1. “Unfortunately, ‘the death of the Author’ has led to the implicit dismissal of ‘value’ as a criterion. We have been taught to look for ‘the rules of classical narrative,’ for genre patterns, motifs, recurring iconography, to study works ‘scientifically’ as cultural products (which of course they are). This discipline has been of great importance: it has greatly increased our awareness of the basic raw materials upon which a genre defines itself and out of which individual films are built. But beyond it remains, or should remain—must remain if we are to retain any belief in human creativity and if works are to mean more to us than mere specimens for dissection—the question of value, and that question hinges inevitably on notions of personal authorship.”

Robin Wood, Rio Bravo, 2003
 

2. We still believe that art holds political and communicative power. We do not believe, however, that in seeking inspiration from art existing outside of consumer culture that we are relegating ourselves to elitism. Poststructuralism began, constructively, as a study of the factors comprising the culture. To put all forms of expression on the same plane (i.e., they all perpetuate the same culture) strips serious art of political and personal relevance.
 

3. Taken to their logical conclusions, postmodernism and deconstruction represent dead ends. Part of the problem may derive from the fact that they announce themselves in terms of what they follow, rather than in terms of what they propose.
 

4. Postmodernism seems built on the disillusionment with the possibility of redemption—a stance that registers as both recognizably human and unforgivably cowardly.
 

5. The blind acceptance of postmodern rhetoric by many contemporary students might be the great irony of our generation. To wholeheartedly agree that the only way to respond to aesthetics (or philosophy, history, etc.) is through critique is to render critique virtually irrelevant, since it no longer exists in opposition to anything. So often do classroom discussions seem to lose sight of any constructive end and instead spiral into critique after critique.
 

6. Antonio Gramsci—if not the man who introduced the word hegemony to political discourse, certainly the most prominent political theorist to discuss it—often stresses in his Prison Notebooks that hegemony is not a negative concept in and of itself. It is a societal given, needed for any political or cultural organization to agree upon and perpetuate some common beliefs. Should a hegemonic order prove to be negative, it is our duty to question it, if not work towards its destruction. Merely pointing out that an aesthetic, if broken down to its base components, reflects a hegemonic order is not enough. That is to say, everything in a functioning society or work of art reflects a hegemonic order of some sort.

Even if an aesthetic irrefutably conveys a social order contrary to one’s worldview, that is not to say it has no informative value. (This may sound like common sense, but it is a point often lost in the current postmodernist discourse.) Take the lingering controversies over Hemingway’s writing, for example. Of course, there are misogynistic tendencies throughout. But what exists underneath these tendencies? A valuable portrait of a common form of masculinity, for one thing. To remain in one’s interpretation attached to the surface misogyny is to remain just that: superficial.
 

7. One of the great contributions of postmodernism is its humbling insistence that all truths are relative to a set of beliefs. We are no longer in pursuit of an innate truth that exists beyond ourselves; we understand that human existence is not static and neither is an ideal of beauty.

At the same time, human beings have been united for countless centuries by the common unsatiated desire for something more (be it “higher” or “deeper,” depending on one’s preferred metaphor). Postmodern thought tends to trivialize this desire, if not ignore it altogether.
 

8. The politics of representation are often a detriment to the appreciation of aesthetics. Not only do they deny the ways in which art can reflect or encourage universal experience (an outdated or idealistic consideration, perhaps, but one that nevertheless explains an inspiring and unifying effect that the arts have had outside the academy) the politics of representation reduce a variety of groups to the labels that the academy is purportedly trying to erase.
 

9. If individuals are in a position to announce their marginality, one could argue that they are not truly marginalized.
 

10. Amongst the most offensive poststructuralist clichés, one in particular stands out: “When an artist creates a work, it belongs to everybody.” For one thing, this approach strips art and artists of social responsibility. (Should art have no definite meaning, connected to, but not necessarily interchangeable with, the ideology of its creator, even Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will could be interpreted as a humanist tract.) Further, it denies the desire for communication between artist and audience.

To continue Fredric Jameson’s assertion that postmodernism represents the ideology of latter-day capitalism: It should be noted the idea of a work of art belonging to everybody is in fact a misnomer. Philosophy being, of course, indefinite, the statement should really read, “A work of art could belong to everybody”—which sounds more like an advertising slogan than an ideology, let alone an individualized approach to aesthetics. In fact, the idea of art belonging to everybody—rather than the more inclusive idea of art being shared by everybody—is essentially the same thing as commodifying it. And art cannot inspire if the audience’s role becomes internalizing it like an ulcer.
 

11. Cultural relativism at first touted itself as a stance that stood outside of all dogma, but taken to its natural conclusions, it argues the absolutist position that everything is relative. This undermines the process of working towards a universal cause, even one which is not absolutist in nature.
 

12. Even in the most visionary post-modern art (such as Cindy Sherman’s photography) there is a sense of irrefutable despair. The artist recognizes pre-existing forms and even demonstrates an intriguing use/deconstruction of them. Yet there is no vision of new forms and, by extension, ways of seeing the world.
 

13. In one class discussion, a classmate make the following assertion: “The Virgin Mary is obviously a symbol of repressed female sexuality.”

This is bullshit, the most rigorously contemptuous of real people that poststructuralist analysis will often validate. The Virgin Mary is, among other things, a symbol of hope, beauty, faith, purity, compassion, allegiance, maternity and devotion to countless people, practicing and otherwise. To claim this figure as the pinnacle of a narrow-minded theoretical argument (After all, is it inconceivable that some women who are not sexually repressed still admire the Virgin Mary?) is to dance on the heads of angels dancing on the heads of pins. It is, simply put, unfeeling and arrogant.
 

14. One problem with postmodernist disciples in the contemporary academy is when they equate any form of representation with cultural subjugation and assert that nothing exists outside of this model. Yet if representation is power and we have no means of combating it, “we are thus put down as pawns of structures, rather than masters of them” (Newton Garver and Seung-Chong Lee, Derrida and Wittgenstein). Running through much postmodern thought is a sort of pseudo-Marxism that, deep down, looks forward to a freer society but cannot envision a single means of working towards it.
 

15. At heart we feel threatened by post-modernity, since it implies that our talents are irrelevant.
 

16. In one of our high school English classes, the teacher would introduce each novel studied by handing out a synopsis of the author’s exact intentions for that novel. This was, in fact, a sign of the teacher’s laziness, since he presented the author’s intention as the sole explanation of the work and turned the students’ job of interpretation into rote learning. In the poststructuralist school, one encounters the opposite problem: When every interpretation is potentially correct, the dialogue concerning aesthetics has no focus. One could also argue that this empowers the analyst at the expense of the aesthetic, reducing any and all art to a template for a theoretical approach.
 

17. Is it the ultimate paradox of contemporary society that our increased access to information is coupled with a widespread feeling of alienation from society? One way to reconcile oneself with this paradox is to deny one’s political/social affiliations and retreat into an extensive record collection and existentialist literature. Indeed, latter-day capitalism and consumer society at-large depends on us to be disengaged; and the failure of postmodernism is that it is more than happy to perpetuate the phenomenon through its corpse-cold analysis of inescapable power dynamics and its consolation prize of positionality.
 

18. In a completely poststructural academic program, Miami Vice becomes as valid a subject for study as Dostoevsky. In fact, there exists a 25-page essay that argues for Miami Vice as a seminal post-modern work; one of us even encountered it in a class. The philosophy often lends itself to this sort of inadvertent self-parody, in which the total lack of value judgment leads to the rigorous study of trash at the expense of epic aesthetic achievements. (Even if one dislikes Crime and Punishment and enjoys Miami Vice, one can easily replace these examples with other extremes of inspiration and commercial product to feel that his/her preferences are being mocked.)

To take a page from any philosopher ranging from Socrates to Bertrand Russell: If Miami Vice is the epitome of postmodernism and Miami Vice is trash, then postmodernism is trash (Propositional logic, law of transitivity: P yields Q; Q yields R; therefore P yields R).
 

19. “The problem is not that academics have abandoned their sacred high-culture responsibilities for a channel changer and a night at the disco, but that in so doing they have uncritically reaffirmed the mass media’s favorite myths about itself. Discovering, after much intellectual twisting and turning, that Madonna is exactly the rebel that she and her handlers imagine her to be, is more an act of blithe intellectual complicity than of the ‘radicalism’ to which the Madonna analysts believe they are contributing.”

Thomas Frank, “The CultureTrust Generation,” 1993
 

20. “The steady flow of signifiers” that makes up the poststructuralist conception of aesthetics denies a sense of individuality to art and artists. Further, this conception renders purposeful art at best aimless and at worst nonsensical.
 

21. Another benefit of postmodern and poststructuralist analysis is that they finally made irrelevant the division between “high” and “low” art. In our time, it is hardly controversial to say that Tchaikovsky and the Sex Pistols are equally worthy of study. Unfortunately, this stance has the potential to turn all important artists into academic commodities; further, it threatens to eliminate the difference between serious art and consumer culture.

Consider the fate of a masterful, albeit highly theoretical contemporary aesthetic: the late-period films of Jean-Luc Godard, as complex and impassioned as Beethoven. These films could, conceivably, reach more people than they are marketed to (and even change the world,as their creator once vowed to do), yet rarely does one encounter discussions of them in the postmodern academy, as they have not been marketed to mass culture and thus do not embody the ways in which the dominant “hegemonic order” is being perpetuated.
 

22. Not only does post-modernist discourse discourage academics from determining value, but it cheapens the consistency of approach. There is a premium placed on contention above validity, in other words.

One could connect this problem to the frustrating position in which many academics find themselves—that of having to publish—and this may force some into arguing on behalf of almost anything at the expense of ideological validity. The greater number of publications (and, by extension, contentions) cannot be traced to the rise of post-modern thought, although there is a certain symbiosis present, equivalent to the parallel phenomena of the Western ghettoization of the arts and the public’s growing disregard for intellectuals.
 

23. A wild animal is taken from its natural habitat and put in a cage. Within no time, it realizes that it has been captured. Soon after that, it says to itself one day, pensively, “My bars of my cage are certainly terrifying!”

The following day it begins to deliberate. “The bars of my cage are certainly terrifying… but perhaps they are lovely as well,” it says, quietly singing these words to a tune that it has invented. In the preceding allegory, the caged animal represents the contemporary academic, and the songs that it sings to itself are postmodernism.
 

24. It isn’t just rationality or language that separates human beings from animals; restlessness is also vital to our peculiar existence. Simply put, we get bored, and we dream of experiences beyond our own. Art ennobles these dreams, or at least betrays commonality through dreaming. (Consider the romantic fates of Kurt Vonnegut’s Howard Campbell or Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, recounting stories and life lessons before execution.) This is something to embrace.
 

25. Dissociating emotional response—which can be the first step in determining the personal or political value of an aesthetic—from the discussion of the arts is a denial of what art sets out to affect.
 

26. “How can one not recognize, in the passionate zeal with which the post-structuralist insists that every text, his own included, is caught in a fundamental ambiguity and flooded with the ‘dissemination’ of the intertextual process, the signs of an obstinate denial (in the Freudian sense of Verneinung); a barely hidden acknowledgement of the fact that one is speaking from a safe position, a position not menaced by the decentred textual process?

“…It would appear that the poststructuralist poetic style itself—the style of continuous ironic self-commentary and self-distance, the way of constantly subverting what one was supposed to say literally—exists only to embellish some basic theoretical propositions. That is why post-structuralist commentaries often produce an effect of ‘bad infinity’ in the Hegelian sense: an endless quasi-poetical variation on the same theoretical assumption, a variation which does not produce anything new.”

Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 1989
 

27. Postmodernism constructs a back door through which fundamentalist ideologies can enter and take over the house.
 

28. Postmodernism is a recycling plant without aluminum cans. In this plant, we recycle ghosts.
 

29. Proposition: Kid (of the largely forgotten early 90s rap duo Kid ‘n’ Play) is simply Dostoevsky’s cranium turned upside down: clean-shaven, and yet with a huge patch of hair, branching out wholly vertically…
 

30. The desire to deconstruct every element of an aesthetic represents a form of cultural resistance—a futile, if not paradoxical pursuit. We should enter the culture we live in rather than comment on it from the sidelines, and within this imperative are two related realizations:

a) The attempt to escape a system of orientalism by announcing one’s marginality is to actually perpetuate the larger order, since it plays by the ground rules of the culture which marginalize groups and individuals in the first place.

b) The academic embrace of unabashed consumer culture (as subject for study or even as a “good time,” removed from any ethical and social responsibility) is little more than arrogant spectatorship—an obnoxious phenomenon on two counts.
 

31. It is our responsibility, especially as students of aesthetics, to engage with the ideologies we encounter, if not draw upon them in our morals and conduct.
 

32. The study of the limits of human reason can be traced back to Immanuel Kant. Rather than feel intimidated by the limitations, however, we should take inspiration in the power of reason, as epitomized by artists such as Frida Kahlo and Walt Whitman, who discovered revelation and even transcendence, respectively, through nurturing their particular views of the world.
 

33. Defining aesthetics as the means through which artists communicate with their audiences, the desire to attain transcendence through art is inherently communicative, communal.

Some questions remain, however: Is it still possible to accept a firm foundation of beliefs necessary for transcendence? But if we no longer bother to accept any ethical stance (regardless of whether or not it leads to wisdom, a hold-over of existential thought that we are more than happy to adopt), do we give up on transcendence as well?
 

34. The goal of aesthetics as well as academics should be to construct a perception of truth out of reflections of experience. There is a role for the dissection of the culture within this pursuit, although it should be considered a detour rather than a destination. The academy still has an important role to fulfill: interpreting the humanities and reaching helpful conclusions about them, allowing the larger society to better understand the world around them. Inherent in this goal is the possibility of cultural improvement.
 

35. Building any future requires unity, collective belief.
 

36. Our approach to ideology may be summed up as a (re-materialized) Pascalian wager. While we recognize the relativity of any system of beliefs, we do not want to give up on them all, lest we give up on the hope of changing the world.
 

37. Most people choose to subscribe to one ideology or another (even if unwittingly) because it helps them to make sense of their lives and goals. To honor and engage with the ideology voiced by a particular aesthetic is thus a boldly humanistic gesture, one that empowers art and audience alike.
 

38. Perhaps it is fair to generalize that post-modernism strives to establish diversity where earlier intellectual movements strove to establish unity. One musn’t forget, however, that the latter quality can enhance the former, and vice-versa. For example, hip-hop, an aesthetic and social movement that has managed to incorporate traditions as varied as reggae and graffiti art, has coalesced into what Chuck D. called “Black America’s CNN.”
 

39. We do not want to return to modernism as such. But we have realized the limitations of postmodernism, and if a theoretical synthesis of the two cannot be reached, then we are willing to settle for a practical one—in effect, a new intellectual movement.
 

40. One should also remember that Gramsci wrote of “catharsis”—“the passage from ‘objective to subjective’ and from ‘necessity to freedom.’” While he referred explicitly to the birth of a revolutionary consciousness, his words could also serve as inspiration for contemporary students of aesthetics:

“[At the time of catharsis] structure ceases to be an external force which crushes man, assimilates him to itself and makes him passive; and is transformed into a means of freedom, an instrument to create a new ethico-political form and a source of new initiatives.”
 

Alex Freeburg ‘05

Dan Ganin ‘04

Colin Kennedy ‘04

Ben Sachs ‘05
 

Note: Several other students contributed to the writing of this piece (either through participating in conversations that yielded the article or through indirect influence) and have chosen to remain anonymous.