The Illusions of Postmodernism

Terry Eagleton

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118725009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

In this brilliant critique, Terry Eagleton explores the origins and emergence of postmodernism, revealing its ambivalences and contradictions. Above all he speaks to a particular kind of student, or consumer, of popular "brands" of postmodern thought.

1

Beginnings

Imagine a radical movement which had suffered an emphatic defeat. So emphatic, in fact, that it seemed unlikely to resurface for the length of a lifetime, if even then. The defeat I have in mind is not just the kind of rebuff with which the political left is depressingly familiar, but a repulse so definitive that it seemed to discredit the very paradigms with which such politics had traditionally worked. It would now be less a matter of hotly contesting these notions than of contemplating them with something of the mild antiquarian interest with which one might regard Ptolemaic cosmology or the scholasticism of Duns Scotus. They, and the language of conventional society, would now seem less ferociously at odds than simply incommensurable – the discourses of different planets rather than of adjacent nations. What if the left were suddenly to find itself less overwhelmed or out-manoeuvred than simply washed up, speaking a discourse so quaintly out of tune with the modern era that, as with the language of Gnosticism or courtly love, nobody even bothered any longer to enquire into its truth value? What if the vanguard were to become the remnant, its arguments still dimly intelligible but spinning off rapidly into some metaphysical outer space where they became nothing but a muffled cry?

What would be the likely reaction of the political left to such a defeat?

Many, no doubt, would drift either cynically or sincerely to the right, regretting their earlier views as infantile idealism. Others would keep the faith out of habit or nostalgia, clinging anxiously to an imaginary identity and risking the neurosis which this is likely to bring in its wake. There are, after all, those devotees for whom nothing whatsoever could count as a falsification of their beliefs – those Christians, for example, who true to what the philosophers of science call the ‘under-determination of data by theory’, would continue to gather joyfully around the eucharistic table even if it had been shown to everyone else’s satisfaction that the gospels were fraudulent from start to finish. Indeed there are members of the Anglican church today who behave in more or less this way. But other responses could be expected too. A small clutch of left triumphalists, incurably sanguine, would no doubt carry on detecting impending signs of revolution in the faintest flicker of militancy. In others the radical impulse would persist, but would be forced to migrate elsewhere. The governing assumption of such an epoch, one imagines, would be that the system itself was unbreachable; and a great many radical positions which might seem superficially unrelated could be seen to flow from this gloomy presupposition.

One might expect, for example, that there would be an upsurge of interest in the margins and crevices of the system – in those ambiguous, indeterminate spots where its power seemed less implacable, the shadowy margins where it trailed off into silence. The system could not be breached; but it could at least be momentarily transgressed, probed for those neuralgic points where its authority faltered and unravelled. Fascinated by these fault-lines, one might even come to imagine that there is no centre to society after all; but while this might be a convenient way of rationalizing one’s own lack of power, it could only be at the cost of acknowledging that there can logically be no margins either. One might expect this fact itself might be calculated into the theory – that a bleak awareness of the collusion between centre and margins, power and rupture, of the stealthy cat-and-mouse game played out between them, would go hand in hand with a more heady affirmation of whatever the system itself expelled as so much detritus, of whatever its ruling rationality seemed not to incorporate. One could envisage much celebration of the marginal and minority as positive in themselves – an absurd enough view, of course, since margins and minorities currently include neo-Nazis, UFO buffs, the international bourgeoisie and those who believe in lashing delinquent adolescents until the blood runs down their thighs. The idea of a creative majority movement, for this habit of mind as much as for the old-style liberalism of a John Stuart Mill, would come to seem like a contradiction in terms, precisely because this style of thought, suitably amnesiac, could no longer remember any instance of a beneficent system or an appealing mass movement. At its extreme, such a case ought to find it hard to cope with a previously marginal current becoming politically dominant (the African National Congress, for example), given its formalist prejudice against ‘dominance’ as such. Logically speaking, it could only hope that its own values would never come to power. The ideas of system, consensus and organization would themselves become demonized in vaguely anarchistic fashion, denounced as absolute ills by those committed to a tolerant relativism.

The historical basis of this belief would be that political movements which were at once mass, central and productive had temporarily gone out of business; but it ill befits an historicizing brand of thought to generalize this to a universal doctrine. It would be the theory of those who were too young to recall a mass radical politics, but who had a good deal of glum experience of drearily oppressive majorities. The notions of law and authority might also be indiscriminately devalued, as though there was no such thing as a protective law or a benign authority. Theorists would mock the madness of the Law in suburban enclaves protected by private security guards, celebrating transgression as inherently good while worrying about child abuse. Protest would still be possible; but because the system would instantly recongeal around this irritant like a jellyfish, the radical sensibility would be accordingly divided – between a brittle pessimism on the one hand, and an exhilarated vision of ceaseless difference, mobility, disruption on the other. The distance between all that, and the drearily determinate world of social and economic life, would no doubt bulk embarrassingly large; but the gap might be narrowed if one were to attend to those few surviving enclaves where these things could still find a home, where a pleasure and playfulness not wholly under the heel of power might still be relished. Primary candidates for this role might be language and sexuality, and one would accordingly anticipate an enormous inflation of interest in these matters in the period in question. Conference papers entitled ‘Putting the anus back into Coriolanus’ would attract hordes of excited acolytes who knew little about the bourgeoisie but a good deal about buggery. The split between pessimism and euphoria, however, might resurface here too: some thinkers would caution how discourse and sexuality were themselves policed, regulated, heavy with power, while others would continue to dream of a liberated signifier or an unshackled sexuality. The radical impulse would not be abandoned; but it would shift gradually from the transformative to the subversive, and nobody except the advertisers would speak of revolution any more. The elation of an earlier, more hopeful phase of radicalism would survive, but it would now be blended with the hard-boiled pragmatism of its disillusioned aftermath, to give birth to a fresh style of left ideology which one might dub libertarian pessimism. One would continue to dream of a Utopian other to the system, indeed to the whole concept of system or regime as such, while grimly insisting on the recalcitrance of power, the frailty of the ego, the absorptive power of capital, the insatiability of desire, the inescapability of the metaphysical, the ineluctability of the Law, the indeterminable effects of political action, and so of the sheer gullibility of one’s own most secret hopes. The dream of liberation would not be relinquished, however much one would scorn the naivety of those foolish enough to believe it could ever be realized. It would not be out of the question to run across people who wished to see the Epoch of Man pass away, and voted Liberal Democrat.

There are other reasons why one might expect a cult of ambiguity and indeterminacy in these conditions. In certain robustly entrepreneurial nations, where the word ‘aggressive’ is used as a compliment and feeling negative about something is regarded as a moral failing, ideas of hesitancy, negativity, undecidability and the like might well loom up as the most radical thing since the Long March. But it is also true that rigorous, determinate knowledge s rather less in demand when there seems no question of a full-blooded political transformation. There is no point in labouring away in the British Museum, absorbing great swathes of indigestible economic theory, if the system is simply impregnable. One of the most moving narratives of modern history is the story of how men and women languishing under various forms of oppression came to acquire, often at great personal cost, the sort of technical knowledge necessary for them to understand their own condition more deeply, and so to acquire some of the theoretical armoury essential to change it. It is an insult to inform these men and women that, in the economic metaphor for intellectual life now prevalent in the USA, they are simply ‘buying into’ the conceptual closures of their masters, or colluding with phallocentrism. Those who are privileged enough not to need to know, for whom there is nothing politically at stake in reasonably accurate cognition, have little to lose by proclaiming the virtues of undecidability. There is no reason why literary critics should not turn to autobiography or anecdotalism, or simply slice up their texts and deliver them to their publishers in a cardboard box, if they are not so politically placed as to need emancipatory knowledge.

If the system is deemed all-powerful, a view which overlooks the fact that it is at once formidably resourceful and spectacularly unsuccessful, then the sources of opposition can only be found outside it. But if it is really all-powerful then there can by definition be nothing outside it, any more than there could be anything outside the infinite curvature of cosmic space. If the system is everywhere, then like the Almighty herself it puts in an appearance at no point in particular, and so is invisible, and thus can be said to be no sort of system at all. The pan-systemic, given a mild shove, can mutate into the anti-systemic. There is a thin line between claiming that totality is sublimely unrepresentable, and asserting that it doesn’t exist. What this latter claim might mean, presumably, is that a certain classical, ‘centred’ sort of system no longer exists; but those avant-gardists who insisted on defining system as such in this quaintly old-fashioned way might naturally be led to conclude that it had evaporated altogether. Even if it existed, and even if there were something outside it, then whatever that was would be less oppositional than incommensurable, unable to gain any effective leverage on the system itself. If such a force were drawn into the orbit of the system so as to challenge it, its otherness would be instantly contaminated and its subversive power would dwindle to nothing. Whatever negates the system in theory is thus logically incapable of doing so in practice. There might well be some alterity to everything we have, indeed it might be brushing our skin and drifting under our fingertips at this very moment; but we are powerless to name it, since to do so is already to have erased it. Anything we could understand would be by that token complicit with our degraded logics, and so incapable of saving us, while the genuinely outlandish or subversive would fall clean outside our frames of representation and be struck as idle as Kant’s mysterious noumenon.

One would expect, then, that such a political period would be rife with various veins of pseudo-mysticism, enamoured of whatever gives the slip to the concept, enthralled by those spasms of the mind which confound its customary distinctions, which breed in us some ecstatic state of indeterminacy in which the border between identity and non-identity is transcended (though we could not of course know this), and the logical deadlock I have just described is dissolved rather than resolved. Such ‘thought’ would at once be preciously Utopian, running up its head against the limits of language in order to glimpse some currently inconceivable state beyond it, and a fantastic displacement of a genuine political deadlock. In an interesting ambivalence, one might expect to find some radicals denouncing a totality they took to be real, and others dismissing the whole affair as a figment of the overheated, compulsively totalizing brain. Some, one might predict, would assume that the dominant system was entirely negative – that nothing within this seamlessly non-contradictory whole could by definition be of value – and turn from it in dismay to idealize some numinous Other. This cult would no doubt be coupled with a guilty self-laceration on the part of some scions of the first world who would hanker to be just about anybody but themselves. One might forecast an enormous upsurge of interest in the alien, deviant, exotic, unincorporable. Perhaps there would be a quickening of concern for non-human animals; or perhaps radical theorists would be frantically trying to communicate with aardvarks or the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri, while hoping of course that their communications would remain suitably unintelligible.

Other thinkers, less romantically ultra-leftist, would no doubt strive to invent a new version of the classical notion of ‘immanent critique’, convinced that there was that within the logic of the system which, prised open or practised upon in a certain way, could be used to undermine it. For the traditional idea of immanent critique, it is at those points where a system is structurally non-identical with itself that it is hollowed out by the shadow of an alternative political future, so that the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is in this sense deconstructed. Just as there are ways of following rules which end up by transforming them, or where the rules intimate to you when to throw them away, so there is that within any system which inscribes its otherness within its interiority. One might redescribe this old-fashioned idea of immanent critique as, say, a ‘deconstruction’. But this, in its newly fashionable forms, could only ever be a strategic skirmish or fleeting subversion, a rapid guerrilla raid on the fortress of Reason, since for it to become systemic would be for it to fall victim to the very logic it threw into question. It would be a critique conducted more at the level of the mind than at the level of political forces; indeed one might understand it, in part, as exactly such a displacement. It would be a Dadaist form of politics, wedded to the dissident gesture, the iconoclastic refusal, the inexplicable happening. If a weighty theorist of carnival were to be unearthed at this point, one who celebrated a sporadic disruption which could in no way dismantle the Law it parodied, one might confidently anticipate that he or she would swiftly give birth to a major scholarly industry. Grotesquerie would be all the rage, while monsters and masochism would surge in the intellectual stockmarket.

Behind this brand of thought would lurk the assumption that the idea of a creative system was an oxymoron, and the notion of a creative anti-system a tautology. And behind this, in turn, would lie the historical fact that that there were precious few instances of a creative political system on offer. Were this not so, then one could easily imagine the whole of this style of thought being transfigured at a stroke. If its exponents had belonged to a different historical era – had been in, say, on the tumultuous birth of a new, inspiring form of social life – then it is morally certain that they would not hold many of the doctrines they did. While a mass radical movement is still on the boil, it is not hard to overturn a simplistic binary opposition between the System and its Others, the former demonized and the latter angelized, since those ‘others’ are clearly products of the system itself, and know themselves to be such. It is exactly because they play some reasonably central role in it that they have the power to change it. But it is also easier to dismiss the idea that such immanent critique can only ever be spasmodic, tactical, or a minority affair. For what would be clear is that there are contradictory systems, whole alternative life-forms at loggerheads with one another; and that any formalistic distinction between ‘system’ on the one hand, and ‘dissent’ on the other, is simply implausible. Those who rummage around for some convenient force to put against ‘the system’ are usually full-blooded monists decked out in pluralist clothing, forgetful that ‘the system’ itself is conflictive and contradictory to its core. That it is hard to feel this in the tranquillity of Oxford or Santa Cruz is no decent excuse for the oversight.

For radicals to discard the idea of totality in a rush of holophobia is, among other more positive things, to furnish themselves with some much-needed consolation. For in a period when no very far-reaching political action seems really feasible, when so-called micropolitics seems the order of the day, it is relieving to convert this necessity into a virtue – to persuade oneself that one’s political limits have, as it were, a solid onto-logical grounding, in the fact that social totality is in any case a chimera. It doesn’t matter if there is no political agent on hand to transform the whole, since there is in fact no whole to be transformed. It is as though, having mislaid the breadknife, one declares the loaf to be already sliced. Totalities, after all, have to exist for someone; and there would now seem nobody for whom the totality was a totality for. It has traditionally been thought to be for groups who urgently need to make some overall sense of their oppressive conditions in order to set about changing them. Just to be free and happy, some people need to grasp the way their specific situation interlocks with a larger context, whose logic helps to determine their destiny. All totalities are launched from highly particular situations, and this is one of several ways we shall be considering in which universality, and difference or specificity, are by no means simple opposites.

If these interlockings do not show up spontaneously in common experience, then one can, as a good empiricist, seize on this fact to cast doubt on the whole notion of an overall system. Alternatively, one can ask whether there might not be mechanisms which accounted for this hiatus between how things are and how they seem. Nobody of course has ever actually seen a system, any more than anyone has clapped eyes on the Freudian id, the University of Cambridge or the Save the Children Fund; but it seems rash to conclude from this that none of them actually exists. It is rather a matter of speculating whether there might not be certain regular effects in our daily life which we can make plausible sense of by positing the impact upon it of a coherent, if invisible, set of forces. This, after all, was how Freud came to disinter the unconscious, an entity devoutly defended by some of those who doubt we can speak coherently of the transnational capitalist system. Such a speculation makes no claims as it stands about the nature of this system – whether it is centred or centreless, unified or asymmetrical, informed by a determining principle or reducible to a singular essence. But one can always of course make life easy for oneself by identifying the whole notion of system with some simple-minded essentialism, thus allowing the concept to obediently write itself off.

The point, anyway, is that the concept of totality implies a subject for whom it would make some practical difference; but once such a subject has been rolled back, incorporated, scattered or metamorphosed out of existence, then the concept of totality is likely to fall with it. Unless, that is, one wants to preserve the idea of subversion in the absence of any likely agent of it, in which case you can always claim that the system subverts itself, and so combine a certain scepticism with a certain radicalism. But in general there would now seem nobody for whom the idea had much of a function, as it would, say, in an era of revolutionary nationalism; and like Bishop Berkeley’s tree it would therefore lapse discreetly from existence just because no one was looking at it. The theoretical discrediting of the idea of totality, then, is to be expected in an epoch of political defeat for the left. Much of the scepticism of it, after all, hails from intellectuals who have no particularly pressing reason to locate their own social existence within a broader political framework. There are others, however, who are not quite so fortunate. It is not, then, just a choice between alternative ways of seeing, as though there are those megalomaniac, phallus-struck theorists who like their ideas to come big and full-blooded, and those more modest, particularizing thinkers who prefer to stick with a politics so tiny as to be well-nigh invisible. To think of this as a choice of intellectual styles is itself an idealist move. How ‘global’ your thinking is depends not on how impressively thick you want your books to be, but on where you happen to be standing, not least if you would prefer to be standing somewhere else.

There are those radical thinkers who genuinely believe that a belief in totality is just a mesmerizing hindrance to real political change, as with the kind of mentally blocked student who feels unable to say anything unless he or she has grasped everything. Anti-totality may here be more of a strategic than a theoretical point: there may well be some sort of total system, but since our political actions cannot dent it as a whole we would be better advised to trim our sails and stick to more modest but more viable projects. This is a case to be respected, if not necessarily endorsed. Others object to the notion of society as a whole for much the same reason that Margaret Thatcher did. Not looking for totality is just code for not looking at capitalism. But a scepticism of totalities, left or right, is usually fairly bogus. It generally turns out to mean a suspicion of certain kinds of totality and an enthusiastic endorsement of others. Some kinds of totality – prisons, patriarchy, the body, absolutist political orders – would be acceptable topics of conversation, while others – modes of production, social formations, doctrinal systems – would be silently censored. Perhaps it might be thought that all totalities are ‘essentialist’, reducible to some single determining principle; but this is not the case, for example, with the charming north Devonshire village of Porlock. Porlock, one might claim, is certainly a totality of a kind: one is almost never in doubt about where it begins and ends, or likely to confuse it with the next village along the coast. Its boundaries are firmly etched, and it is quite evidently itself and not some other thing. But it is questionable even so that Porlock can be reduced to some single animating force, such as the high street or the flower shop, which informs all of its constituent parts with impeccable even-handedness. There is no reason to assume that totalities are always homogeneous; and if the globe is indeed becoming a more dismally self-identical place, this has rather more to do with the operations of transnational capitalism, and the cultural forms it brings in its wake, than with the paranoia of left political theorists. The idea that totality is all in the mind is a remarkably idealist doctrine for a supposedly materialist creed.

Grasping the shape of a totality requires some tiresomely rigorous thought, which is one...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1 Beginnings
• 2 Ambivalences
• 3 Histories
• 4 Subjects
• 5 Fallacies
• 6 Contradictions
• Notes
• Index