>From http://www.uexpress.com/ups/opinion/column/jl/ E-Mail this Column to a Friend or Click for printable version of this column TOWER OF POMOBABBLE DOMINATES GROVES OF ACADEME A professor once wrote this about Tonya Harding's attack on Nancy Kerrigan: "This melodrama parsed the transgressive hybridity of unnarrativized representative bodies back into recognizable heterovisual codes." Probable English translation: Maybe Tonya had Nancy's leg smashed because she was attracted to her. If so, the media wouldn't tell us. The professor was writing in "pomobabble." This is the jargon of postmodernism, the intellectual movement that says truth doesn't exist and that all values and knowledge are "socially constructed" -- made up to serve the interests of the powerful. Postmodernism has swept through our universities, doing great damage. But "pomobabble" has emerged as a source of constant mirth. As a hoax, Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, wrote an article in dense pomobabble arguing that gravity and physical reality are social constructs. Social Text magazine took it as a serious piece and published it. Later, to explain the joke to the magazine's editors, Sokal said that anyone who doubts the law of gravity should come up to his apartment and try walking out the window. He lives on the 21st floor. Pomobabblers now win most awards in the annual Bad Writing Contest, says Denis Dutton, a professor in New Zealand and editor of Philosophy and Literature, the scholarly journal that sponsors the competition. Homi Bhabha of the University of Chicago took second place last year for this sentence: "If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstitition, spurious authorities and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to 'normalize' formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violated the rational, enlightened claim of its enunciatory modality." Wondering what an enunciatory modality might be, I phoned Bhabha, who explained that it is technical language referring to a network of terms, vocabulary and language that construct a particular set of meanings. I was pleased he was able to clear that up. The grand prizewinner of 1998 was a 94-word effort by Judith Butler of the University of California, Berkeley, a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature. For a school assignment, my daughter and a classmate worked four hours to untangle and diagram this sentence. Here it comes, at half its length to save space: "The move from a structuralist account ... marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power." Butler is an academic star. But Martha Nussbaum, a scholar at the University of Chicago Law School, recently wrote that when Butler's notions are stated clearly and succinctly, they don't amount to much. The obscurity of Butler's prose, she wrote, "bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on." Many scholars are now busy mocking pomobabble. The Michigan Law Review ran a long spoof of postmodern legal gibberish written by law professor Dennis Arrow ("There is the double narrative, the narrative of the vision enclosed in the general narrative carried on by the same narrator.") Australian professors have created a "Postmodern Generator," an Internet Web site that spits out a new essay in pomobabble each time the site is hit (http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/postmodern). My visit to the site produced deep thoughts about Marxism ("Thus, Marx uses the term 'Marxism' to denote not, in fact, desublimation but predesublimation. The example of dialectic narrative ... emerges again in 'The Last Words of Dutch Schultz,' although in a more textual sense.") Anyone can learn pomobabble. String together words such as "hegemonic," "transgressive," "narrativity" and "valorization." Refer often to murky French philosophers. Deprivilege heterosexuality by gluing "hetero" to the front of normal words, creating terms like "heterotextuality." Denis Dutton is so good at this that I asked him to translate three recent quotes from American politics into pomospeak. Here they are, academically transformed: 1. "The gendered non-being in modes of heterolocalized transgressivity negotiates while it articulates an ontology of the sexualized body simultaneously within a contested absentation of narrativity symbolized within a discourse of indiscriminate penetrative phallicism. ("I never had sexual relations with that woman.") 2. "The multivocality of semanticism essentialized in a dialogue of Being instantiates while it interrogates a hermeneutic of self-annihilating discursive spaces which occlude the ontological signifier. ("It depends on what you mean by 'is.'") 3. The negotiating of sanguinary tumescence structured by a closure of post-coital transgressivity encodes while it marginalizes a physiognomic narrative of frigid aquacity. ("You better put some ice on that.") COPYRIGHT 1999 JOHN LEO ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. -Thomas Huxley + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
