The Real Postmodern Dilemma

The moment I heard Camille Paglia say that "poststructuralism is a form of child abuse" during her speech on education reform at the Kennedy School's ARCO Forum last Tuesday, I knew I had heard one of several ready-made soundbites that would surely appear in the next morning's paper. Another striking moment came when she said, nonchalantly, that today's Ivy League graduates are nothing more than "little blind gnomes," two generations of students who have been crippled by postmodern professors. Her cause was the preservation of art and facts, as well as the restoration of grandeur to teaching and learning--all noble goals that, she argued, have been utterly ignored or destroyed by this thing called postmodernism.

Paglia, a professor of humanities at the University of Arts in Philadelphia, is known for her controversial cultural criticism and her position as an "anti-feminist feminist." But last week she started off her speech by saying that "educational reform is the number one issue of my career," especially the state of America's public school system. One expects such a comment to be followed by talk of school funding, vouchers, busing, bilingual education, the condition of inner city schools, teacher testing, charter schools and other components of the national debate on this subject. Many of these issues did arise in Paglia's speech, though most of them could have just whizzed by your ears thanks to her whirlwind speaking style.

One thing you couldn't miss, however, was her continuous attack on postmodernism and its purveyors in Ivy League humanities departments. Her repeated stressing of this "disaster" conveyed the sense that postmodernism is a palpable evil, one which will bite your arm or steal your soul if you are not careful enough to avoid it.

If it sounds like a stretch to blame America's educational problems on what is essentially a literary and cultural movement, that's because it is. Paglia's assertion that humanities professors at Harvard are "trying to take away meaning, tell students it's all meaningless"--thus producing that "gnome" effect--simply isn't true. A small fraction of our humanities classes deal with literature produced in the second half of this century, much of which has come to be labeled "postmodern." The aim of these classes, like any others, is to give students a way of understanding and appreciating the material. Paglia's previous attacks on specific Harvard professors are particularly misdirected. Is anyone else willing to make the ridiculous claim that Porter University Professor Helen H. Vendler, who has devoted her life to the study of poetry, doesn't display a proper reverence and respect for art?

Paglia, however, is not alone in portraying postmodernism as a negative influence on educational scholarship, or as a virus that particularly attacks the educational elite. For this reason, it is useful to ask: What the heck does "postmodern" really mean?

The problem with Paglia's use of the word is that she takes it beyond the strictly literary realm, adding all sorts of political and sociological undertones, and the result is extraordinarily vague. Yet, in this vague sense, the word gets tossed around quite frequently. The definition of a term that is useful for understanding literature has been bent out of shape, blown full of hot air and basically stretched to such a degree that it has ceased to have any meaning at all. The real postmodern dilemma isn't figuring out how to fight off some sort of vague monster that's threatening our ability to think, write and learn. It's figuring out what the word means in the first place and grappling with its significance. If, ultimately, the term ceases to mean anything to us, we should be free to toss it out of our lexicon altogether.

I've heard Harvard professors define "postmodernism" in two ways which have seemed satisfactory. The first definition is that postmodernism is everything that comes "after modernism." This doesn't sound so great at first, but at least defining the word by associating it with a particular time constraint gives it some concrete meaning. The second definition adds to the previous one by saying that postmodernism is really a problem, not a statement or a set of values. It's a problem of how we can express ourselves, and of how we can understand the expression of others, in the often confusing age in which we now live.

What I like most about these definitions is that they give us a way of looking at some of the great works of art produced in the last 40 or 50 years, strange and tricky works by Pynchon, Nabokov, Beckett and many others. The danger of talking about postmodernism as something that robs us of meaning-as Paglia says humanities scholars are trying to do to us today-is that many of these so-called "postmodern" authors are profoundly moral, presenting some of the difficulties of making meaningful literature in our time.

Surely there are ways that we can think about making educational reforms. Yet purging our souls of postmodernism is undoubtedly the wrong way to go about affecting change. We'll have to wait to see whether "postmodern" will prove to be a useful and enduring literary term. But Paglia's use of the word as an expression of her own vague disgruntlement-however justifiable or unjustifiable her anger may be-does a disservice to the issue she would like to address. As a means of discussing problems within our educational system, grumbling that everything has become too "postmodern" just doesn't make very much sense. Erwin R. Rosinberg '00 is an English concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.