Making Fun of POMO Chris
Making Fun of POMO
Chris Chanson writes:
Chip Morningstar wrote a great piece about literary criticism in the early 1990s called “How to Deconstruct Almost Anything” after his experience at the Second International Conference on Cyberspace in 1991.
This is an amusing personal sociology of Post-Modern criticism.
Ah, let’s deconstruct that sentence! “Amusing” is a gutless word, commitment-free. That’s because I have mixed feelings about the article. First, it is genuinely amusing in the sense of being humorous and interesting. But it focuses its fury on the excesses of POMOism, an easy target. And yet, Chip also genuinely struggles with it, trying to find what’s of value and where it goes off the rails. His explanation of why academics have developed a remarkably hermetic vocabulary strikes me as right. And he writes:
The Pseudo Politically Correct term that I would use to describe the mind set of postmodernism is “epistemologically challenged”: a constitutional inability to adopt a reasonable way to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff.
This is exactly right, but it — I hesitate to say it — needs to be deconstructed. POMO at its best challenges the comfortable notion of “reasonable.” Buried in that term is an appeal to a privileged standpoint that is usually deeply conservative: facts, rationality or common sense.
Believe me, I am deeply sympathetic to Chip’s reaction to POMO. His description of what it’s like to swim among these fish mirrors my own experiences. But an appeal to the “reasonable” ignores what’s most important about POMO analysis. POMO tells us that all understanding is interpretive, that other interpretations are possible, and that our interpretation seems right not because it is right but because it’s our interpretation.
It seems like we have two choices: we fall into an indecisive relativism that says that all views are equally valid or we sprain our brains trying to see how there could be a way to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff. To say that there’s a “reasonable way” to do so seems to me to miss the point because it assumes the very thing that we should be stubbing our toes trying to think through.
On the other foot (er, hand), I personally think it’s a mistake to assume that we have to choose among fundamental interpretations. We don’t get to fly above all interpretations, including our own, picking and choosing among them. We are our stance in the world, a stance given to us by history, culture, language and accident. So, the lesson I take from POMO is that absolutism is a mistake, that humility is warranted, and that we always have to decide among uncertain choices that are themselves delivered by the accident of history.
So, how do we decide whether the post-feminist-meta-Marx-pre-Freudian interpretation of the Book of Job is worth our time? I don’t think POMO actually helps us. It’s better at freeing up creative interpretations that challenge the status quo than at enabling us to choose among those interpretations. My guess is that such decisions actually come after the fact: we’re inspired/energized/heartened by the critique we just read and only afterwards do we try to “justify” why that critique is worthy of belief. Belief is the last in the series. And it’s the least interesting. More important: Does it excite you? Does it reveal the world in a way that matters? Does it set the hairs on your neck on edge? Does it give you a chill?
Could any lesson of the Web be clearer? Belief is nice, but it’s not why 500 million of us are here dishing the dirt.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
