Farewell to a Fad.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Postmodernism

Before we bury postmodernism, let us praise it--for a nanosecond anyway, because this was surely one of the least lovable fads to hit American campuses since drinking-till-you-barf. You know, I hope, who I'm talking about.

They favored menacing all-black garments, accessorized with a knowing smirk.

They considered themselves members of the left--in fact, its theoretical avant garde--but their idea of activism never went beyond "deconstructing" some stray "text" for latent biases.

In the end, they didn't even have the grace to concede that they'd been beaten, insisting instead that there never was any postmodernism anyway, just a few "postmodernisms" here and there.

Credit for squelching this peculiar trend goes largely to one man, NYU physicist--and it should be mentioned, leftist--Alan Sokal. Three years ago, he submitted a parody of postmodernist thought to the postmodernist journal Social Text. The article purported to mock, in true postmodernist fashion, the silly old "dogma" that "there exists an external world," asserting instead that "physical `reality'" is just "a social and linguistic construct." The Social Text editors, thrilled to have a physicist defecting to their side, published the piece. In short order, the hoax was revealed and, to what should have been the terminal mortification of pomos everywhere, found its way into The New York Times.

Then, just a few months ago, Sokal and the Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont delivered the coup de grace with their new book, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, in which they topple the towering prophets of French postmodernism--including Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Jean Baudrillard--for their bizarre and pompous gibberish.

To cite just one among thousands of equally juicy examples--this from the still-stylish Lacan:

"Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance [ecstasy], not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to the [square root of -1] of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier [square root of -1]."

So what does it matter if some French guy wants to think of his penis as the square root of minus one? Not much, except that on American campuses, especially the more elite ones, such utterances were routinely passed off as examples of boldly...