Postmodernism, the teacher, and the politics of 'clarity'

John Xiros Cooper

Keynote speech,

33rd Annual Seminar for College Professors, Vancouver,

31 May 1991

After two decades of pomo talk, postmodern remains a very

slippery term. About as slippery as ‘proletarian

literature’ in the 1930s, or the word ‘aesthetic’ in the

1890s. However, with the turn of the millennium, it will

probably grow less slippery with time. Why? Because the

nerve centers of the dot-com universe are whispering that

pomo's fifteen minutes of fame are up and that

postmodernism is officially over. Now if the corpse will

only lie still, the coroner can get to work.

First flash of the scalpel: the postmodern was born,

developed, and died in precisely the same way as the

modern. It is the modern's inescapable 'other'.

Similarly, the end of Dada as a vital movement in art

occurred with the demise of its 'other'. I refer to the

deletion of etiquette from the collective brain of

advanced capitalist society sometime in the early 1960s.

Postmodernism's co-presence with modernism can be seen

when we realize that it was postmodernism to which

Baudelaire was referring when he couldn't tell whether

his reader was his brother (mon frère) or himself (mon

semblable). If the X Files documents a shadowy parallel

universe of unexplained events, postmodernism is

modernism's X file. So with the death of modernism, its X

dossier is now closed. In the new century ahead we will

need to get past this nomenclature of an ultimately self-

cancelling co-presence.

But about the death of the postmodern, my sources do say,

however, that it has only died in New York City, and I

suppose if you live in Manhattan and have watched and

heard the discourse of postmodernism trickle down from

the heights of the Trump Tower to the crack dealers on

Amsterdam Avenue, then you are no doubt weary of pomo

talk. But news travels slowly, even in hyperspace, so

here in the provinces we have a good three to five years

of pomo's fifteen minutes of fame remaining, except in

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the little strips of youth hipdom that can be found in

even the most clodhopper towns. Howevermuch that most

postmodern weapon, the Uzi submachinegun may have solved

the problem of the metaphysics of presence in the South

Bronx, the question of defining postmodernism, for us,

still remains, even at this late date, a slippery

business.

Does postmodernism, for example, represent a radical

break with the old notion of modern times, or is it

simply a revolt within the modernist aesthetic against

certain forms of ‘high modernism’ as represented, say, by

the poetry of T. S. Eliot, or the architecture of Mies

van der Rohe or the blank surfaces of minimalist abstract

expressionist painting (Mark Rothko)? Is postmodernism a

philosophical style, via Dada and Surrealism, with roots in

Nietzsche's debunking of classic humanism, or should we

view it strictly as a periodizing concept, say, as a

stylistic reaction to Bauhaus functionalism, beginning

possibly in the 1950s in Las Vegas? Is there beyond the

arts a postmodern politics and is Bill Clinton its magus?

Does postmodern politics have serious transformative (we

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used to say revolutionary) potential by virtue of its

opposition to all metanarratives of control (including

all forms of Enlightenment reason, Marxism, Freudianism,

etc.), and is it revolutionary by its close attention to

‘other worlds’ and to ‘other voices’ that have been long

silenced (women, gays, blacks, colonized peoples, all of

whom, as we've come to understand, have their own

histories and their own realities and now their own

shopping centres)? Or is it simply the commercialization

and domestication of modernity and the now familiar

aspirations of a laissez-faire, ‘anything goes’ market

eclecticism in which the human agent is repositioned in

history, not as ‘Man’, the measure of all things, or the

liberal variant of this, the individual as citoyen, the

rational, informed citizen, but as a utility maximiser on

a cell phone? Does postmodernism, therefore, undermine or

integrate with neo-conservative politics? And are we to

attach its rise to some radical restructuring of

capitalism, the emergence of some ‘post-industrial’

society, in which the capitalist mode of production

shifts from older, more rigid forms of capital

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accumulation (for which the term Fordist - after Henry

Ford - is normally used) to more flexible, less

centralized, more mobile ones, and is thus more

thoroughly exploitative and more impregnably invincible?

Do we view postmodern art, as the ‘art of an inflationary

era’ or as the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’?

The most startling fact about postmodernism is not, it

seems to me, its acceptance of the ephemeral, the

fragmentary, and the discontinuous. We might recognize

this as one-half of Charles Baudelaire's conception of

modernity and of the ephemeral as the necessary condition

for an authentic heroism in modern times. (The other half

of Baudelaire is the traditional idea of transcendence

and the ideal as the final destination of fashion's

exhausted refugees.) But postmodernism responds to the

ephemeral, not by aiming to transcend it (which is a high

modernist theme), but by embracing it without

reservation. Postmodernism does not discover in the

ephemeral the eternal and immutable elements, reflections

of the ideal within appearance, that carry the potential

to unify and staunch the ceaseless flow of change. To the

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degree that it does try to legitimate itself by reference

to the past, postmodernism typically looks to those, like

Nietzsche for example, who emphasize the deep chaos of

modern life and its intractability before rational

thought. Embracing the fragmentary and ephemeral in an

affirmative fashion leads to a number of consequences.

To begin with, we find writers like Michel Foucault and

Jean-François Lyotard explicitly attacking any notion

that there might be a metalanguage, metanarrative, or

metatheory through which all things can be connected and

represented. Universal or eternal truths, if they exist

at all, cannot be specified. Condemning metanarratives -

those broad interpretative and explanatory schemes like

those constructed by Plato, Aquinas, Marx or Freud - as

‘totalizing’, Foucault for example insists upon the

absolute plurality of discourses as running dead against the

sway of explanatory totalities. This discursive diversity

resists what he calls, rather strikingly, ‘the fascism in

our heads’ by building upon the open and ungovernable

qualities of human discourse and, thereby, disrupting the

way knowledge is routinely produced and constituted at

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the particular sites where some ‘iron cage’ of

repression, some bureaucratic-technical power-discourse

prevails. Lyotard, more preoccupied with language as

such, speaks of ‘language games’, again in the plural, as

the ruptured landscape which the classic totalizations

cannot map, language as the medium not of one Logos, but

of a multitude of logoi. While ‘the social bond is

linguistic’, he argues, it ‘is not woven with a single

thread’ but by an ‘indeterminate number’ of ‘language

games.’ Each of us lives ‘at the intersection of many of

these’ and we do not necessarily establish ‘stable

language combinations and the properties of the ones we

do establish are not necessarily communicable.’ As a

result, ‘the social subject itself seems to dissolve in

this dissemination of language games.’ The traditional

metanarratives which synthesize and unify language-

knowledge-experience cannot be re-assembled when we've

reached this degree of dispersal and separation.

We don't realize perhaps well enough what a tremendous

investment Western society has made in these

metanarratives and how much they always enter into the

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events of the classroom or lecture theater. The

dissolution of these traditional metanarratives, I

believe, is where the greatest challenge to the teacher

in the humanities lies today.

Well, there is plenty here to keep the coroner's blades

flashing for longer than my little space of time allows.

So let me rotate this large subject so that we might look

at it more closely from our perspective, as teachers of

language and literature. What does postmodernism mean for

us?

The one account of the postmodern condition that seems

most relevant to a discussion of pedagogy and the

university as presently constituted is, I believe,

Lyotard's deployment of the term in his important summary

statement on the state of knowledge, ‘in the most highly

developed societies’, the book called La Condition

postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on

Knowledge).

First let's note that the term ‘condition’ is an

interesting rhetorical move. Are we on the terrain of the

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pathological here? We should be wary of this because we

know that it has been one of Foucault's aims to question

the traditional distinction between the normal and the

pathological. Is it a ‘condition’ in the medical sense,

then, that is being dissected? Or is the term meant to

suggest logical enquiry, of the sort familiar in Anglo-

American philosophy, i.e., an attempt to establish the

necessary and/or sufficient conditions for something

called the postmodern to exist? The condition he

diagnoses as characterizing the state of knowledge in the

late 20th century is one of extreme scepticism towards

the great legitimizing discourses inherited from the

past. ‘I define postmodern,’ he writes, ‘as incredulity

toward metanarratives.’ Postmodern here denotes those

transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth

century (and more fully now than ever before), have

altered the rules of the game for science, literature,

and the arts. He means by metanarratives those grand

narratives which legitimize, which warrant, the theory

and practice of particular disciplines. Science for

example does not simply restrict itself to finding and

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stating useful regularities in nature and blithely

seeking the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules

of its own game. It then produces a discourse of

legitimation with respect to its own status. In the case

of science this metadiscourse is a form of positivist

philosophy.

Lyotard uses the term modern (as opposed to postmodern)

to designate any discipline that legitimates itself with

reference to a metadiscourse of this kind. In the

humanities we can list some of these Grand Disciplinary

Narratives easily enough:

the prevailing humanism which has provided the most

authoritative framing discourse of Western culture

since the sixteenth century;

the cult of personal identity, and of the

metaphysical construction of subjectivity;

the hermeneutics of meaning and the establishment of

a particular, well-policed standard of

intelligibility;

the primacy of Spirit in the spirit/matter couple;

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reason as the foundation of human freedom;

beauty as the goal of artistic activity;

equilibrium as the vanishing point of civil and

economic life, and so on.

These metanarratives of control can be heard whirring

routinely in the background of a hundred lectures any day

of the week around the campus.

The postmodern is defined then as incredulity towards

these metanarratives. The postmodern condition refers to

that state of dismay and crisis in which the legitimating

warrants, the underlying rules and framework of our game,

have dissolved. Leading us, some might feel, if we don't

just simply ignore the whole matter, to the precipice of

nihilism and dread. But we might want to see the

dissolution of these control mechanisms of thought and

feeling in other terms, as leading, for example, to joy

rather than dread, in recognizing here a possibly final

and complete liberation.

Which brings me to teaching.

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If what Lyotard proposes is true and there is a good deal

of evidence to suggest we are living through just such a

crisis, although I'm not sure that there aren't, at the

same time, some very powerful arguments to suggest that

he's wrong, but let's assume that his diagnosis reflects

accurately the actual conditions in which we do our work,

in which we try to establish, if not the final truth of

our statements, at least their plausibilities, how do we

then approach our work in the classroom? How do we teach

writing students, for example, about finding a personal

‘voice’ if the old certainty about the unity and

substance of personal identity is no longer possible and

can no longer legitimate the category of ‘voice’, or that

the romantic metanarrative of art as self-expression,

resulting in poetry, for example, which can be

confidently referred to the particulars of a personal

history and to an individual temperament and sensibility,

is no longer there even as a sustaining and necessary

fiction, what do we do then with the task of teaching?

And what about the pieties paid to the nobility of the

human spirit in a century which has seen the nihilistic

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destruction of so many millions of human bodies? And how

does the naive faith in the perfectibility of the human

person survive Bergen-Belsen and the ‘highway from hell’

north of Kuwait City? When the traditional metanarratives

ring hollow, where does the legitimating discourse dwell?

As a teacher you have a particularly difficult task

because you inevitably find yourself in the position of

making explicit these traditional metanarratives as

reference points in interpretation, in analysis and

discussion of a work's vision of the real and of the

human enterprise, and very often you find yourself

seeming to accept or even defend them by virtue of the

fact that you've made them explicit. Can you talk

confidently about Hamlet as ‘touching on the perennial

issues of human nature’ (as I heard recently in an

undergraduate lecture), when the term ‘human nature’

itself may be gibberish, may be simply an empty signifier

to be filled in eccentrically by the authority figure at

the lectern, useful perhaps for ideological purposes, for

re-inforcing some group's claim to power, or cultural

hegemony, and appealed to, not as the final solution to a

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real problem, but as a way of cutting short further, and

possibly more subversive, enquiry? In bringing our

attention to the underlying warrants, and the backing for

these warrants, upon which our discourses rest,

postmodernism has rendered us a great service, a service

of liberation. This is cause for joy. But as you might

suspect a condition of permanent reflexiveness presents

particular problems for the teacher and scholar, whose

position at the heart of the production and transmission

of knowledge carries with it a traditional, and often

jealously guarded, priestly authority. Let me give you a

personal example of the kind of problem the teacher of

literature can face under the conditions sketched to this

point.

I've spent the last fifteen years studying the work of

T.S. Eliot and I'm now well into a second book on his

work, and I've taught The Waste Land many times over that

period. It really is an impossible poem, a difficult

poem. I don't find it difficult because of its erudition

or its non-linear development by juxtaposition without

connectives, or because of its reliance on

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uncontextualized images to convey its primary effects,

nor do I find it difficult because I can't come up with a

convincing account of its ‘meaning’ - no, those aren't my

problems with the poem at all. My problem with The Waste

Land stems from the fact that convincing accounts of its

coherence, and therefore its meaning, can spring so

easily to my lips. My difficulty lies in the fact that I

can now effortlessly and convincingly transpose the

entire poem to a metadiscursive register which makes

sense of its text. Any small doubts arising from the

intractability or uncooperativeness of specific details

in the poem I can simply and glibly dismiss, if I'm so

minded. Not only do I command the lectern, I've also got

that intimidating fifteen years of professional study

under my belt.

Typically the poem's discontinuous, fragmentary surface

may be resolved by reference to vegetation myths of Indo-

European origin, that the seeming chaos of modern times,

when one stands far enough back from it, clearly reveals

underlying unifying patterns of ancient myth. These myths

are both social institutions, in the sense that they

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constitute society at some deeper level of communal or

collective consciousness, and they provide access to the

deeper recesses of individual consciousness. They make

order happen, in a poem that works through what seems an

irredeemably disordered and disordering discourse. These

appeals to Indo-European myths or the metaphysics of

subjectivity and consciousness as unifying

metanarratives, then, can make the poem cohere, even

against itself. You might call this metanarrative the

myth of myth-as-unifying principle.

But let me make a confession to you, the same one I

sometimes make to my students: my intuition tells me the

poem itself resists unified interpretation at every turn.

If truth be told, I've come to suspect that most accounts

of the poem's internal coherence are really anxiety-

ridden attempts to salvage the wreckage of a devastated

lucidity, not only in the poem itself, where the

traditional lucidities of romantic aesthetics are

ceaselessly challenged and subverted, but also to salvage

lucidity as such, in a more general sense, as a

sustaining structure of Western expressiveness. It seems

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to me that Eliot's challenges to romanticism carry us out

past aesthetic consciousness to a more radical

questioning of certain epistemological givens in Western

thought. I don't think Eliot intended such a penetrating

and radical critique, but the pressures of the historical

moment of composition and Eliot's own psychological and

emotional state at the time forced such a critique out of

him, carried him well past his own, more limited, goals,

such as they were.

What my struggles with the poem have made me conscious of

is not the difficulty of making sense of Eliot's text,

but of the pathological need to believe in and maintain

the myth of clarity as a central given of Western

concepts of communication. I don't think I need to sketch

a defense of lucidity for you; we all know, supposedly,

its value in our guts. You don't need to hear an argument

in defense of the lucid, because that defense is already

built into the operating metanarrative of expressiveness

in our culture. You might liken it to a default setting

of the mind, not as a metaphysical given, but as socially

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constructed for particular purposes. Postmodernism is

simply fiddling with the default settings.

We might interrogate the sanctity of normative syntax,

for example, in the same vein. Gertrude Stein's

stretching of the syntactic norms of language forces us

to recognize that the conventionally close, but

arbitrary, association of a normative syntax and meaning,

gives way to new forms of semantic circulation in a text,

semantic processes that go well beyond even Eliot's

subversion of the foundations of a certain kind of

inherited intelligibility.

But push further. Take ‘clarity’ as part of the mandate

to be intelligible in our culture. Think of it as a

political demand, our demand of writing students that

they be clear in thought and expression, that they make

their thought as clear to us as possible. Let me ask you

a difficult question: why should they trust us, why

should they trust our privileging of clarity? What if we

have some other motive, other than our usual appeal to

the wisdom of effective communication (for success in

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life), some other design not necessarily in the students'

own interest, in urging the students to be clear? What if

that motive is so thoroughly disguised in the rhetoric of

a generous and optimistic, yet fraudulent, liberalism, so

well hidden from view (and therefore so much more

effective) that we teachers aren't even aware that it

exists as the real destination of all our instruction in

clarity? Why should clarity be the principal aim of

effective expression? In a totalitarian society teaching

people to be clear could be seen as collaboration with

the regime, couldn't it? In some cultures, think of Nazi

Germany, being opaque and impenetrable is really the only

way to survive, being clear might mean revealing too

much. And really we don't have to remember Nazi Germany

to recognize that the demand to be clear might even be a

form of surveillance right here in our own classrooms.

The old rationale runs like this: the path to freedom

lies in the open and lucid operation of reason made

visible in clear expression. Only the clear thinker

satisfies the requirements of the Logos. Or so that

particular metanarrative goes and one can call on a long

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philosophical and rhetorical tradition to support it.

Here lies one of the most powerful myths of Western

thought. But what if we see things otherwise: coherence,

lucidity, clarity may have no universal warrant in the

history of what we mean by effective writing; they may

simply be tactics, essentially political in origin and

effect, to make the subalterns transparent to their

masters, in order to more effectively maintain

surveillance of them from the vantage of a power-

discourse, a discourse that constitutes us as pedagogues,

and puts us and ‘clarity’ in the service of the status

quo. The more clear the dominated are in expressing

themselves, the more easily we can look into their minds,

the more easily we can police their very souls; the more

we go on about souls and the eternal human spirit, the

more resigned they become to their inescapable fates, and

isn't it curious how often the inescapable fates of so

many of our students, or of colonized peoples, for that

matter, is servitude, not freedom.

The question of the political status of ‘clarity’ is, as

you might agree, an interesting case, although it is also

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a provocative one. I offer it as an example of a certain

kind of postmodern interrogation of what is, in the

practicalities of teaching language and literature, a

universally acknowledged truth.

Well I didn't mean to depress you. I did begin with joy a

moment ago and have ended, I fear, somewhere near

despair. The challenges of postmodernism as we find it in

the works of Lyotard and Foucault represent a challenge

particularly to the teacher. As I mentioned earlier

Lyotard's diagnosis of the postmodern condition in

knowledge is not itself beyond challenge. Both Lyotard

and Foucault, however, have made very powerful critiques

of certain unifying, totalizing predispositions in

Western thought. No more so than in their displacement of

the human from a position of privilege in the thought of

the West. Foucault's conclusion to The Order of Things

unabashedly announces the decentering of the human

subject: ‘One thing in any case is certain: man is

neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has

been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short

chronological sample within a restricted geographical

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area - European culture since the sixteenth century - one

can be certain that man is a recent invention within

it. . . . As the archaeology of our thought easily shows,

man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps

nearing its end’ (386-387). This departure from the main

path of Western philosophy, a turning which takes its

first modern formulation in Nietzsche on its way to

Foucault, jars us when heard against the reigning

humanism in all its numberless choruses. One is tempted

to respond with a ‘so what?’ After all, do Foucault,

Lyotard, and others really represent a serious challenge

to the workings of a humanism which is so thoroughly

ingrained in the intellectual and moral tradition of the

West that it cannot be shaken from the official rhetoric

of the American empire even as 100,000 charred bodies

pile up grotesquely in the desert north of Kuwait City?

Where do we locate Man (with a capital M), as the measure

of all things, among the nameless charred remains in

southern Iraq. Man? Is it just one more public relations

triumph for civilization?

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There is an argument that can be made which suggests that

the best thing to do as a teacher is ignore the crisis,

if that is what it is, proceed in the framework of the

old in order to give students something to hold on to -

after they have assimilated the old legitimizing

discourses with their value systems, standards of

intelligibility and coherence, the production of

authority, the policing of boundaries etc., after all

that, then open the debate on the question of the

legitimacy of the metanarratives of control, only then is

someone really in a position to understand, appreciate,

the implications of the postmodern condition.

I'm not sure our students can't already see through such

a tactic. I suspect that many of them find life in the

postmodern lane far more comfortable than we do, after

all they've always shopped in the malls with their

decentered design, their multiple, ungrounded discourses

of pleasure and instant gratification, their playful,

self-parodying invitations to decipher today's

consumption codes, their absent owners, exercising

control remotely through franchise and chainstore, and

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finally their transformation of the event of exchange

from a transaction constituted by two willing, rational

human beings, into a structure which constitutes,

sometimes ironically, a knowing, half-humorous parody of

the human through the act of consumption itself. Plato's

Republic cannot long survive these pastel parodies of

utopia.

But there are other arguments that can be deployed, that

are just as convincing, arguments that suggest that

assuming the undeniable truth of the old grand

narratives, about a unified human nature, history as the

record of human liberation, progress, et cetera, simply

transmits blindly to students, often below conscious

awareness, the whole hollow edifice of the past, with its

glaring contradictions, wishful thinking, semi-conscious

self-deceptions, its hidden exercises of power, its

police actions masquerading as the maintenance of

civilized or humane or progressive values, and so on: the

argument goes on to propose, that in the postmodern

condition, a new kind of pedagogy must be born, that not

only recognizes the postmodern condition as such, but

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inserts the very act of teaching itself, with all its

hidden assumptions about knowledge, power, and value into

the teaching process as well.

I only have a few minutes left and so must leave you, I'm

sorry to say, with these enormous questions unanswered.

But let me give this large subject one more turn, and let

me toy for a moment with what might sound like self-

contradiction. The very existence of the postmodern

condition as described by Lyotard is itself still an open

question. And the possibility exists that he is both

right and wrong, that, yes, there is a delegitimizing

process in progress and we are in the midst of it, very

much like the process of economic and statutory

deregulation that is transforming the civil societies of

the North Atlantic world by deliberately dissolving the

old regulatory mechanisms of social and economic life

(the political and economic metanarratives of our

grandparents) for the ‘freedom’ offered by the new

disciplines of the marketplace, which is now positioned,

supposedly, as a more natural form of regulation. The

mention of the word natural, of course, should alert us to

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the fact that we're sailing awfully close to a condition

where the natural is used to mask something that is

constructed socially through and through. And, if we

transpose Lyotard's scheme, we can see that the concept

of the market, which constitutes the most powerful socio-

economic metanarrative of our day, dissolves the old

discourses of value, regulation, and control, thus

casting customary societies, not just knowledge, into the

postmodern condition.

We only have to look around us in the public sphere to

see the effect of the delegitimizing of old value

systems. We do not even have to invent ‘a postmodern

condition’ in order to isolate the cause. Market

capitalism erodes systematically, without any help thank

you very much from the professors at the Ecole Normale

Superior, the old metanarratives of control. We are

witness to this in the everyday, not in the special

semiosphere of the theory seminar. We see it in the

organization of work under the pressure of the world

market, in the commercialization of the family, in the

disruption of the traditional life of communities by

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‘development’, and most strikingly, in the political

defeat of humanism by the remaking of the State as

material and ideological defender of the new commercial

religion, the primacy of ‘market forces’ to reorganize

not only material life, but consciousness itself,

according to what best maintains competitive production.

We work, we organize our family life, we remake

consciousness in order to maintain the efficient

circulation of goods and credit, all the rest, as the

saying goes, is frills. Where is the classical conception

of Man (with a capital M) in this situation? Precisely

nowhere. Individuals come and go, but the free play of

market forces goes on forever.

From this wider, and I hope more useful, perspective the

postmodern condition is not simply some philosophical

debate in Paris or a series of stylistic gyrations in

Manhattan or Milan. The postmodern condition, insofar as

postmodernism refers to the process of delegitimizing

privileged discourses of value which sustain established

societies, is everywhere around us. Is everywhere around

us, except in the classroom. The expiration of humanism,

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for example, envelops us at every turn, again except in

the classroom, where quixotically, the teaching of a

traditional humanism persists. In politics, in social

life, in economics the process of delegitimizing communal

values, of respect for the individual, of the value of

the arts, of the necessity of self-knowledge, is debunked

and ridiculed usually implicitly, but more openly now

than ever. Only in the classroom are these values part of

a sustaining metanarrative that functions there, among

the students, as resistance to and rebuke of the culture

of toys and its value system, a value system that begins

and ends with that most grimly despairing of postmodern

oneliners - who dies with the most toys, wins.

Well so what are we left with? A very ambiguous

situation, I fear. Our dilemma is really not one of

thought so much as one of action. If postmodernism is

liberation, then it represents one of the great and

hopeful turning points of human history. But if it is

simply the final extension of the power of the market

economy over all cultural and intellectual production,

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then there is plenty of reason to resist and rebuke such

developments in our classrooms.

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