There Are No Postmodernists In a Foxhole

[Dave Monroe]

There Are No Postmodernists In a Foxhole

Geoff Nunberg
Commentary broadcast on "Fresh Air," August 20, 2002


Like a lot of my favorite stories, this one begins
with a pronoun, this from an article in the Chronicle
of Higher Education that quoted Harvard President
Lawrence Summers in an interview saying, "I regret any
faculty member leaving a conversation feeling they are
not respected"

The sentence was tailor-made to bundle puristic
panties, particularly given the context and speaker --
and in fact a few weeks later, the Chronicle ran an
extensive diatribe from a professor of English who
took exception to Summers' grammar. According to the
writer, Summers should have said "I regret any faculty
member's leaving," not "any faculty member leaving."
And the antecedent "any faculty member" required the
pronouns "he or she," not "they," (Modern academics
are particularly attached to the "he or she"
construction, which enables them to sound politically
correct and pedantic in the same breath.)

The professor went on to chide President Summers for
contributing to the general decline of precision in
language -- all the more distressing in someone who
has presented himself as a crusader for scholarly
rigor. Indeed, he said, the woeful state of the
language is evident to anyone who listens to National
Public Radio for 15 minutes or reads a single section
of The New York Times. That's what happens when
students are taught that writing is a form of pure
self-expression, so that students "need never accept
correction; for if it is their precious little selves
they are expressing, the language of expression is
answerable only to the internal judgment of those same
selves." We've come to the point, the writer said,
where composition teachers have a horror of acting as
language police and grammar itself is regarded as a
form of reactionary tyranny. 

The response went on in this vein for a full 1750
words, and concluded with an insistence that all
college composition courses should henceforth teach
grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. In short, it
was an utterly routine grammatical harangue,
distinguished only by the speciousness of the occasion
for it. For example, that business about having to use
the possessive "any member's leaving" instead of "any
member leaving" is one of those mindless superstitions
that have been passed on to generations of
schoolchildren at the end of Sister Petra's ruler. As
the linguist Geoff Pullum pointed out in a letter to
the Chronicle, if you really believed the construction
was incorrect, you'd have to take a red pencil to
Shakespeare, Milton, Jane Austen, and most of the
other great figures of English literature. And as for
the plural pronoun they, bear in mind that Summers'
words were quoted from a spoken interview, and that
everybody uses the plural that way in their informal
speech. 

In fact the only thing that made this disquisition
notable is that its author was the redoubtable Stanley
Fish, the literary theorist and self-styled champion
of postmodern thought. As it happens, in fact, Fish's
piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education appeared at
about the same time as another extended public
pronouncement of his, this one in the July issue of
Harper's Magazine, where Fish offered a rejoinder to
the attacks on postmodernism from the cultural right.

That anti-postmodernist jihad has been waged with
particular ferocity since 9/11, as the right invokes
the September attacks in an effort to score a decisive
victory in the culture wars. The first salvo was fired
just ten days after the attacks by Edward Rothstein,
the one-minute intellectual who's resident at the New
York Times' culture pages. According to Rothstein, the
postmodernists would be unable to condemn the attacks
in an unqualified way, since they reject universal
values and ideals. In fact, he said, postmodernism
leads to establishing a moral symmetry between the
terrorist and his opponent. And US News and World
Report commentator John Leo warned that our campus
cultures have been captured by "the postmodern
conviction that there are no truths or moral norms
worth defending." The result of that, he says, is an
anything-goes morality and a "drumbeat of
rule-breaking" that drowns out traditional values. 

Now you don't have to be a devotee of academic fashion
to see that this is all meretricious claptrap. And in
his Harpers article, Fish rightly points out that the
"postmodernism" that the conservatives are attacking
is a grotesque caricature of what he and others have
actually argued. In fact "postmodernist" has become a
boogieman word that conservatives use in a way that's
reminiscent of how the Church used to talk about
"masons."

Distortions aside, though, the attacks on postmodern
doctrine are bizarre on the simple face of things.
I'll grant you there's a lot academic theorizing
that's variously flaky or pretentious -- though anyone
who thinks this is a new development ought to take a
look at what Dwight Macdonald was saying about
academic writing forty years ago. But it takes a
singularly loopy turn of mind to see any of this as a
social menace. Anybody who seriously believes that the
moral order of America is threatened by its literature
professors should get back on their meds immediately.
It isn't simply that the enterprises of philosophy and
literary study have always been inconsequential in
American life, and even in the American academy, for
that matter. More to the point, there's no group more
deeply invested in traditional standards and cultural
hierarchy than academic humanists are, whatever theory
they drive to work.

In fact when you read Fish's linguistic screed in the
Chronicle of Higher Education it becomes immediately
clear just how absurd the whole campaign against
postmodernism has been. "No norms worth defending"?
"Drumbeats of rule-breaking"? "One standard is as good
as another"? Not on Stanley Fish's watch! When it
comes to the crunch, Fish has ideas about standards
that are every bit as conventional -- and as
unconsidered -- as anything the cultural right could
wish for. And most of his fellow-travelers will
readily endorse those values, even if they might not
put the argument quite so splenetically. Not to worry:
the future of the Republic is in safe hands

http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/fish.html

Nunberg, Geoffrey.  Going Nucular: Language,
   Politics, and Culture in Confrontational Times.
   New York: Public Affairs, 2004.  275-8.

http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/publicaffairsbooks-cgi-bin/display?book=1586482343


		
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