The Contradictions of Postmodernism Author(s): Terry Eagleton Source: New Literary History, Vol. 28, No.

1, Cultural Studies: China and the West (Winter, 1997), pp. 1-6 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057396 Accessed: 02/07/2010 06:02
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The

Contradictions

of Postmodernism

Terry Eagleton
talking

Why

is everyone

about

culture?

Because

there

are,

of

course, rather more topics important now among sectors of fashionable

to the doctrine is cultural belongs everything as reductive in its own way as economism, doctrine biologism, quite or any of the other "isms" against which it is a essentialism, mildly panic of what is Culturalism inflates the importance stricken overreaction.
constructed, coded, conventional about human life, as against what

to talk about. The idea, the Western left, that a known as culturalism,

as natural material beings have in common tends to emphasize what is changeable, likewise, than what has rather tinuous about history, and somewhat depressingly consistent unmovably, human
belongs to a specific historical place and time?in

animals. Historicism, relative, and discon remained massively, about it. Culturalism
our case, to an

advanced increasingly, capitalist West, into China and other "emergent" be imported reasons for this? Let us be clear first of all that there is nothing inherently radical about In post-Enlightenment seeing things as culturally constructed. Europe, culture as a concept was quite often on the side of political reaction: an as in the exemplary case of Edmund to the pieties of Burke, appeal,
custom, traditional privilege, inherited status, and hierarchies, as against

but now

it would

seem, about to societies. What are the

the radical Enlightenment's In a revolutionary rallying cry of Nature. curious fit of historical oblivion, Western cultural left appears to today's to the natural as insidiously all appeals have demonized naturalizing, is quite a different which that thing. They have conveniently forgotten meant Nature for the radical-democratic other among Enlightenment an things appeal to what all human beings from cabin to castle share in and so was intrinsically common, levelling and subversive. For Thomas it is Burke's recourse to culture, to consecrated historical habit, Paine, not his own radical deployment which is naturalizing, of the notion of a common nature. A venerable Western human lineage from George to believe Luk?cs to Roland Barthes is quite mistaken that ideology is One can be a doughty defender of always and everywhere naturalizing. that things capitalism or Stalinism without suffering from the delusion were always like that, that the collectivization or the of the peasantry
New Literary History, 1997, 28: 1-6

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of market forces reflect an unalterable dimension of human unleashing nature. No canny apologist for such regimes would be naive enough to a culturalism or conventional in such an egregious folly. Today, indulge a left to a ism such as that of Stanley Fish harnesses epistemology as that of Richard Rorty yokes it to a liberal conservative politics, just
bourgeois outlook.

radical either, whatever is by no means the inherently Historicizing Indeed much histori cultural left may on the whole consider. Western of political cism in Europe has been firmly in possession conservatism. is naturally on the side of radicalism that historicism The assumption are antihistorical formalists. quite falsely, that all nonradicals implies, a liberal or conservative is no reason why should not appeal to There them and the political left is not historical context; the quarrel between in the main over this, but over which historical reading is in question. or minori radical about either margins is nothing There automatically
ties, streams just as and there is consensuses. nothing spontaneously Minorities today reactionary neo-Nazis include about main and the

in civilized company, racists are marginalized international bourgeoisie; or otherness or too. The idea that plurality and it's a good thing subversive reveals similar left illusions. Some is inherently multiplicity
forms of plurality are radical, whereas others are as native to the free

market empty
sometimes

as violence formalism,
on the

States. All of these beliefs betray is to the United content. Culturalism historical void of concrete
side of the given system, and sometimes not; and

an is
my

once. in this essay is that, in its postmodern contention guise, it is both at can think immediately of two Why all this talk about culture? One
reasons, one rather more negative than the other. The bad news first: in

for the first time in the modern culture has become the postwar West, as a whole, firmly locked a vital force in material reproduction epoch it in the era of high modernism, into the commodity which, production or traditional cul In premodern disdained. societies, characteristically as a significant force in political and ideological ture reproduc figured or less closely inte were more tion: the various cultural apparatuses of clan, court, church, or state, which meant grated into the institutions on the one hand that the artist had a public function, on the other hand of that his or her art acted among other things as a fairly direct medium the symbolic realms the dawning of modernity, With power. ideological of religion, art, and sexuality were gradually separated out from political and art was shifted instead into the market, and economic institutions, lacked a on the one hand that the artist now worryingly which meant on the other hand that his or her art could exploit public function, but for the first time, a form this distance from the public realm to become, of critique. The only problem with this was that the very distance which

CONTRADICTIONS

OF

POSTMODERNISM

made

Advanced

for critique also tended to render that criticism fairly impotent. in a sense, a revival of the premodern capitalism witnesses, of the symbolic and the social, but now, more precisely and integration in the form of a recoupling of the symbolic and the dispiritingly, after the economic. Cultural rejoins general production production and estrangements of modernity, but now thoroughly under fissurings form. The work of art is thus a bearer of the sway of the commodity it is linked in premodern less because dominant fashion to the power itmimes the destiny of the but because official ideological apparatuses, its own form which Adorno comments, is, as Theodor commodity to The art which was once considered, rather desperately, ideology. the lonely last-ditch stand of use-value against exchange-value represent turns out to be just another modality of the latter.
As usual, however, there is a more upbeat story to tell as well. For the

in recent decades other reason why culture has figured so prominently it has been an inseparable part of the new social and political is because movements. This has involved a struggle over the meaning of the term
"culture" senses: sexual, itself, culture ethnic, between as and art may its more not have aesthetic a great and deal but more to do culture anthropological with these as new

associated

movements,

language,

value, custom, clearly has. (One might life-style, identity, allegiance, note here, incidentally, that "culture" is always either too unworkably narrow or too embarrassingly if it is "elitist" to identify it wide a notion: with minority art, as all good postmodernists agree, it is also shoddy, to view it as coterminous and ultimately meaningless with amorphous,
the whole of human life, as all good postmodernists by no means agree.)

The
in

is that culture in its broader sense has been utterly point, however, to the three movements which have headed the political agenda integral
the West for the past few decades: revolutionary nationalism, sexual

politics, and ethnic struggle. In each of these cases, culture is part of the of political conflict, the very idiom in which it is inflected, very medium
rather than?as for much classical socialist politics?an optional extra.

And what humanist

is the steady undermining this means of the traditional liberal faith in culture as either an alternative to prosaic political of them. That faith is in my view conflicts, or as a higher reconciliation to be sniffed at: historically it has bred a by no means speaking,

one, a generously Utopian lineage along with a perilously mystifying vision of human potential as well as a hopelessly idealist one. But moving it is clearly much harder to sustain once culture has shifted over from that is to being part of the solution to being part of the problem?once, culture becomes of the very terms in which political interests say, part
articulate themselves, rather than the deeper, universal, more per

durable

language

in which

such ephemeral

quarrels

may

be resolved.

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What has happened in our own time is that culture, for good and ill, has become once more?and for the first time since the late 1960s?a realm of political in itself, at the very moment, struggle ironically enough, when it is also being voraciously assimilated into a market society. this new concern with cultural struggle Whether is an extraordinary enrichment of a previously rather philistine, antisubjective politics, or a of it in the face of a rolling back of those desperate displacement classical political for individual judgment; my own forces, is a matter view is that it is both of these things simultaneously.
Culture, at least in nineteenth-century Britain, was called upon to

fulfill the function of transcendental reconciliation because a consider more plausible candidate for that role, religion, had dismally failed. ably It had failed not under the savage assaults of atheistic materialists, but because industrial tends itself, in its unavoidable society capitalist and secularizing to bring into discredit of social existence, rationalizing its own purportedly transcendent values. But it is hard for culture to play this role,

since it is, after all, ineluctably local, sensuous, particularized, a poor it will always provide idiomatic; subject for the magnificently effective role which religious discourse previously fulfilled, and, delicate animal that it is, will begin to betray disturbingly neurotic if symptoms too much is ideologically demanded of it. Postmodernism has kissed or so it believes, the idea of culture as disinterested reconcili goodbye, and theoreticist. ation; but in this, one suspects, it is distinctly premature For though
grounds,

??may have jettisoned

truths,

ontological

foundations,
authorities, and

metaphysical
the rest, the

apodictic

unimpeachable

advanced it belongs capitalist orders to which indeed cannot. No capitalist society is more States, and none ismore virulently metaphysical.
conjuncture, though it may be an incongruous

certainly have not, and secular than the United This is not a fortuitous
one. The more market

forces level all distinct value and identity to arbitrary, aleatory, relative, fixed ontologies, status, confounding hybrid, interchangeable mocking and kicking all solid foundations from beneath teleologies, high-toned the more their ideological themselves, superstructures?to adopt a now once more urgently relevant?will shamefully old-style terminology to insist, more need and more values and stridently, upon absolute immutable and unimpeachable standards, assured grounds goals, the eternal givenness of a human nature which ismutating before their very as histori status of values which are being exposed eyes, the universal even as we speak. cally partial It is in this sense, surely, that postmodernism is both radical and as it does from this structural contradic conservative together, springing tion at the core of advanced itself. Against the forbidding capitalism of such regimes, it boldly pits the provi superstructures metaphysical

CONTRADICTIONS

OF POSTMODERNISM

sional, fluid, multiple, unavoidably miming

has now, so to speak,

relativist, egalitarian; and in doing so it finds itself the logic of the capitalist marketplace itself, which
been turned against the logic be of the superstruc

tures which
postmodernism

hold

it in place.
is radical or

The

answer
can

to the question
only a firm

of whether
yes and no.

conservative

And

of few places in the world today is this perhaps truer than of China, a spectacular a still contradiction between where we are witnessing and a progressively authoritarian highly political superstructure capital base. At one end of Tiananmen ized economic Square, an outsized still peers expressionlessly of Mao Zedong down, while just the luminous arches of the McDonald's logo scale the evening opposite, in this context just what a bold project Chinese One can appreciate sky. to deconstruct all is, with its resolute determination postmodernism portrait
hierarchies, elites, and immutable values. One can also recognize how

Western

postmodern
as in

theory has arrived

some sense the

along with

the latest shipment

of all that, and

of Coca-Cola,

intellectual

rationale

radicals who have how properly suspicious of itmust be those Chinese to Stalinism that the only alternative is 7-Up. still not accepted other things, concerns of cul the cherishing Postmodernism, among it is therefore an irony beyond anything flaunted by its tural difference; own fictions to the remorseless that it is now actively contributing a philosophy of the globe, exporting cultural homogenization of differ
ence as, among other things, a mode of Western cultural integration.

Like most fronts

proper.

so-called today
do you

China
What

con the problem which Third-World societies, is less that of postmodernity than of modernity
do, in short, if postmodernity arrives on your

the delights and disasters of doorstep before you have fully experienced on itself? How do you cope with the time warping consequent modernity current history elided between autocratic on traditionalism having your on the the one hand and the ambiguous of postmodernism promises other? How do you deal with the paradox that your own "modernity" means a club which is now at the point of leaving modernity joining it? Two kinds of solution suggest themselves, neither scornfully behind much more than the other. On the one hand, you can satisfactory a "stageist" theory: China, and societies with roughly its sorts of should not rush to adopt Western of postmodernity? problems, styles indeed than purely could the how, other cerebrally, they, since is a good deal more than a theory?without first striving to postmodern of that very form of enlightenment benefits which enjoy the post advocate
modernism in the West is now so eager to dismantle. On this argu

societies need is less Lyotard ment, what China and other "emergent" a full individual than civil liberties, material autonomy, well-being, in short all of the advantages democratized which public sphere,

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to bring the West, however European Enlightenment promised dismally it has failed to deliver. The drawbacks of such a are obvious: position to "stageist" theories are always a little suspect, since it is unrealistic expect that societies will artificially "defer," in the name of some abstract what has suddenly become for them. And the agenda, possible of such a case needs little Eurocentrism are we to underlining: bequeath such societies our own erstwhile liberal humanism, while hastening in
our own case to deconstruct it?

first "solution" remembers the gains of Enlightenment; the ismore conscious of its losses. This is the case that the so-called Third World should take advantage of the fact that it might be able to modernization without the accompanying undergo European ideology of all the evils of that creed. Perhaps, by modernity by avoiding being able to from Mao to the postmodern, one can give the leap directly slip to some of the most destructive of European Enlightenment. The consequences is that in giving the slip to the more negative here, however, problem of that current, you may simultaneously be passing up on consequences what ismost precious in it. For the typical Western this postmodernist, no problem at all, since there is little to be cherished about poses in the first place. But for those of us with a somewhat Enlightenment more assessment of the movement, as both magnificent dialectical and unutterable cannot be dissolved the problem disaster, emancipation so is indeed a "solution" to this dilemma, There quickly. though at the seem at least in China, itmight worth mentioning. The moment, hardly doctrine which has traditionally tried to redeem the positive kernel of while its devastating effects is Enlightenment relentlessly criticizing
known conference as socialism?a at the doctrine source of which, this volume as one Chinese remarked, participant makes any in decent the

This second

today shudder. One will not assuage that entirely understand able horror by arguing that Mao was about as far from socialism as Newt intellectual force such a claim might have, and it Gingrich. Whatever seems to me considerable, it is idly academicist in the present situation. All one can perhaps point out is that, whatever the important issues are or North are most East and West and South, between today they as certainly not in the first place "cultural," and that to believe otherwise, to perpetuate a damaging tend to, is merely culturalists postmodern Chinese mystification.
St. Catherine's College

Oxford

University