Various folks have linked to this New York Times piece in which various critical theorists glumly contemplate their own near-total irrelevance. In part, of course, this was inevitable. “Theory” was always eminently mockable, and since the peak of its influence in the mid 80s it’s been subjected to more than its share of well deserved ridicule. If pomo had never existed, I imagine that the right would’ve had to invent it: it made a spectacular whipping boy.

But just as the pomoristocrats are belatedly acknowleding that almost nobody takes them seriously, we find ourselves in a time in which deconstructionist analysis has the most to offer public debate. Ironically (and how else could it be?), pomo is finally needed for precisely the same reason it now seems least relevant. We are living through the rebirth of the master narrative.

During the early Cold War, world affairs were neatly organized. Almost all conflicts anywhere could be seen through the lens of the grand battle between communism and capital, interpreted as subplots to the titanic story of the tension between the Soviet Union and the United States. When the great enemy wobbled and toppled, we found ourselves (we thought) at the “end of history.” (I think this was subtly reflected in the music of the early 90s, but that’s another post…) The late-90s tech boom and the insane optimism that accompanied it sort of gave us a new narrative. But it was at least in part a narrative about the end of narratives: part of what the Internet would bring was greater fragmentation and decentralization. It was good news, but not a good story—Red Riding Hood without the wolf.

But that all ended on September 11. We’ve got a new narrative now, a titanic tale about the Clash of Civilizations that makes the communist/capitalist showdown look like a household squabble over balancing the checkbook. The administration is itself under the sway of the conservative crypto-cousins of the pomos—Straussian hawks who run a positively Qur’anic foreign policy, with zahir public justifications spiced with subtle allusions to the batin plan. When in recent history have we been more in need of some skillful deconstruction?

Part of the problem is that the new narrative is quite powerful—not least because punctuated by a devastating foreign attack on American soil. The public mood is not friendly to skepticism just now. But perhaps the larger part of the problem is that postmodernism sabotaged itself with its own jargon-laden silliness. Like the Pythagoreans, who simultaneously developed cutting-edge mathematics and loony mysticism, the pomos wedded deconstructionist techniques—useful tools for teasing out a discourse’s hidden assumptions and masked power relations—to a preposterous, irrationalist general philosophy. Little wonder that the pomos took up residence in comparative lit. departments, but never gained any foothold in American philosophy programs. (Even pomo-superstar Richard Rorty added a philosophy appointment to his comparative lit. professorship only “by courtesy.”) Maybe what we need is a new breed of Enlightenment postmodernists. What’s that you say? An oxymoron? A contradiction? To paraphrase Walter from The Big Lebowski “who’s the postmodernist now?”