AKMA has put together a far more eloquent and insightful response to the Happy Tutor’s remarks on postmodernism than I could muster. In looking back at my responses to what the Tutor said, he’s quite right: I was certainly off-balance, and put off-balance by what felt to me like an attack; hence the bombast of my response. The Tutor equates the vast, soft zeppelin titled “postmodernism” to lies and moral evasions; Gerry follows by naming the dunces in the academy as dunces for having swallowed those lies and moral evasions, and suggests that the academy is worthy of blame for perpetuating intellectual dishonesty.
I’m pursuing a PhD because I’ve found the combination of an acuity of insight, a feeling of community, an impressive work ethic, a joy for the examination of ideas, a moral and ethical uprightness, and a sense of doing something that mattered in academia — in teaching writing and in the field of rhetoric and composition — that I never found working in warehouses or for lobbying organizations in DC, or for banks and steel makers in Pittsburgh, or in the swamps and deserts I saw with the 24th Infantry. So Gerry’s remarks stung some, and my responses show my reaction.
But the Tutor’s dismissal of everything that might be stuffed into “postmodernism” (is not a zeppelin sausage-shaped?) as lies and moral evasions troubles me as well. I’ve argued that the term postmodernism is so vast and amorphous as to be nearly meaningless, a target for whatever guns one might wish to turn on it, but it contains in its vastness ideas that I find important to the way I think about class and writing in the wired classroom: Lyotard’s carefully elaborated distrust for grand narratives (such as the narratives of capitalism’s glories and the inherent equality of American society), Jameson on culture and capitalism, the notions that there are no positions free of ideology and that we are often unaware of the multiplicity of political positions we take and that language can force us into. The Tutor believes “identity politics” to be problematic or perhaps only superannuated; I believe that as long as people are made targets on account of their identities, “identity politics” has a necessary and moral work to do. And shooting at a target as large as “postmodernism” — there are people I know in there; friends, mentors, colleagues. They’re not stupid or intellectually dishonest.
What troubles me most, though, is the Tutor’s characterization of me as pouncing, hunting, on the attack, and I certainly brought it on myself: my responses to Gerry and the Tutor were more than strongly stated, and I’d do well to rein in my bombast at the keyboard. Pouncing or hunting or being on the attack wasn’t what I wanted, or how I meant it, at all. My responses weren’t intended as critique, but as defense against the wholesale dismissal of a body of thought that has informed my perspective, and defense of the profession I’d like to claim.
So I’m disheartened. All this brings to mind another recent discussion where similar subjects were pilloried, and where I found myself in a very similar position. Perhaps I’d do well to learn from the two discussions, and try to feel less strongly about such topics.
My friend! Your comments were well taken, your scholarship enviable. What is at issue is not personal, on either side. When any of us learns a discipline, we take much on faith, including the stance, style, parlance, manners. One of the key moves, certainly of Derrida, and of de Man was to reframe a discourse, or Culler (“Framing the Sign”) is to force a reader to attend to what had been marginalized or hidden. In seeing that hidden detail, a new pattern emerged, a new gestalt. At the time, two decades ago that experience was vertiginous. Those against whom it was practiced — my friends and mentors now silent or dead, were discomfitted, off balance, vulnerable. That is how the game was played. Today it may be more doctrinal, ephebes teaching ephebes the canonical works, all with the somber face of A students conning the canon. But when that happens the new orthodoxy becomes vulnerable in its turn.
You have chosen a dangerous life – more than you realise, perhaps, because when you become an intellectual you are playing a game in which the stakes are nothing less than your own mind. When you meet another whose moves “encompass” the move you have been taught to make, the result is that you end up on your fanny. “Reverse the reversals.” Welcome to the Dojo.
That said, you won our exchange. You highlighted my ignorance of recent theory, and you were correct. And you pointed out that I was hitting a strawman (other than you.) The fun is not in the winning or losing, but in the rapid fire exchange of trained shots. How else can either of us learn?
You taught me some humility. Hope you learned something on your side about persona, countenance, all the stuff you read about in rhetoric. Remember all discourse comes from a source, it defines a speaker. Didn’t Aristotle say that most of the impact of a speech stems from “character,” or what we would call reputation, image, or persona?
When you write in the received style, forget your teacher as an Ideal Reader. Coonsider your own voice as emanating from a sound source — the mask of a Fool. If you can hear that, see it, then you have learned what I have to teach. It is more than a lesson in style, it is a lesson in genre, and in neoclassical ethics and decorum. If you don’t learn it, you will always, against one trained in our Novle Trade, take the pratfall — even if you become as famous as your heroes.
You have not yet written the style of gravitas, or sublimnity. But that won’t help either — read Peri Bathos. The higher they climb, the farther they fall.
This is an old, old quarrel. I am reawakening, as best I can, a tradition that your masters left for dead. Your loyalty to your colleauges in that Blimp moves me. Imagine how you will feel if it burns like the Hindenburg. Mine did. And the fire was set by arsonsists, the first in your line, particularly de Man and Derrida. And they were right to do it. We are friends, but don’t expect quarter. You are learning a martial art. Don’t sniffle when you bleed. It only encourages me. I do like it. Wish I could shed a drop for every mentor of mine your line has silenced.
Frankly, I am honored to be treated as an equal in these discussions as I have no formal training in these areas, and as I said in the comments at WB, I have not read deeply in any of these topics. I speak from my experience and training as a technologist, and as a reasonably well-read amature intellectual. My inclinations and affinities aren’t really in the humanities, but I have deep respect for those take this difficult path. My mother is a visual artist of high quality and no fame, and my wife is an English major and writer who was started on her sixth draft of a historical fiction novel when we met. What angers me about the world is the lack of support that our society gives to people who take these paths, and the winner-takes-all way that the markets work often to reward bad art that is good at self-promotion. I think you understand better what I was getting at WRT common vs. elite; there is a vast untapped wealth of artistic expression that errupts spontaneously from the depths. Perhaps the struggle is part of it, but must everyone who wants to play the Blues first pay their dues? We loose a lot of talent that way.
I hope you can see the value of the Tutor’s invitation to his Dojo. No doubt it is difficult to see while you are in your training, but the world of the Guardians of Culture is a blood sport, and you would do well to learn these lessons from such a kind and generous teacher. Whether you choose to play the Fool or the Knave, always try to remember who you are.
There is more to say about this, but perhaps elsewhere. I’ll echo HT in closing, “My friend! Your comments were well taken, your scholarship enviable.” I’m very glad to be in this corner of blogspace with both of you, and AKMA too, even if he bristles at calling it a “space” and not a “way”.
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