The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

Once again, postmodernism took this extreme to an even greater extreme in which the theory upstaged the subject matter and became a genre of performance art in itself. Postmodernist scholars, taking off from the critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault, distrust the demand for “linguistic transparency” because it hobbles the ability “to think the world more radically” and puts a text in danger of being turned into a mass-market commodity.59 This attitude has made them regular winners of the annual Bad Writing Contest, which “celebrates the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles.”60 In 1998, first prize went to the lauded professor of rhetoric at Berkeley, Judith Butler, for the following sentence: The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power. Dutton, whose journal Philosophy and Literature sponsors the contest, assures us that this is not a satire. The rules of th...