Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

by Helen Pluckrose

As befits one who is radically skeptical of the ability of language to convey meaning at all, Bhabha’s writing is notoriously difficult to read. In 1998, he won second place in Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest—beaten only by Judith Butler—for the sentence, If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline, soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.17 This bewildering sentence does have a meaning—a thoroughly postmodern one. Broken down, it means that racist, sexual jokes are told by colonizers initially to control a subordinate group, but that, ultimately, they are attempts by colonizers to convince themselves that their own ways of talking about things make sense because they are secretly terrified that they don’t. This particular mind-reading claim permeates Bhabha’s work and underlies his belief that the rejection of stable descriptive categories can subvert colonial dominance.18 This is, of course, entirely unfalsifiable and, when expressed as above, incomprehensible.