This is Part Two of my present blog series on the role of politicized postmodernism in corrupting the field of professional literary study (as instanced in the English Department). In my July 12 blog, I suggested that English has basically set itself out, over the last several decades, to become a model postmodern community, and that as such one may learn something about the effects of politicized postmodernism on people and on culture by looking closely at English. My aim in this series is to think usefully on two levels: one, the local level of the academic humanities, which seems to me to be dying a particularly ugly, largely self-inflicted death; and two, the broader level of contemporary American culture, which is increasingly inflected by the kinds of equivocations, and the kinds of personal and social damage, that result when politicized postmodernism gains mainstream respectability (which it has, especially on the left). Whether English is a principal cause of what is happening in the wider culture, or whether it is more an instance and an effect of a more general shift in American values, I will save for another time. At the moment, my concern is simply to read English as a microcosm of politicized postmodernism. My hope is to shed light on the risks involved in adopting politicized postmodernism as a value system by looking closely and uncompromisingly on what that value system has done to the field in which I have studied and worked for the last twelve years.

What happens to the content of a field when those working within it are more invested in their postmodern praxis than in the field itself? The field disappears. Postmodernism situates itself in opposition to liberal humanism, which it sees as naive, and as complicit with the oppressive ideological structures associated with bourgeois culture (racism, sexism, classism, and so on). This means that it rejects "humanist" notions of art (as that which should be beautiful, or morally uplifting; as that which can be great, and can contain within it universal truths about the human condition) and of tradition (all we really have are stories; those stories that belong to a so-called tradition are the ones that have been marked as "meaningful" by those in power; those stories that are regarded as part of the historical record are likewise the self-serving interpretations of the powerful).

What does this mean for English? It means that English has rejected the very terms and categories that make the field make sense. Under politicized postmodernism, there is no longer something we can reliably call literature. No one can agree what "literature" is. Is it Shakespeare? Is it the phone book? Is there a difference? Does it matter? Because "literature" is really just a privileged form of "textuality," it no longer makes sense to talk about the "literary tradition" or the "literary canon." In the radical equivalency of postmodern levelling, there is no such thing as a common core of works that constitutes the content of the field. In other words: there is no field. There is only "the text."

It goes without saying that when there is no such thing as literature, literature cannot be taught. But texts that have historically been classified as literature can be used to teach other kinds of things--psychology, sociology, multiculturalism, marxism, the history and theory of power, resistance, and oppression. Politicized postmodern English profs think it's their job to use the literature course to model utopian ideals of resistant reading, revisionist history, and multicultural community. The syllabus is not where you list great works of literature that are worthy of careful, guided study. That's apolitical, uninformed, and reactionary. The syllabus is where you reject the idea of the "great work" in favor of creating a synecdoche of your ideal world. The ideal syllabus is one that represents the marginal and gives voice to the oppressed. The syllabus without women writers and authors of color is a syllabus with a political problem. The more modern the syllabus, the bigger the problem you have if it is all white or all male or both. (Hence, for example, the notorious uproar at Stanford about the too-male, too-white Western Culture requirement, and the present scuffle about Western Civ at the University of Chicago.)

The conversion of the literature course into a staging ground for a proper politics and an ideal rewriting of history hinges on the belief that discriminating between good and bad writing is just as bad as other, more blatantly oppressive forms of discrimination. Thus the objection to the literary canon as we know it--as it has traditionally been anthologized and syllabized and revered--is that it is a canon of white European males. It's an old boy's club, one that excludes women and minorities by privileging stuffy old boy standards for fine art. Arguments for an expanded canon are consequently arguments that read the white male tradition as essentially discriminatory, hostile to the special artistic talents of women and people of color. Cultivating discriminating judgement and discriminating against historically oppressed groups are utterly and idiotically confounded in this debate. Unfortunately, it is one of the defining debates of "the profession" (that's a pompous phrase we English professors like), and has done more than its share of damage during the several decades of its ascendancy.

The result is a rabidly anti-intellectual inclusiveness, one that doubles as an excuse not to master the material that once formed the backbone of the discipline. On the one hand, the conventional postmodern wisdom defiantly asserts the right of the English prof to extend his reach indefinitely: Who says The Color Purple can't hold a candle to Hamlet ? Who says comic books aren't literature? Who says out-of-print women writers aren't as important as Wordsworth, Wilde, or Joyce? Who says Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud don't belong in an English class? Who says the professor of English--the expert in language and the master of textuality--cannot expound upon economics, history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, medicine, and law? On the other hand, the widening of English's purview tends to correspond to an erosion of field-specific expertise: Who says the professor of English must know his Shakespeare, or the difference between a sonnet and an ode, or be able to discuss modernism's relationship to realism? In the context of the English department, politicized postmodernism is a recipe for irresponsibility, one that not only institutionalizes a lax contempt for the field's own subject matter, but rewards it as the stuff of professional sophistication.

How is this possible? Because along with the concepts of literature and tradition, politicized postmodernism has junked the methods of literary evaluation. Aesthetic judgement has fallen into disrepute. There is no taste, only ideology. There is no beauty, only the power to privilege something as beautiful. There are no good or bad poems or books or plays, just texts that "encode" or "interrogate" ideology. Aesthetics is politics. To argue otherwise is to announce your complicity with the bourgeois hegemonic order. It's also to advertise either your reactionary politics (because not properly postmodern) or your naivete (for not knowing that aesthetics is really just a cover for ideology). Or both.

The critical tradition has thus suffered a fate analogous to that suffered by literature. As literature, taste, and aesthetic judgement have been deconstructed, so has criticism that takes these categories seriously been discredited. In practice, this means that just about all the literary criticism written before the 1960s has been relegated to the realm of the--you guessed it--reactionary (Marxist literary criticism is the signal exception). That which has been designated as reactionary (or naive, or unsophisticated, or liberal, or humanist) thereby ceases to belong meaningfully to the history of ideas or the critical tradition: you will not find it taught and you will not find it cited--except, occasionally, disparagingly--in the scholarly literature. It is, quite literally, beneath notice.

In English, one may thus claim professional expertise without knowing much, if anything, about literature, or literary history, or the history of one's profession, or the history of ideas within that profession. One need never have read one's F.R. Leavis or one's Lionel Trilling, let alone one's Matthew Arnold or one's Northrop Frye. Even Aristotle is optional. A steady dose of Jameson, Spivak, Butler, Bhabha, Foucault, Derrida (or, since Derrida is hard, Culler's primer to same)--none of whom talk consistently, clearly, or particularly well about literature or literary history--will get you anywhere you want to go.

Politicized postmodernism thus produces a strangely truncated, tautological version of professional literary study: one need only read the work that conforms to its premises in order to acquire a proper understanding of the world and of one's field. Imagine if this were the situation in medicine, or law, or physics. Would you let a surgeon who never had to learn anatomy operate on you? Would you hire a defense lawyer who believed that "guilt" and "innocence" are mere social constructs? Would you trust a nuclear physicist who was more concerned with the sexual politics of plutonium than with its explosive properties? Don't let the obfuscating pontifications of today's politically postmodern critical theorists throw you: incompetence is incompetence no matter how polysyllabic it is.

English professors today enjoy the dubious distinction of working in a field that they have exploded. Unlike mathematics, or biology, or even philosophy, there is no common core of knowledge, of texts, or even of analytical techniques, that binds the motley crew of literature professors into something resembling a professional culture. Into the void left by the discrediting of literature has crept a deadly pseudo-culture, one that has more in common with fundamentalism than with intellectual inquiry, and that allows a virulently exclusive snobbery to insulate it from challenge and debate. Its principal components are collective embarrassment (at "merely" being English teachers), communal pretension (to be "theorists"), and political grandiosity (as "cultural theorists" and as self-styled "experts in language," literature professors believe they are specially licensed to behave as pundits in their scholarship and activists in their classrooms).

It's hard to imagine English lasting much longer, especially when no one in the field is even willing to admit that the field has gone terribly far awry. We in the academic humanities blame our problems on the poor job market, on the corporatization of the university, on the anti-intellectualism of American culture, and on conservatives (who are, in the reigning conspiracy theory that passes for reasonable explanation, out to stifle the radical thought of the scholarly left). The last people in the world we are willing to blame is ourselves. So goes accountability in the culture of politicized postmodernism.

In the next installment, I'll talk more about what the politicized postmodernism of the English department has done to its ideas about professionalism and authority, concentrating particularly on the degradation of graduate training and the related confusion of scholarly excellence with political conformity.

to be continued...