Postmodernism: No Longer Useful?

I don’t consider myself a postmodernist. As a scholar of contemporary political and historical fiction, I’ve often questioned postmodern metafiction’s privileged status. Yet the more I read socially-committed writers such as E.L. Doctorow, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Louise Erdrich, the more I see postmodern techniques being used quite successfully by writers who may be as ambivalent about the movement as I am. As Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon state in their introduction to A Postmodern Reader, (SUNY Albany, 1993) postmodernism is the cultural and social air we breathe, permeating virtually every facet of contemporary life. That it has become so naturalized is all the more reason to critique it, and Terry Eagleton does critique it. Although in his Preface he claims to credit postmodernism with some strengths—especially its work on racism and ethnicity, on the limits of identity-thinking, and the dangers of totality—the bulk of this text is devoted to debunking postmodern tenets; among them the importance of the local, the rejection of hierarchies, and the suspicion of closure.

Eagleton grounds his criticism of postmodernism in what he sees as the movement’s political failings. While he acknowledges that a variety of cultural, economic, and political forces have contributed to postmodernism’s ascendency, he ultimately sees it as being spawned by the perceived (and the perceived is important) failures of Marxist radicalism. Indeed, Eagleton even states that part of postmodernism’s appeal is “that it exists, whereas how true this is of socialism these days is rather more debatable” (ix). If, Eagleton argues, it seems impossible to take meaningful political action, then it might be comforting to persuade oneself that any totality one might fight against is actually illusory. This theory is provocative, as is the observation that the elation of an earlier radicalism survives now as only a hard-boiled pragmatism. In light of Bill Clinton’s policies and Tony Blair’s Clintonesque self-fashioning, this analysis certainly rings true. Such accommodations by people on the left perhaps lend some credence to Eagleton’s point that the left has not really been defeated, but rather suffered a “failure of nerve,” a failure which postmodernism both represents and aggravates.

Eagleton goes on to fault postmodernism for its “cultural relativism and moral conventionalism, its scepticism, pragmatism, and localism, its distaste for ideas of solidarity and disciplined organization, its lack of any adequate theory of political agency...”(134). In his prose style as well as in his argumentation, he challenges postmodern values. Faulting postmodernism for excessive emphasis on the particular and local, Eagleton chooses not to consider the work of specific theorists. As he explains, he is concerned “...less with the more recherche formulations of postmodern philosophy than with the culture or milieu or even sensibility of postmodernism as a whole” (viii). Hence, Eagleton is not afraid to generalize—at times he seems to delight in it—and write prose that is satiric and engaging.

Eagleton’s political reading of postmodernism’s advent and his very general approach account for the book’s most marked strengths and weaknesses. Its strengths might be compared with those of an earlier work, Literary Theory: An Introduction (UMinn Pr, 1982): in each text Eagleton takes on a difficult, complex subject and makes it accessible to a wide audience. Often he is quite successful is raising questions about some postmodern beliefs, making some keen observations that some proponents of postmodernism may have forgotten. He is undoubtedly correct in stating that postmodernism is often politically oppositional but economically complicit, that it gives us many representations of desiring bodies but few of starving or laboring ones. In criticizing postmodernism’s suspicion of grand narratives and totalities, he forcefully states, “For socialist thought there has indeed been a grand narrative, and more’s the pity. What strikes a socialist most forcibly about history to date is that it has displayed an almost remarkable consistency—namely, the stubbornly persisting realities of wretchedness and exploitation” (51). A brief glance at almost any history text or daily newspaper will support Eagleton’s claim.

At a time when many in the...