Evangelical postmodernists luxuriate in the sensation that they are on the bleeding, cutting edge. They feel that they have the “out-there-ness” to really make a radical statement to our times. In reality, their story is about as interesting as the one about how the cow ate the cabbage.
By now, I have read a goodish bit of their stuff, and the excited breathlessness over a bunch of nothing reminds me of a story. It is not exactly a metanarrative, but it serves a purpose. I have two uncles who have an impish streak, one of them a minister and the other a psychologist. One time they decided to do something that would illustrate the power of jargon, and the experiment succeeded nobly. They took a bunch of vocabulary from a piece of clinical psychology, cut it all up into individual words, and put different kinds of words in four different cans. The nouns went in one can, the verbs in another, the adverbs in another, and the adjectives in the fourth. They then sat down to “write an article.” Typing “The,” they then reached into the appropriate can, pulled out the kind of word they needed and typed it in. One of my uncles said that the scary thing was that the article they wrote this way hovered perpetually on the threshold of sense. when my other uncle gave it to a colleague, asking him to review it for him, the response he got was, “Harold, that’s deep.”
In dealing with all this deep postmodern stuff, it is hard to escape the notion that a goodly number of people involved have been educated beyond their intelligence. They don’t see that heaps and piles of jargon reveal nothing more than heaps and piles of jargon. And those who are not in over their heads are sinister. Try this one on from Raschke’s book. “Just as Einstein’s construct of ‘curved space’ within a space-time ‘continuum’ resisted common sense, yet worked well mathematically, so Deleuze’s suggestion of ‘curved concepts’ within a plane of immanence may function more felicitously than any paradigm of predication.”
Exactly. I myself have had it up to here with infelicitous paradigms of predication not stepping aside to curved concepts when they want their turn on the plane of immanence. Also, I don’t like how ice cream cartons tear off when you try to open them, leaving little strips of paper lying on the ice cream. You know?