What do these people want in terms of positive philosophical and political construction? I eventually concluded that the answer was really quite simple: The purpose of critical theory is not to establish anything at all. Rather, it is to destabilize as potentially oppressive any claim to transcendent truth or value. Its target is the destruction of all metanarratives, and thus the bombastically rebarbative prose is itself part of the “argument.” Leaving readers hopelessly confused about even the simplest things is an important part of the game, pellucid simplicity being one way the oppressors made their oppression seem natural.

Darel Paul’s “Under the Rainbow Banner” in the June/July issue of First Things might be one of the most important and incisive essays the magazine has published. As Rod Dreher notes, it is a terrific piece of cultural analysis. It goes to the heart of our current moment, when individualism, freedom, and recognition are moral imperatives. And yet, as Paul hints, these things are not necessarily compatible, even in our world of kaleidoscopic identities and confected communities. Rather, they are bringing us to the point of lowest common denominator chaos.

The essay reminded me of the many years I spent trying to understand the various approaches to culture that fall under the umbrella term of Critical Theory. Queer Theory is one of the most significant of these approaches. Wading through the pretentiously written and interminably opaque prose always left me wondering: What exactly is the endgame here? What do these people want in terms of positive philosophical and political construction? I eventually concluded that the answer was really quite simple: The purpose of critical theory is not to establish anything at all. Rather, it is to destabilize as potentially oppressive any claim to transcendent truth or value. Its target is the destruction of all metanarratives, and thus the bombastically rebarbative prose is itself part of the “argument.” Leaving readers hopelessly confused about even the simplest things is an important part of the game, pellucid simplicity being one way the oppressors made their oppression seem natural.

Conservatives often respond to claims about the death of metanarratives with the trite observation that this too is a metanarratival claim. That is true, but only in the most banal sense, and the point is polemically useless. All previous metanarratives have, for good or ill, attempted to provide the world with stability, a set of categories by which cultures can operate. They may have offered different, even mutually exclusive, accounts of the world, but offering stability was still the intention. The metanarrative of the death of metanarratives does the antithesis of this: It serves only to destabilize everything. It is the quintessential ideology of the anti-culture, opposed to any and every form of transcendent authority. And that generates all manner of problems, even in the most unlikely of places.

Take the following testimony, drawn from the feminist bible Our Bodies, Ourselves, in which a lesbian speaks of a modern challenge she faced:

When my partner began his gender transition my lesbian identity had been central to my life and my sense of self for well over a decade, and I didn’t know what his transition made me. Some people told me I was “obviously” still a lesbian, but it was just as obvious to others that I was now straight, or bisexual. It wasn’t obvious to me at all, and I struggled with it for a long time. Now I’ve been the partner of a trans man for as long as I was a lesbian, and I’ve gotten comfortable just not having a name for what I think I am. I think of myself as part of the family of queers and trans people.

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