The domination of postmodern theory

I just love it when the left actually challenges its own intellectual problems, the way that they have tied themselves into knots over the use of language in political discourse is something that they have for a long time been mocked for by commentators such as myself. Now we find that one of their own has finally said enough!

The domination of postmodern theory, especially in humanities courses, is setting up a generation of students for educational failure, University of NSW professor Gavin Kitching argues in a book to be published this week. Based on an analysis of all honours dissertations written by politics students at the university over 23 years, Professor Kitching concludes that the students had abused their intelligence in writing their theses.

In the book, The Trouble With Theory, he says even the best students produce radically incoherent ideas and embrace the “extraordinary proposition” that language uses people rather than being a tool manipulated by people. Professor Kitching, who describes himself as being politically left-wing, said postmodernism had become identified with being left-wing.

“It’s postmodernism as intellectual radicalism – if you’re on the Left politically you have to believe in all of this,” he said.

“There are other traditions of being left-wing which respect the facts, which don’t believe the world is simply what we believe it to be, that think if you’re going to make political arguments, you have to have evidence to support them. I want to reinstate that kind of rigorous, realistic Left liberalism.”

Professor Kitching, a professor of politics and fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, argues that postmodernism locks students into inflexible and emotionally manipulative definitions of words in a way that ignores the nuanced nature of language and often defies common sense.

This means that terms like terrorist, asylum seeker and gay are used to create stereotypes and not simply to refer to a group of people or to challenge the stereotype. He argues that postmodernist theory does “active intellectual damage” to able students and clouds their thinking.

“Postmodernism is addling the brain and wasting the time of some our brightest young people,” he says.

What is the bet that this book will be loudly denounced and that the author is accused of being in the pay of “big oil” or whatever the academic equivalent to that is?

Lovely to see the postmodernist othodoxy challenged and I look forward to reading the book.

Cheers Comrades