The (Post)Modern Dark Age
There seems to be an ever-increasing lexicon of postmodern literature—a great deal of which is comprised of explanatory introductions. One need only peruse the bookshelves of Barnes and Noble or Borders to see the extent to which postmodern literature has asserted its influence; entire volumes are now exclusively devoted to introducing the casual reader to Derrida or Foucault, Baudrillard or Lyotard.
While I applaud the originators of the postmodern movement for their obvious intelligence and commitment to deeply-critical analysis, I fear that, instead of ushering in an age of critique and, by extension, an age of progress, the age they instigated is little more than the modern dark age. Now, this is not to say that we live in an age where there is a definitive lack or repression of scholarship; on the contrary, there seems to be an inundation of sensationalist, commodified, and ultimately superfluous literature now adorning America’s academic facade. Our “greatest” and most “accomplished” minds have either fallen silent or fallen ill—their ailment a result of an unhealthy marriage between the sanctity of our finest intellectual doctrines to the paralyzing systems of mass consumerism. Now, the intellectual hides behind ivy-covered walls, detached from the world and detached from legitimate theorizing—publications of eloquent nothingness are splashed across the newsstands, nightly news reports and tabloids of contemporary America.
The sheer quantity of literature, produced in much the same fashion one may produce any other product, resembles the embodiment of a Horkheimer and Adorno nightmare than legitimate forces of critical and creative pursuit. The language of our most popular criticisms is the language of the iron age; we have all but lost our most precious and essential understandings of intellectualism, humanism, and even postmodernism.
In political science, one can literally name the legitimate theorists in one breath: Wolin, Cohen, Roemer, Rawls, Elster, Rogers, Hayek, Mansfield—where is contemporary society’s response to real intellectualism?
Perhaps what is needed is a shift in the equilibrium of critical analyses; where the 1960’s gave rise to some of the most controversial, innovative and influential minds ever, the legacy of the postmoderns has left a responsibility, in a sense—a responsibility that we, if we are to respect their contributions to our intellectual tradition, must assume, examine and act upon. So, forget the introductory texts, the countless politically-jargonized books, the innumerable “best sellers,” and go back to the basics: there is something to be said for great writers and their original work, as I feel that a resurgence of effective and creative academia is directly contingent to the level in which we engage the ideas themselves. Perhaps a new movement is in order?
While I applaud the originators of the postmodern movement for their obvious intelligence and commitment to deeply-critical analysis, I fear that, instead of ushering in an age of critique and, by extension, an age of progress, the age they instigated is little more than the modern dark age. Now, this is not to say that we live in an age where there is a definitive lack or repression of scholarship; on the contrary, there seems to be an inundation of sensationalist, commodified, and ultimately superfluous literature now adorning America’s academic facade. Our “greatest” and most “accomplished” minds have either fallen silent or fallen ill—their ailment a result of an unhealthy marriage between the sanctity of our finest intellectual doctrines to the paralyzing systems of mass consumerism. Now, the intellectual hides behind ivy-covered walls, detached from the world and detached from legitimate theorizing—publications of eloquent nothingness are splashed across the newsstands, nightly news reports and tabloids of contemporary America.
The sheer quantity of literature, produced in much the same fashion one may produce any other product, resembles the embodiment of a Horkheimer and Adorno nightmare than legitimate forces of critical and creative pursuit. The language of our most popular criticisms is the language of the iron age; we have all but lost our most precious and essential understandings of intellectualism, humanism, and even postmodernism.
In political science, one can literally name the legitimate theorists in one breath: Wolin, Cohen, Roemer, Rawls, Elster, Rogers, Hayek, Mansfield—where is contemporary society’s response to real intellectualism?
Perhaps what is needed is a shift in the equilibrium of critical analyses; where the 1960’s gave rise to some of the most controversial, innovative and influential minds ever, the legacy of the postmoderns has left a responsibility, in a sense—a responsibility that we, if we are to respect their contributions to our intellectual tradition, must assume, examine and act upon. So, forget the introductory texts, the countless politically-jargonized books, the innumerable “best sellers,” and go back to the basics: there is something to be said for great writers and their original work, as I feel that a resurgence of effective and creative academia is directly contingent to the level in which we engage the ideas themselves. Perhaps a new movement is in order?