Apart from resentment:
Inexorably, from orientation to graduation day, your clear thinking will decline. You will have learned how to reflexively obfuscate on virtually any subject. You will possess an acute sensitivity to detect oppression and privilege in all the places it does not exist. Conversely, the worst excesses instigated by the most powerful against the most helpless will become invisible to you.
The humanities were not always like this, and we desperately need them to stop being like this. They are hopelessly infected by post-modern thought.
The harder you apply yourself to comprehend this curriculum, the less you will understand. The more you master post-modern principles, the more confused and resentful you will be of history, politics, philosophy and society. And should you somehow graduate a true post-modern believer, you will be of no practical use to any employer. Friends and family will avoid you.
Professor Stephen Katz’s wrote the following article or something like it back in 1999 on ‘How to speak and write postmodernism’. In the ensuing 24 years, post-modern speech has escaped the confines of academia, gained a solid bridgehead and launched a frenzied attack upon both the political and corporate culture.
You want to say something like, ‘We should listen to the views of people outside Western society in order to learn about the cultural biases that affect us’. This is honest but dull.
Take the word ‘views’. Postmodern-speak would change it to ‘voices’, or better, ‘vocalities’, or still better, ‘multivocalities’. Add an adjective like ‘intertextual’, and you’re on your way. ‘People outside’ is also too plain. ‘Postcolonial others’ is better. To speak postmodern properly you need a deep reservoir of toxic bias besides the familiar racism, sexism, ageism, etc. Try Phallocentric – expanding the male centredness trope with rationalistic forms of binary logic. And that whole ‘affect us’ sounds like plaid pyjamas. Use more obscure verbs and phrases, like ‘mediate our identities’.
So, the final statement should say, ‘We should listen to the intertextual multivocalities of postcolonial others outside of Western culture in order to learn about the phallogocentric biases that mediate our identities’. Now you’re talking!
Or, perhaps, you wish to say something like, ‘Contemporary buildings are alienating’. A fertile thought, but, of course, a non-starter.
You wouldn’t get offered a second round of crackers and cheese at a conference reception with such a line. In fact, after saying this, you might get asked to stay and clean up the cheese and crackers after the reception. When in doubt Continental European theorists are best. I recommend citing the sociologist Jean Baudrillard since he has written a great deal of difficult material about postmodern space. Don’t forget to make some mention of gender. Finally, add a few smoothing out words to tie the whole garbled mess together and don’t forget to pack in the hyphens, slashes and parentheses.
What do you get? ‘Pre/ post/spatiality’s of counter-architectural hyper-contemporaneity commits us to an ambivalent recurrent of anti-social reductivity, enunciated in a de-gendered-Baudrillardian discourse of granulated subjectivity’. At this point, you should be able to hear a post industrialist pin drop on the cultural floor.
At some point someone may ask you what you’re talking about… give the questioner the impression that they have missed the point. Follow it up with another salvo of postmodern-speak. If they persist just say, ‘The instability of your question leaves me with several contradictorily layered responses whose interconnectivity cannot express the logo-centric coherency you seek. I can only say that reality is more uneven and its (mis)representations more untrustworthy than we have time here to explore’…”pass the cheese and crackers.”
This same banality is the essential ethos driving political-correctness and identity politics. It should have been trashed long ago into the dustbin of history but there it is continuing to expand its influence across our culture. May the gods save us all.
