Post-Modern Justice

Start your morning with a cup of coffee and political satire!

Now that I’m sober (yay!) and can actually read again, I decided to pull a book off the shelf I’ve been waiting to shred into for a while now and if you’ll join me along for the ride, you are more than invited. The victim is Charles Jencks ‘What is Post-Modernism?’ and I will be dissecting it through the lense of the American criminal justice system. So grab your cigarettes and coffee and let’s begin.

One prominent feature of postmodernism is its approach to how we interact with narrative structures. Denying the existence of objective truth in favor of what it calls a 'metanarrative' neatly aligns with the ideology's predominent focus on power structures. Whoever or whatever [institution] is in power is de facto justified to define and act according to its own preferred "metanarrative." We can see this played out in American criminal courts quite literally all the time, every day. When a defendent is brought before the judge they are limited to very few responses: "Yes, your honor." "No, your honor." "Guilty." "Innocent." "No-Contest." That's all that can be said after a judge reads aloud a summary of the crime(s) you have been accused of no matter how far from objective reality they may be. There is no room for a defendant to explain themselves or speak on their own behalf, and if they have the good luck to have an attorney that will do so, it will be behind closed doors rather that in the official hearing itself. This is a perfect example of postmodernism at play.

And speaking of absurd academic wordplay, let’s talk about a neologism I am grateful to have never heard until now, “cognitariat.” Supposedly, this refers to the new “working class,” a mashup of “cognition” and “proletariat”—used to describe those whose labor is primarily mental. It conveniently lumps together freelance writers, Uber drivers, junior attorneys, data analysts, adjunct professors, and Harvard grads with six-figure salaries and ergonomic desk chairs. If this is the new proletariat, what do you call the immigrants who clean the toilets when these poor unfortunate souls go home to their NYC studio apartments?

Take a public defender, for example. Sure, they’re underpaid and drowning in cases. But they’re also lawyers — literal officers of the court, draped in degrees and cloaked in institutional credibility. And yet, they might claim a spot in the cognitariat, as if their stress eating and courtroom fatigue place them in the same boat as the single mom defending herself or having her court date reset because her public defender didn’t show up.

This is also evident in the national moan for student debt relief. People who got the golden ticket — college — now insist they're the underclass because Sallie Mae sends them emails. And don’t get me wrong, the system is rigged, but let’s not pretend someone with a law degree is in the same category as someone who never got past tenth grade because they had to work full time. No one held a gun to their head and forced them to become a lawyer. Truckers and plumbers get paid just fine and there’s a solid argument that their work is far more morally respectable and they certainly aren’t pretending to be underprivileged.

Okay so I’m not even through with the introduction so I guess this is going to be a multi-article piece but I have to share this quote from the end of the introduction before I move on…

“I would like to christen this a “transitext”, or “metamorphibook”, or “rescription”, or “evolvotome” — but I doubt such terms would find favour.”

It’s like watching a guy struggle to put on his turtleneck while trying to reinvent the dictionary in a mid-manic episode. Like, “evolvotome”? Sir, are you okay?? You can feel him trying to coin a term that’ll land him in some academic canon by mashing together syllables like he's building a postmodern Pokémon. What is a “rescription”? What does a “transitext” do?

I’ll leave this here for now and hope, if nothing else, you got a good laugh in. Have a nice day and remember that the Shultz Report is and will always be here to stay. Thank you for your patient support.

-written by M.Shultz