Postmodernism as Usual

Review of Theory as Resistance. Mas'ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton. New York: Guilford Press, 1994.

By opening up a field of inquiry into the production and reproduction of subjectivities, postmodern theory offered the potential to radically transform the object of literary studies. No longer would intellectual work in the Humanities be limited to the scholarly documentation and annotation of “great works” or to the fetishization of cultural artifacts. By making visible the ideological processes by which meaning is naturalized, such work held the possibility of challenging existing institutional structures (academic disciplines and specializations) as well as the ideologies that legitimated their rule. Above all, the aim of such work was directed toward deconstructing the category of the bourgeois individual as the linchpin of a liberal humanism complicit with a variety of dominations along lines of race, class, and gender. If genuinely followed through on, such work would make serious demands on existing institutions, not to mention the power arrangements and modes of production those institutions reproduce and legitimate. Many ways of escaping precisely these consequences have thus emerged. In their contestatory work, Theory as Resistance, Mas'ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton argue that at present, the political center of the academy is powerfully reconstituting itself through negotiating its relationship with “theory." In their book, Zavarzadeh and Morton explore the ways in which the “unrest” caused by the theoretical “battles” of the 1980s is now being settled and managed.

Zavarzadeh and Morton make a strategic intervention into conventional understandings of recent changes in the Humanities. Curricular change is currently attacked by conservatives who argue that the humanities has abandoned its moral mission of preserving transhistorical aesthetic and philosophical values, instead offering a crassly politicized understanding of culture in order to satisfy the demands of militant activists. Much “left” response to these claims has been little more than weak attempts to “defend” and preserve such small reforms as have taken place. Theory as Resistance, however, intervenes in this debate from a far different angle, arguing that current reorganization in the Humanities, premised on a pluralistic adoption of postmodern and poststructuralist theory, in fact only helps to contain current historical transformation by producing more liberalized institutions capable of training and managing “multicultural” workforces. Thus, the debate between the “right” and “left” (that is, between the outmoded and emergent sections of the academy) has already been won by those representing a new postmodern center. And, Zavarzadeh and Morton argue, the effect of this “recentering” has been to suppress more radical positions which call not for piecemeal reform of the institutions that manage intellectual production, but for transformation in the mode of production itself.

In each of the essays in their study, Zavarzadeh and Morton chart the emergence of an “anti-conceptualism," and “anti-theory theory” premised on a rejection of theory as critique. That is, they argue that what has taken place in the academy is an accommodation of the “insights” of postmodern theory to the needs of an uncertain and unstable domestic economy and global situation. In other words, the up-dating of practices in the humanities is related to other current sites of institutional “damage control” as the contemporary university finds itself, like all other bourgeois institutions, pressured by a range of internal and external crises. The pressure brought to bear on the academy by economic change, in particular efforts toward privatization, is visible in the increasing emphasis on institutional “flexibility." As a result, the postmodern theories most valuable to current institutional rearrangements are those “ludic” postmodern theories which premise the liberation of “difference” on the abolition of systemic critique. The category of the autonomous subject and its position within a single world order is thus rendered more flexible, but remains intact.

Both traditionalists and “theorists” (by “theorist” I mean, as Zavarzadeh and Morton define it, progressive liberals who have updated their liberalism through an adoption of a postmodern “ludic liberation") envision the need for a change in the humanism that contemporary society has outgrown by reforming the curriculum with inclusionary tactics that seek to “expand” the subjectivity of the student. Zavarzadeh and Morton argue that the seeming opposition between traditionalists and theorists is a false one: the battle lines that have been drawn divide not over principles and concepts—what is to be done and why, but merely over pragmatics: how it is to be accomplished. While traditionalists still see merit in the literary canon and in the survey course that sets a “moral” base from which the student can learn about human “experience," and the “theorists," on the other hand, wish to expand the curriculum to include postmodern texts and poststructuralist theory in order to “expand” the human “experience," there is no fundamental ideological difference in this opposition: the bourgeois subject has not been overturned but merely updated.

What Zavarzadeh and Morton explicate throughout these essays is how the positions of the traditionalists and theorists prop each other up in an effort to manage the real threat to their business as usual: materialist criti(que)al theory. Such a critical practice would not only offer a sustained critique of the politics of culture but also demonstrate the complicity of both “old” and “new” pedagogical positions in the very political/economic situations they (either “morally” or “ludically") pretend to subvert. Through a detailed analysis of the historical determinants that have brought the American university to its current state of being, Zavarzadeh and Morton challenge the “progressive” commonsensical understanding of the recent changes in the Humanities and show how the current postmodern university does nothing but continue to reproduce the subjectivities necessary for the maintenance of late capitalism.

Within the framework of capitalism, education needs to continually reproduce the workers/consumers necessary for capitalism's survival. Like the changes made to American education during the Industrial Revolution, when the classroom was adapted to fit the needs of the routinization, repetition, and division of discourse/labor of the factory, postmodern capitalism requires incoherent/"plural” subjectivities willing to fulfill the transitory needs of multi-national corporations. As Zavarzadeh and Morton point out, “the humanists and the theorists who participated in the debate over the change of curriculum, were therefore acting within the historical conditions of postmodern capitalism, which demanded change since it no longer had any use for the older humanities” (11).

The traditional humanities curriculum, grounded in a theory of the individual necessary to the early stages of capitalism's growth, is “based upon the idea that the individual is the cause and not the effect of signification” (55). According to this way of thinking, the “self," an ahistorical entity, is “free” from economic and social restraints and is able to “enter into transactions with other free persons in the free market but is, at the same time, obedient to the values of the free market that legitimate the existing political order” (58). The immanent nature of the traditional humanities curriculum keeps people focused on their “self" while searching out the “eternal truths." Any critique that arises, therefore, remains trapped at the level of an analysis of discrete individuals while deflecting a systemic and materialist critique of institutional situations as a whole.

While the traditional humanities curriculum was necessary for a post-Industrial Revolution ideology, contemporary technological revolutions and the subsequent growth of multi-national corporations now call for a new “indefinable subject." As late capitalism found itself running out of markets and faced with the growing numbers of the technological underclass (the increasing disparity between the have and have-nots based upon their access, or lack of access, to recent technological advancements), it became necessary to update the means of production of labor. Zavarzadeh and Morton point out that “the change of the curriculum is, in short, a response to the change of the labor force... The rising labor force requires skills that go beyond the linear and empirical and produce in workers an understanding, no matter how elementary, of systems operations in general” (139).

Although postmodern and poststructuralist theories were originally assumed to “inherently” oppose the traditional understandings of “self," Zavarzadeh and Morton argue that the indeterminacy and “playfulness” of meaning of a “ludic postmodernism” gave late capitalism the methods needed for its reproduction. The humanities curriculum could be filled with a piece-meal “theory” that made use of theoretical terms stripped of their oppositional potential. This has occurred, Zavarzadeh and Morton argue, because the discourses that have been absorbed into the academy are those which achieve their intellectual effects from a postmodern revision of categories like “experience," “identity," and “power," as well as from an explicit or implicit dismissal of categories like “totality," “critique," “contradiction," and “ideology." Because of the rejection of these latter categories, categories that have been fundamental to Marxist and other radical theories of revolutionary social transformation, the postmodernism of the academy can support local change and reform, while simultaneously arguing that systemic change is impossible. The focus of Zavarzadeh's and Morton's argument is on those uses of postmodern theory which firmly separate the “local” from the “global," and attempt to forestall any rearticulation of the two by associating systemic conceptualization with authoritarian politics.

One of Zavarzadeh and Morton's most compelling analyses is found in chapter 4, “The Cultural Politics of the Fiction Workshop," where they inquire into one of the most ideologically protected spaces in the academy. Although historically perceived as not the most “serious” site of literary study, given the pressures brought to bear by critical theory on the bourgeois subject, the Creative Writing program has come to be regarded as the last bastion of the “self." “The fiction workshop is not a 'neutral' place where insights are developed, ideas/advice freely exchanged, and skills honed. It is a site of ideology: a place in which a particular view of reading/writing is put forth and, through this view, support is given to the dominant social order” (92). As detailed in chapters four and five, the commonsensical understanding of the Fiction Workshop as the “free” expression of the “self” through “unmediated” creativity has enabled its acceptance by both traditionalists and “theorists." Based upon a bourgeois understanding of the “self," the fiction workshop reproduces an unquestioning acceptance of the status quo. “The dominant fiction workshop... adheres to a theory of reading/writing that regards the text's meaning as 'produced' less by cultural and historical factors than by the imagination of the author as reflected in the text “itself" (85). In reaction against the opposition to the author and authority, and enabled by the incessant “play” and plurality created by poststructuralism, the university has created a space in which the proponents of capitalism can revert to a site of pre-theory that privileges the human subject by their [anti-theorists] “heavy emphasis on aesthetic experience, on style (as the signature of the subject) and on such notions as 'genius,' 'inspiration,' 'intuition,' 'author,' and 'authority'" (75). As a result of grounding the fiction workshop on the sanctity of “experience” and the pseudo-equality of “free” expression, the university has preserved a site where both notions of a “free” individual and an equally “free” ahistorical knowledge can be “freed” from the “threat of theory."

The fiction workshop, through the “violent separation of 'reading' from 'writing'" (87), reproduces not just the idea of the “self” as “individual” and “unique," but also an understanding of the self's servitude: the subjectivity necessary for the maintenance of a capitalist economy is the “free” individual who can “create” what is needed. It is through the fiction workshop's “acceptance” of opinion, without any critique of “opinion” itself, that future writers learn only to reproduce the dominant ideology, i.e., what is most immediately intelligible as “what is needed." The ideological inviolability of the ruling regime of “truth” results, as Zavarzadeh and Morton argue, in “the socially dominant class [having] the final say in the designation of what is 'real'... and what is 'nonreal'... in a society” (85).

The separation of “reading” and “writing” also reproduces an acceptance of a particular economic system. The future writers, who through the unquestioning basis of the fiction workshop “learn” to reproduce the commonsense, become the “boss”; while “the scholars/critics/editors not only accept but indeed enthusiastically define themselves as the subjects of reading.... The separation of 'readers' from 'writers' interpellates them as different 'experts,' 'professionals' whose unique expertise cannot possibly be undertaken by 'others'" (87-88). This dichotomy is what keeps people willing to accept the oppressions of capitalism as inevitable; the “writers” of the commonsense are reproducing the “real” world, as they have been taught to “see” it, and the “readers” are perfectly willing to internalize that world so that at the end of the cycle it appears “realistic."

Theories that seek to raise questions about the “free-ness” of “opinion” and “creativity," such as the ones presented by Morton and Zavarzadeh, often get dismissed as “authoritarian” since they pressure the very notion of freedom necessary to the “managed democracy” of capitalism. As Morton and Zavarzadeh argue, “experience” is not a given but is mediated through language and through the way one has been taught to “read” culture. But traditionalists and “theorists” understand "'creativity'... [as] the ability to transcend the political, the economic, and in short the 'material' conditions of writing." Since this understanding of “freedom” structures the fiction workshop, students enter an ideological space in which their “ideas” get reaffirmed without any questions as to the “production” of “ideas”: i.e. where did they come from? what interests do they serve? The group of discourses that Zavarzadeh and Morton term “ludic postmodernism” have helped further this tendency by (as Morton and Zavarzadeh explain through their examination of Derrida) privileging an understanding of meaning in which the slippage of signification results in an inability to permanently “fix” any notion of “the real." As Zavarzadeh and Morton argue, this “playful” conception of meaning, with its concomitant notion of a constant, nearly “accidental” shifting of identities, reproduces a revamped pluralism in which every position is given an “equal” footing. Since “real” meaning cannot be determined, poststructuralist theory legitimates ignoring the historical and political framework in which the writing subject is situated.

As a result of the recent acquisition of “theory” by the American university it is now more than ever imperative that those who wish a revolutionary change begin “what amounts to a daily hand-to-hand combat with the liberal pluralism that underlies today's resistance to theory” (1). One must engage in an oppositional pedagogy which forces the “invisible” reproduction of the status quo out into the open. It is necessary to produce students who can recognize the entrapments of the dominant ideology as political/economic constructs used to benefit a small few. Teachers must introduce concepts involving the “material” nature of “ideas”: that one simply does not have/hold an idea “for no reason” but because it enables a particular political position. Students must be forced to account for their “opinions” and learn to conceptually visualize what “owning” such an idea means. We must not simply fill our curriculums with an unquestioning "plurality” which only restructures the traditional notions of Literature and “self” by reproducing author as authority. An oppositional pedagogy is one that does not seek to “interact” with students on a “humanistic” level, but instead attempts to make the “invisible” boundaries of the classroom (as a politically constructed site) “visible” so that students can eventually challenge the reigning concepts of “knowledge."

Yet this is neither “easily said” nor “easily done”. The American university is a highly resilient institution. These changes have become so institutionally entrenched that even second- and third-tier colleges have embarked on a series of curriculur [sic.] reforms that were previously undertaken only by the “elites”. But rather than the attempts at restructuring the function and institutional structure of disciplines themselves, as universties [sic.] like Duke, Carnegie-Mellon and Brown were reputedly interested in doing, widespread curricular change in America now only consists of the inclusion of a few “special topic” courses, which now stand proudly side-by-side with the traditional Survey Course. The goal of such reform now is less one of broadening and deepening intellectual inquiry than simply a desperate propping up of declining enrollment by making “English” “more fun”.

By ending Theory as Resistance with a discussion of the American University's attempts at suppressing materialist criti(que)al theory, Zavarzadeh and Morton present a challenge to “traditional left” political notions of “building a common ground” and “compromise”. Their specific challenges and references to “behind the scenes” maneuver ing, which by commonsensical standards is a violation of “privacy”, are a direct outgrowth of their oppositional position. Their documentation of the “revolution without bloodshed” makes visible the lengths to which the status quo will go in order to be maintained. What is happening in the Humanities programs all over the country via the “expansion” of curriculums to simply include multicultural texts alongside of more traditional “canon-esque” material, and the indoctrination going on in “creative writing” programs (now considered a site for “serious” work), is a direct dismissal of materialist criti(que)al theory. By restructuring the boundaries of the center to include only those parts of “theory” which serve to reproduce current political positions, oppositional theory—which provides the knowledges which can produce actual change—is signified as “extreme”, “irrational”, and “totalitarian”. Not by “accident”, but as the necessary suppression of that oppositional knowledge that would most seriously pressure capitalism's claims to both “moral” and “pragmatic” legitimation.