Postpostmodern

"Mentally Lyotarded"

Our devices have a way of accumulating dust just like old storage rooms. We all have those old photos we’re wondering why we still keep, ex-friends and ex-lovers and plans for things that never came to fruition, all the little things in the corners that, if you’re a natural hoarder like me, are harder to part with than they ought to be.

This is one of a series originally written, in modified form, in another venue. Migrating over to Substack has given me ample opportunity to revisit and polish some older writing, and I can only hope that my efforts are more that of the careful and loving task of the redecorator than the unnecessary addition of a CGI Jabba the Hutt.

And so I poked through a vault of, of all things, old PDFs from my twenties. “Folder last altered 5 March 2012,” that sort of thing – a time capsule of an era in which bootleg scans of books were very much part of the intellectual life as a whole, to the point where I remember arriving in Bangkok not very long afterwards and seeing print-outs of Mediafire links to Walter Benjamin texts taped to pillars by students with open-source ideals, in a time when the potential of the internet was viewed as liberatory rather than panoptic.

Back then, and even moreso earlier, I had a lot more time I could dedicate, in some capacity, to that big project of cultural studies, the "postmodern" dissection of human knowledge, in whatever sense one might construct that. And I wonder why, four years on, do so many of them remain unopened?

My first introduction to this project so often known with a wonderful smugness simply as "theory” began, as is normal, at a not-great not-terrible liberal arts college in an adorable Victorian town in rural America. I arrived, gawky, with a boxful of my high school idols. Ferlinghetti. Kierkegaard. Camus. And god did they look fantastic on the bookshelf of my dorm room, next to the posters of R. Crumb comics, the Interpol LP sleeves, and the giant beneficent head of Jack Kerouac with that quote about the mad ones and the burn burn burning.

But these were adolescent heroes. At smoke-hazed house parties, in my English classes, I was suddenly surrounded by a whole new raft of predominantly French surnames. I knew that these writers, or at least a passing awareness of them, seemed to go hand-in-hand with any number of other things that I felt were worth my time: various psychedelia, whole bottles of red wine, noise rock, sex with arty girls.

And as a freshman, my attempts at theory – much like my attempts with the psychedelia and the red wine and the noise rock and the arty girls – were stabbing and met with mixed success at best.

This is where I should define “theory,” to which… I can’t. Can you? “Theory,” “postmodern,” “post-structuralist,” all these terms kind of mean what you want them to mean. There are those definitions – postmodernism as “an incredulity towards metanarratives,” per Jean-François Lyotard – but they seem tentative at best, and have a way of contradicting themselves. Really, it’s more of a vibe, a conceptual free-for-all with which one attempts to prove that one’s critique is the most radical, with an intellectual genealogy that can generally be traced to Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche – the big three Germanics of the 19th Century who together breathed out the 20th – but which is often neither Freudian, nor Marxist, nor Nietzschean. If you call it theory, it’s probably theory.

But I don't think my embrace of theory was in any way insincere. Sure, I wanted to be a smartypants, but I wanted above all else to understand the world, because ordinary life can be pretty goddamn confusing. So I hit the books.

And the avenues of thought offered by European celebrity intellectuals suggested that whatever progress I thought I'd made was illusory, that I needed to revise my worldview. That struck me as a challenge, and off I went with a thick stack of reading material – glossy new Verso editions, classic texts re-bound in plain, primary-colored card, LOC catalog numbers stamped on the spine in white ink. The opacity of Franco-German academic prose didn't faze me – if anything, it emboldened me. As with so many things, the fact that it was a puzzle made it all the more interesting. This was not writing for weak minds, and I fully believed that it was only in the France at the height of the évènements de Mai '68 that academics had the courage to fire such volleys at the system.

So for some time, I swore by the power of theory to change one’s life. Each text I read seemed to swing a hammer at some bias, some invidious way in which the logic of late-capitalist society had penetrated my psyche. Reading became a giant Whac-a-Mole game, orientalism, phallocentrism, the spatial fetish, scientism, all the implicit biases that lurked behind polite society, in an era long before terms like “microaggression” entered wide use.

Was that some foreshadowing just there?

But the more I read, the emptier I felt. When you boil the world down to nothing but contradiction and a truth that might not even be intersubjective, you're left with a sickly feeling of inability.

Which of course allows for neoliberal capitalism, in all its ruthless, mechanical efficiency, to completely logroll any attempt at liberation. After I graduated from college, I spent the wet Seattle winter of 2008-09 in a rat's-nest apartment, with unemployment spiraling upwards, with working-class black and Latino homeowners waking up to find the properties they'd invested their life savings in valueless. Somehow, all of the metaphor systems that suggested the predominance of the virtual, the evil of late capitalism lying essentially in its dullness, and the suggestion that the welfare state is in many ways as evil as the 19th Century liberal-capitalist state due to its totalizing quality—ideas I can pin to Baudrillard, Debord, and Marcuse, respectively – turned to dust when I was faced with a dwindling bank account, an empty email inbox, and the marginal, insecure position I held in the much-vaunted "creative economy" when I finally found employment.

And so slowly, I started checking out fewer and fewer library books by Gilles Deleuze and Herbert Marcuse, and instead opted for William James and Primo Levi.

For a long time, theory seemed a dying beast. Sure, there were me and my fellow Occupiers clutching our copies of Benjamin’s Illuminations (or, more likely, a Youtube clip of Slavoj Zizek sniffling and lip-smacking his way through a rambling interview like a cocaine-addled mustelid). But mostly it seemed a purely ivory-tower exercise, only expressed outside in the netherworld of little-viewed blogs and quixotic anarchist zines, in which it showed a certain writing style. A cant characterized by delirious cold opens, a sense of deathly ennui, and a poetic airiness without admitting its essentially literary character. It's been imitated enough to be commonly parodied (hey look at what Achewood did back in 2012!), it doesn't sound nearly as good in English as in French, and it's something I self-consciously try to steer away from.

A misinterpretation of a misinterpretation. It’s what us Americans are best at. François Cusset’s French Theory provides a pretty solid account of how that happened.

There was a now largely forgotten trend in center-left magazines in the late ‘00s and early ‘10s. The story of the postmodernist apostate returning to the humanist fold, onetime theory fanatics recanting their heresies. These stories had a few common themes: a citation of some of the sillier claims made by big-name theorists (Jacques Lacan being a particularly egregious offender), a misty-eyed recollection of a foolish and idealistic youth, and a return to soberer thought – typically the world of cognitive science and its unfalsifiable handmaiden, evolutionary psychology. Ugh to that too.

But that is itself a fossil now. Little did I know, then, or when I originally wrote a version of this piece a decade ago, that the language of theory wasn’t going anywhere. Rather, it transmogrified. The terminology percolated from the academy into the social media discourse. Hey there “settler colonialism” and “heteronormative” and privilege privilege privilege, I remember you!

Failing to actualize the revolution of the 1960s, erstwhile theorists turned away from the potential for revolution in the political sphere to revolution in the psychic sphere, whether that was a romantic reading of actual revolutionary movements, primarily in the Global South (Zapatistas et al.), or more likely, an application of the language of theory at its most maximalist to the world of cultural production, a morass of standpoint epistemology (the bodies! the voices!), phony postcolonialism that would have Edward Said rolling in his grave in his gorgeously tailored suit, and deliberate transgression for which the sole justification is transgression, even as transgression has become fully absorbed into capitalist production — thus doing nothing to stop the abovementioned logrolling. And I think that’s what particularly galls me. The language of theory is used to shut down conversation, and can often be used to support the foulest enterprises of our time – whether that’s Aleksandr Dugin invoking the idea of a plurality of positions to support revanchist Russian nationalism, or hardline Zionists demanding that Israeli Jews be considered “indigenous,” Fortune 500 companies and three-letter agencies invoking the language of intersectionality, or pop stars quoting big-name feminists to sell crap music, and their armies of stans invoking said crap music as a form of critical theory.

Something I once said about Maggie Nelson: “I looked up a pic of her and her husband. They look like every decent middle-aged academic couple I've ever known. I'll bet they're lovely dinner guests, and I'll bet their children are delights. So why do I care about her brutally San Franciscan hemmings and hawings about it?

Westward the course of discourse goes its way, subversions upon subversions, valences upon valences, claims to the radical and transgressive being posited as variations upon the normative, the very claim to their transgression reifying the normative, and so on, ad aeternam.”

My objections could be summed up thusly, haven’t improved since.

But all of that being said, I still read theory from time to time. But that seems like bullshit too. Because a lot of theory does have value. As Terry Eagleton pointed out, we – society as a whole, and especially those of us who like to think about things and write about what we think about things – cannot return to a pre-theory age of innocence. The conversation has changed.

And good theory (emphasis on “good” here) is often dense and interesting in the same way good poetry is – Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Elaine Scarry, and Walter Benjamin, for example, were perhaps better stylists and observers than philosophers. Furthermore, a good metaphor, even when flawed, can provoke us out of an intellectual slumber. In an earlier era, Wittgenstein refused to systematize his Philosophical Investigations, and yet it is never doubted, even in the bloodless white-paper world of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, as a text of serious importance and influence.

Then what comes post-postmodernism? Being the sort of person who loses sleep over things like the correspondence theory of truth, I sort of flail about. I pick up book after book, and read them with the same enthusiasm and for the same reasons my countrymen devour books by simpering self-help gurus. The quietist approach – Adorno is Tony Robbins for sadbois. Yet I am left no happier, no more serene, even as my understanding hopefully improves.

Which in the current climate, is about all I have left. That and the grass I’m supposed to touch. It is nice and soft.