideas in the field have not evolved or changed in any significant way since politicized postmodernism burst onto the scene during the 1980s (in the form of queer criticism, postcolonial criticism, poststructuralist feminist theory, and Foucauldian criticism, to name the most important incarnations). That was an exciting time, and it did seem then as if English were entering some kind of a methodological renaissance--anything seemed possible, and much was changing and new. But since then, time seems to have stopped. The aims of the criticism produced in English are the same as they were then, the arguments have been endlessly recycled, reinvented, upgraded, retooled and renewed. The only thing that is surprising about the present state of the discipline is that more people aren't bored to tears with it. Politicized postmodernism is a professional meme, one that contains within it not only the capacity endlessly to reproduce itself, but also to dull the sensibilities of those who are infected by it, to convince them that the untiring repetition of other people's old ideas is somehow the same thing as innovative intellectual work.

Within English, "radical" criticism has thus proven to be a deeply conservative force: stable, stabilizing. Without new ideas, there is no dissent. Without dissent, there is no change. As more and more politicized postmodernists earn tenure and work their way up into the ranks of full professor (there are many there by now; they are the stars of the field), and as more and more of the thinning ranks of older, unapologetically unreconstructed faculty retire, so English comes ever closer to its fondest wish and deepest goal: to be a model politicized postmodern community, a small, perfectly multicultural, self-contained world that stands in ideological opposition to the corporate university whose dollars support it.

Within this community, what matters is collective well-being. Collegiality--or at least the appearance thereof--is crucial; peace and harmony--or the appearance thereof--are all; disagreement is thus redefined, proactively, as aggression, and discouraged as such. Individuals who do not subordinate themselves to the needs of the group are often understood as rogues, or, because defamation is a favored method of enforcing departmental groupthink, as crazy. In English, one speaks in terms of groups: there are "the faculty" and "the graduate students;" within "the faculty" there are "the medievalists," "the modernists," "the Victorianists," "the junior faculty," and "the senior faculty." When hiring, one does not look for exceptional individuals, but for an exceptionally representative member of a group. In any given year, "a queer theorist" or "a postcolonialist" or, more traditionally, "a Romanticist" may be hired; always there is the push to hire women and people of color; always too the push to recruit graduate students who belong to one or another oppressed group. It is understood that you can and will teach the literature that belongs to your group: women may specialize in a period or genre, but they are expected to be able to handle "women's literature" and feminist theory, too. More often than not, scholars of color work on race. It is the rare politicized postmodern academic who does not gladly embrace the equation between her genetic makeup and her expertise; to do so would be to fly in the face of communal expectations.

Politicized postmodernism is, finally, more a means than an end; it supplies the basis for a closed collective, one whose harmony depends on an enforced absence of independent thought and a related unblinking allegiance to a group that understands itself as perpetually embattled, at war with the conservative, corporate forces of the university and beyond.The ubiquitous phrases "departmental community" and "departmental citizen" are deeply telling in this regard. One belongs to one's department; one owes it; when one does well, one brings credit to the department; when one deviates from the collective norm, one brings shame on the department.

English today is hardly an inspired, inspiring environment, and despite the glitz and glamour of the politicized postmodern paradigm, it isn't meant to be. Institutionalized, routinized, and oversimplified over time, politicized postmodernism is, above all, a means of producing dependency and docility in the very people it presumes to empower. I'll explain in the last blog of this series, coming soon to a web browser near you.