Postmodernism is the bad conscience of the failed sexual revolution. While this so-called revolution failed to accomplish any deep transformation of our still fundamentally patriarchal values, where it did succeed brilliantly was in the exteriorizing of hypocrisy. The hypocrisy of the old sexual mores was by definition hidden; the new kind is an openly lived hypocrisy, a freely discussed hypocrisy, a hypocrisy that posits finding ways around the old rules (without actually challenging them) as a social liberation, and simply breaking them as a personal one.

I feel almost embarrassed even to be using the term postmodernism, it has come to mean so many different things, and to be such a convenient peg for idle praise and senseless blanket dismissals. But rigorously speaking, it is either a diverse set of theoretical and artistic and discursive currents in diverse fields, tied together by nothing but chronology--or it is what I say it is, the bad conscience of the failed sexual revolution. Freud showed that a society's whole morality hinges around its sexual morality, and that is no less true today.

Freud! How dare I speak approvingly of this target of mandatory slander? He had wide enough appeal during the modernist era, because his critiques of hidden hypocrisies enabled those who wished to twit the moral establishment to enlist him--or a bowdlerized version thereof--as the rebel's patrician friend. Now, however, that hypocrisy is openly admitted, he has lost his social utility, and it has become mandatory to tag him with that poisonous label "dated," beloved of postmoderns, by which inconvenient ideas are dismissed through an ad hominem attack on the author's date of birth. In no sense, though, have the sharpness of Freud's ideas ceased to rise far above, and cut through, the prevailing obscurantist muck; and even if they need to have new attachments fastened (as to a vacuum cleaner) to deal with the new times, they still work. For hidden hypocrisies abound within the inner folds of the open hypocrisies "we" now celebrate. And open sexual hypocrisy itself implies a certain social order and a certain theoretical alignment.

Indeed, the most cunning and deadly aspect of postmodernity is the confusion that enables its most highly placed defenders to pass for free-spirited critics of the social order--when in fact they are its arch-guardians and enforcers. We have seen where this leads: to the endless proliferation of feckless academic rebellions that smash the last barrier to something-or-other without making the slightest effort to really do anything; to the social enthronement of cynicism as the proper response to any and all demands for rigor, or even basic honesty; to the consequent loss of respect for rules and distinctions previously held necessary, not because they prevented their own violation but because they put some limit on it; to the naivete that welcomes thieves into one's house on the grounds that there have always been thieves; to the respectability of fakery, no matter how obvious, so long as the forms and trappings are well observed; culminating in the acceptance of a fraudulent presidency (because why not?) that plays by no previously accepted rules (why should there be rules?), and the slowly escalating reign of terror that has resulted.

Far be it from me, nonetheless, to engage in my own blanket dismissal, especially since many theories frequently labelled postmodern are ones I have made my own; nor do I find Anglophone postmodern thought that hard to understand. Most often it suffers more from banality than obscurity, wielding undoubtedly formidable theoretical apparatuses upon targets easily cracked with far less equipage. This is less symptomatic of deliberate pomposity or obscurity than of an inadequate grasp of the ideas being used.

It is often stated, quite correctly, that a new theoretical vocabulary, in and of itself, brings about decisive changes in thought; it does not follow, however, that a decisive change in thought is achieved by employing a new theoretical vocabulary to reach results already known or easily derived. Rather, such employment is a misuse of the vocabulary that betrays the fact that it has not been truly assimilated. It is symptomatic of a facility with the theory comparable to that of a second language learner who understands but does not speak. When academic rules force her, nonetheless, to open her mouth, what comes out is merely a translation of the discourse of her native tongue. This applies to the vast majority of the more advanced critical theorists of the English-speaking world, those who are not merely tenured but widely admired; for the most part the rest have not even reached this level, and it is their shaky comprehension that makes the admiration possible. Any deliberate obscurity is merely to maintain this situation.

This is all the more disappointing because the theories whose use is attempted are among the most genuinely advanced ones in existence, derived from Continental sources far more potent than their conceptual translations. The usual twenty year lag between an idea's emergence in Paris and its appropriation by Anglo-American academics leaves little cause for confidence in the future, given that the French seem largely to have been coasting on their prior accomplishments since 1980, albeit coasting at comparatively a very high level.

My expose of postmodernism is thus in no way sympathetic to the often xenophobic ridicule of Continental thought that passes for intellectuality among the arriere-garde, nor does it express any desire to "get back to" a positivistic tradition whose pervasive inadequacy to account for the phenomena of language in their actually observed form has been glaringly evident for nearly a century. This failure is radical, and cannot be remedied patchwork-style as analytic philosophers try to do. Nor will all the common-sense appeals in the world suffice to wish away the gaping fissures between meaning and reference revealed by reason--a word too often abandoned to the tender mercies of those who idealize the real, construing it as a pre-given absolute.

Postmodernism's error, then, is not that it refuses the untenable equation of meaning and reference, but rather that, finding they do not equate, it abandons meaning altogether--thus proving its failure to surmount the very referential prejudice it attacks. For meaning insists within language without any need for reference, and is none the worse off. And this meaning does not render itself perpetually impotent and uncapturable by moving in an endless circuit. Though it is true that synchronically it is arranged that way, synchrony by definition is not movement; its actual movement has stopping places, never final but nonetheless irreversible, wherein nuggets of the real escape (Freud's Psychopathology provides perhaps the most startling examples to disturb the reticent). This has nothing to do with reality, still less reference, and the defensive reaction of some postmodernists to this revelation from the ranks of their fellow theorists is instructive--"Don't tell us about anything real, we're the anti-realists, remember?"--a position entertaining in its bald revelation, from those supposedly paid to think, that the beneficiary of the postmodern impulse to exteriorize the hidden can be shifted, in a pinch, from hypocrisy to sheer idiocy.