ABSTRACT
Postmodernism is not dead. It lives in disguise in many places. It and its offspring, however, have left the humanities on life support. These offshoots, too numerous to name across many disciplines, all rely on PoMo’s basic premise: variations of linguistic constructivism. The radical skepticism, the insistence that humans are ‘constructed’, the distrust of language, the erosion of trust in science have all played their part deleteriously in higher education. It is not inherently wrong to introduce skepticism, playfulness, and discursive practices to any field, from anthropology to education. But one main casualty has been irony. While claiming to wield irony as some corrective against ‘Truth’, they evidently have forgotten how irony works. Irony is not the simple disassembly of dissembling. Its structure is one of opposition. A character, for example, may expect her invention to grant eternal life. If it kills her, it’s ironic. Makes her sick? That’s coincidence. Calling all validity or rationality into question is hardly ironic. It is coincidentally skeptical. What is the ironic structural opposition to coincidental skepticism? It doesn’t exist. Therefore, the PoMo variations claim ‘irony’ while not understanding it. Alanis Morrissette’s song, ‘Ironic’ 1995, contains no irony, which was unintentionally ironic. PoMo variations share this mistake. Coincidental and convenient skepticism wielded under a liberal banner for ‘just causes’ severely erodes the inclusionary ethos that liberalism requires.
