So, out of sheer boredom it seems, I ventured into my sister’s room to see what she was up to the other day only to find that she had turned on a show called “My Super Sweet 16.” Now, the basic premise is this: insanely rich, insanely superficial kids throw insanely large, insanely expensive parties to celebrate the big 16. In a word, the show is insane.

After watching the show for about 10 minutes, both my sister and I could not comprehend the performance. This sounds odd, and it is—our mental capacities, combined, could not plunge the depths of this seemingly inane MTV reality spoof. Then it hit me. This show, this measly piece of media from the outskirts of some producers failed imagination, was the ultimate culmination of a purely commodified, purely commercialized age. This was the epitome of reality TV: a reality so inundated with the “lights and sounds” of Baudrillard’s work, so reminiscent of the utterly unrepresentable discussed by Derrida and Lyotard, that the only conceivable outlet of intellectual force was to submit to the “staged fake” of Zizek. After all, this can’t be the case, right? These kids can’t be this stupid, this superficial, this obsessed with Gucci, Prada, and Mercedes Benz, right? It was literally inconceivable.

Was this what our culture has degenerated into—a spectacle, a world purely of “lights and sounds,” the hollow essence of a single glimmering, shimmering night? The English language simply does not supply the vocabulary necessary to qualify the utter depravity of these child’s lives. It is a world of country clubs, private airplanes, mansions, and 1.2 million dollar cars—it seethed with the same yuppie-bleakness of upper-Washingtonian culture. Everything about this show, and I literally mean everything, was so ridiculous, so torn away from “reality” or “rationality” that these terms themselves, when used in a critical light, cannot even begin to strip the show of its internal defenses. Indeed, the lexicon of critical tools supplied by postmodernism, even, does little more than inflate the grandiose image of the spectacle itself. It was as though I was throwing water upon rocks.

So what can we do against such unrepresentable superficiality? What can we do when the very subject we attempt to deconstruct has preempted our very language, has the built-in ability to constantly reinvent the limit of its grandeur? What can we do when the system itself is braided with our society’s most deeply-embedded doctrines of commercialism and consumerism; after all, isn’t the pinnacle of the American dream unlimited wealth? I have failed, I feel, in the sense that I do not possess the material necessary to fully surmount the problems I have witnessed—neither work that has come before me nor work of my own is capable of developing a comprehensive criticism to adequately analyze the show.

I suppose I must leave with an admitted irony, then. While I am supplied with an extensive lexicon of philosophical and critical tools—tools that have been compiled over the course of human civilization—it was the spectacle of an MTV reality show that is the ultimate challenge. Where one can identify and deconstruct modern politics, modern socioeconomics, modern international affairs, modern gender studies—essentially, modern veins of every school of thought or societal process there is—one cannot even come close to facing the beast that is “My Super Sweet 16.” So we sit, I suppose, and watch as the beast lumbers closer to Bethlehem, once again caught in the liminality of Yeats poem, waiting, ever so patiently, for the spectacle to issue the second coming. Perhaps we should not ask what we can do to prevent it; perhaps our worry should be: what happens when the beast evolves, as is the necessary impetus behind the survival of a capitalistic venture?

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?