POMO from Pisgah
And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah,
I feel it is proper to take notice of AKMA’s book, What is Postmodern Biblical Criticism? on this blog. I don’t think I’m sub-, in-, or per-verting the bearing of his text, or shall we say, the text published under his inscribed name, to suggest that one of the derivative foundations crumbling in the background of his sketch of postmodernism is the entire system of intellectual property rights as currently interpreted by the United Corporations of America.
And since a prime directive of IMproPRieTies (the major dept. of commonplaces) is to examine the various apologia for intellectual property – "examine"? ok, ridicule might be more accurate – discussing a work purporting to introduce learners to contemporary insights into the discombobulation of property (and much else) as we know it seems entirely apt.
The 81-page book, published in 1995 by Fortress Press, is written to the learner seeking an introduction to the thorny bramble of postmodernism. The author, at that time teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary, generously chose substance over style, and generations of readers will be forever grateful.
If you want a taste of Derrida without the French frippery, if you’d like to swim with deconstructors while helpfully buoyed by Scottish parsimony of expression, this might be the book for you.
Style: ego-less tone – not diffident – confident, but unassuming; none of the snazzy, Watch-me-deconstruct-this-Ma! verbal gesticulations of so many academicians; an almost neutral tone in keeping with the notion of a primer geared to practical help; guidance, not about showing off.
Indeed, for a book about POMO, it does very little showing whatsoever. The examples are few, and while obviously chosen with care, there are certain stretches of abstract discourse when I suspect some readers might say, “an example might go well here.”
This is not to say the book shies away from making things clear – just that it does so without many of the vivid rhetorical ploys we have become used to in incendiary tomes. And make no mistake, this is incendiary stuff, only, it might not seem so at first glance, muffled under all that tartan.
The stylistic oddity runs even deeper, given that one of the broad effects of postmodern thinking is to metamorphose all telling to showing, all axiomatic utterance to example (my formulation, not AKMA's). If it is not possible to use language to propound universal, objective truth (the sole exception, of course, being this statement), then every utterance, whether Hegel or Mr. Ed is speaking, can only aspire to being a position - a concrete, probably aberrant example of some destabilized if not discredited aspiration to generality. There is no theory, only ideological praxis; no discourse that is not always already a performance; no telling that is not in “fact” a masked showing. The disturbing effects of Postmodernism – when truly actualized – are revealed in the drunken walk taken by Modern Certitude when the spinning top of its equilibrium is ever so slightly knocked off kilter.
So we have a brief primer introducing us to the powerful negative thrust of postmodern thought and deconstruction – a handbook that eschews nearly all rhetorical flourish, that tells rather than shows, and calmly talks rather than putting on the song and dance which, it tells us, have been newly re-legitimated in view of the suspension of the boundaries that allowed academic and scientific authority to hold sway under the Modern regime.
I.e., the book’s method of exposition could not be more unlike the thing being exposed. (For a more typical postmodern text, look here.) Is this apparent incongruity between form and content - style and import – significant? What does it signify? Here’s where the interpretive going gets a bit thick.
The text does offer other clues that might contribute to a better understanding of this discrepancy. For one thing, it unostentatiously ignores most of the standard trappings of academic discourse: it brandishes no footnotes, defends no thesis purporting to bring us something “new.” Annotated bibliographies are placed at the end of each chapter, but the text offers little in the way of discussion of specific proponents or opponents of postmodernism. Derrida, Barthes, Lyotard and a handful of others make brief appearances, but the book chooses to focus less on individuals than on a few of the core ideas that they seem to share: the loss of foundation, of totality, and of illusions of access to transcendental truth.
Of course, reasons of state within the field of Biblical hermeneutics (or theological studies more generally) might have caused AKMA to wish to understate the volatile nature of some of his subject’s implications. Still, I kept asking myself, why doesn't he take the subversive insights he describes further? Why does he not spell out their implications, especially for the interpretation of a sacred book, a book that has been held to be the Word of God?
In a few places, he does examine some of the ways in which new readings, new insights open up once our certified academically-accepted historical methods of interpreting the Book are overturned. But mostly he steers clear of showing how, for example, he comes to terms with thinking that many would say undercuts all possibility of religious authority.
If I had to venture a guess, I would say that apart from any conscious decision to avoid waving a flag already so red as to be sufficiently provocative to certain eminent gray bulls, there is a larger stylistic tradition behind this primer – one which AKMA is profoundly in touch with. It’s the sermo humilis, – the style of the gospels, of Chaucer’s Parson, the rough, unadorned way that provoked the contempt of Renaissance humanists, but was the object of veneration and awe by people like Augustine and Dante.
It is a manner of speaking directly to the reader, not down to him, or from an elevated platform, but simply, openly, without the grace notes of condescension, inside-jokesterism, self-aware ironic meta-reflection, or “I’d love to explain this but it would take far longer than we have time for now"-ism.
The book explores its key ideas with a calm, open gaze. It makes delicate references to large and potent negations, but instead of filling out their implications, it leaves them to reverberate with the reader.
And reverberate they do. One by one, the comforting totalizations of history, authority, selfhood and the rest begin to lose their sharp edges; tectonic shifts make hash of habitual defenses; before long, as the shields of our belief systems fall like dominoes, “we” are standing uncertainly in what looks awfully like mid-air. I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want right about now is some character doing Clever Things with Words. What one wants is the confident hand of a friend saying, in effect, “It’s ok, come on in (or out), it’ll be alright.”
And here’s where, for me, the book demonstrates its postmodern pedigree: by forbearing to show us what all this “means” to him, AKMA opens the way for us to confront it ourselves. He takes us up to a certain Pisgah-like point, then stands aside. This is a form of authority that is curious indeed. It is a sacrifice of authorial glory in the name of something more important, which can be called an exemplary teaching.
Don’t take my word for it: Buy the book, read it, then compare it with the best selling guru-ific treatises of the hour. With all their answers, all their catchy metaphors, their stories of apocalyptic, Yeatsian collapse, the gurus are just arguing, pretending, cavorting, posturing, shilling.
They are not teaching. In the Dionysian ferment of our postmodern bouillabaisse, this is one distinction with a difference I will fight to maintain.
On quickly to my quibbles:
1. Citing Lyotard’s definition of POMO as “incredulity toward metanarratives” certainly puts the stress on the challenges to belief that happen when POMO works its magic upon the magniloquent stasis of Modernism. But POMO does make its own contours hard to pin down; it seems more like a detonation, an act of undoing. What comes ''after'' deconstruction? Is it possible to build, to have any foothold from which to proceed?
2. Basically POMO is epistemological dynamite in Pandora’s enticing box. It opens the door to pluralities of modes of thinking, but what if some of these modes return to earlier forms of totalitarianism?
3. The POMO fondness for bricolage seems to put every bit of creative work ever made on the same plane, and then excuse itself from having any other relation to all of it except one of formal re-arrangement. The seeming abdication of all judgment of value makes one think that much POMO art, at any rate, will have a very short lifespan.
4. There is stated in various ways throughout the text the possibility for a remnant of rigor, of sound judgment, after all the props of modernism – the text, the reader, the author, etc. – have been removed. But this seems more like a wish – a desideratum – than like something conclusively shown. If one puts it all back on the audience – if one says, e.g., "the better reading will be the one that persuades more people of its validity," one shifts to a rhetorical reality in which it can become dizzyingly unclear whether an interpretation thrives because it is closer to what many others agree is accurate, or because the interpreter happens to speak well, and wears a nice tie. (This is probably just a clumsy restatement of David Weinberger's question for AKMA.)
These and more are, of course, the sorts of issues that POMO raises whenever its Modern critics get their Apollonian dander up. That doesn't make the issues any less urgent.
At the very least, there’s room for a sequel.
