Repost: Stephen Katz, "How to Speak and Write Postmodern"
I don't have permission to repost this. Sorry bout that, Steve! DM me. But it's too good to ignore. The short piece below talks about something that drives me crazy: people using big words to hide simple ideas. Or just to sound smart. Chomsky says that kind of writing is nonsense, and he's wicked smart. You see it everywhere now, especially in left-leaning academic and political spaces. Someone says something simple, then complicates it. Stephen Katz makes fun of that habit perfectly. So I'm sharing this anyway, because it's funny and it deserves to be read.
Or, as I’d say it in PoMo: I must begin with a modest disclaimer regarding the unauthorized recontextualization of the text that follows. Yet the epistemic urgency of its circulation exceeds the narrow juridical boundaries of permission. What is at stake here is the well-known academic ritual whereby lexical inflation transforms elementary propositions into ornate performances of intellectual gravitas. As the profoundly influential, theoretically generative, and widely venerated linguist Noam Chomsky has long intimated in his own critiques of obscurantist discourse, such verbosity often conceals rather than clarifies. Katz exposes this phallogocentric theater of terminological excess with surgical irony. The result is a text whose comedic force destabilizes the very discursive habits it imitates. In short, it is very humorous. Quite. And its reappearance here participates in the necessary redistribution of that laughter.
Stephen Katz originally published “How to Speak and Write Postmodern” as a satire in The Australian on July 6, 1994. The piece quickly circulated in universities as a handout mocking the dense style of postmodern theory, often detached from its original citation. And, tbh, I used the line “The instability of {this} question leaves me with several contradictorily layered responses whose interconnectivity cannot express the logocentric coherency you seek” to survive more than one AP class long, long ago.
How to Speak and Write Postmodern
Stephen Katz; Jul 6, 1994
Postmodernism has been the buzzword in academia for the last decade. Books, journal articles, conference themes and university courses have resounded to the debates about postmodernism that focus on the uniqueness of our times, where computerisation, the global economy and the media have irrevocably transformed all forms of social engagement. As a professor of sociology who teaches about culture, I include myself in this environment. Indeed, I have a great interest in postmodernism both as an intellectual movement and as a practical problem. In my experience there seems to be a gulf between those who see the postmodern turn as a neo-conservative reupholstering of the same old corporate trappings, and those who see it as a long overdue break with modernist doctrines in education, aesthetics and politics. Of course there are all kinds of positions in between, depending upon how one sorts out the optimum route into the next millennium.
However, I think the real gulf is no so much positional as linguistic. Posture can be as important as politics when it comes to the intelligentsia. In other words, it may be less important whether or not you like postmodernism than whether you can speak and write postmodernism. Perhaps you would like to join in conversation with your local mandarins of cultural theory and all-purpose deep thinking, but you don't know what to say. Or, when you do contribute something you consider relevant, even insightful, you get ignored or looked at with pity. Here is a quick guide, then, to speaking and writing postmodern.
First, you need to remember that plainly expressed language is out of the question. It is too realist, modernist and obvious. Postmodern language requires that one uses play, parody and indeterminacy as critical techniques to point this out. Often this is quite a difficult requirement, so obscurity is the well acknowledged substitute. For example, let's imagine 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'. Postmodernspeak would change that to 'voices', or better, 'vocalities', or even better, 'multivocalities'. Add an adjective like 'intertextual', and you're covered. 'People outside' is also too plain. How about 'postcolonial others'. To speak postmodern properly one must master a bevy of biases besides the familiar racism, sexism, ageism, etc. For example, phallogocentricism (male-centredness combined with rationalistic forms of binary logic).
Finally, '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 postmodern!
Sometimes you might be in a hurry and won't have the time to muster even the minimum number of postmodern synonyms and neologisms needed to avoid public disgrace. Remember, saying the wrong thing is acceptable if you say it the right way. This brings me to a second important strategy in speaking postmodern, which is to use as many suffixes, prefixes, hyphens, slashes, underlinings and anything else your computer (an absolute must to write postmodern) can dish out. You can make a quick reference chart to avoid time delays. Make three columns. In column A put your prefixes; post-, hyper-, pre-, de-, dis-, re-, ex-, and counter-. In column B go your suffixes and related endings: -ism, -itis, - iality, -ation, -itivity, and -tricity. In column C add a series of wellrespected names that make for impressive adjectives or schools of thought, for example, Barthes (Barthesian), Foucault (Foucauldian, Foucauldianism), Derrida (Derridean, Derrideanism).
Now for the test. You want to write something like, 'Contemporary buildings are alienating'. This is a good 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. Go to your three columns. First the prefix. Pre- is useful, as is post-, or several prefixes at once is terrific. Rather than 'contemporary buildings', be creative. 'The Pre/post/spatialities of counter architectural hyper-contemporaneity' is promising. You would have to drop the weak and dated term 'alienating' for some well suffixed words from column B. How about 'antisociability', or be more postmodern and introduce ambiguity with the linked phrase 'antisociality/seductivity'.
Now, go to column C and grab a few names whose work everyone will agree is important and hardly anyone has had time or the inclination to read. Continental European theorists are best when in doubt. I recommend 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/spatialities of counter-architectural hyper-contemporaneity (re)commits us to an ambivalent recurrentiality of anti sociality/ seductivity, one enunciated in a de/gendered-Baudrillardian discourse of granulated subjectivity'. You should be able to hear a postindustrialist pin drop on the retrocultural floor.
At some point someone may actually ask you what you're talking about. This risk faces all those who would speak postmodern and must be carefully avoided. You must always give the questioner the impression that they have missed the point, and so send another verbose salvo of postmodernspeak in their direction as a 'simplification' or 'clarification' of your original statement. If that doesn't work, you might be left with the terribly modernist thought of, 'I don't know'. Don't worry, just say, 'The instability of your question leaves me with several contradictorily layered responses whose interconnectivity cannot express the logocentric 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'.
Any more questions? No, then pass the cheese and crackers.
