The Illusion of Postmodernism

Author: (English) Terry Eagleton, translated by Hu Ming
Translator: Hu Ming / Country:
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2000-10-10
Features: In the subsequent stage of imperialism, in a hypothetical multicultural society, this system can no longer convincingly claim that its value is superior to the value of other systems, merely—key postmodern terminology—difference. There can be no genuine comparison between these two sets of values, because this would assume the existence of a third rationality that could encompass both, which is also part of what is being negated. As Bernard Williams pointed out, this is in fact an absolutely absurd assumption; we can translate English into Malay without needing to utilize a third language shared by both. But this act serves to protect this ruling system from any radical criticism while also reinforcing its liberal credibility. More conservative forms of postmodernism represent the thought of those who believe that if the system is to survive, truth must be sacrificed for practice. This action is mystifying to Jefferson or John Stuart Mill, but completely not to Friedrich Nietzsche. Perhaps in this regard, Ponty Pilate is a postmodernist. But as this scheme never truly succeeded—because the complete sacrifice of the concept of truth renders certain quite useful principles of social cohesion, such as religion and secular morality, ineffective—more radical forms of postmodernism begin to turn their skepticism about truth toward the continuous need of their rulers for truth, which they treat as a form of social control. The irony lies in the fact that in doing so, while insisting that truth is an effect of power and desire, they terrifyingly approximate what their rulers claim in practice. The choice faced by this system can be reconfigured in terms of a conflict between two different conceptions of freedom. On the one hand, there is the old-fashioned model of the rational, self-sufficient subject, which corresponds entirely to the more classic stage of free-market capitalism. This subject was revolutionary in its time, just as it was deeply flawed, and in fact, it was never reliably discovered, because its self-sufficiency tends to detach it from the world that gave it a place, leaving it rooted only in itself. For this very reason, its euphoria is also a kind of aversion, as the romantics knew full well. The freedom of the subject makes it tragically inconsistent with nature; but if it finds its grounding in its unity with the world, then strengthening it in this way can only weaken it in another. History is on the side of the free subject, but only by embracing it, thereby also limiting its autonomy. The subject is either precariously suspended in the air, forced into a lonely self-imprisonment to legislate for itself, where its inner freedom is mystically inconsistent with its empiricism; or it is supported by a history that itself is a narrative of the gradual unfolding of liberation, but thereby risks being reduced to merely one of its effects. This is more or less a choice between Kant and Hegel. Then, later, we encounter a postmodern subject whose "freedom" consists of a simulation of facts, a subject with no real foundation, and thus has the right to move anxiously or ecstatically through a world that is itself arbitrary, contingent, and random. This world, let's say, takes its own lack of foundation as the foundation of the aforementioned subject, and its own reasonless nature as a license for the subject's free drift. The subject is free not because it is undetermined, but precisely because it is determined by processes of indeterminacy. The dilemma of freedom and foundation is thus "solved"—but only at the risk of excluding the free subject itself. Because it is quite difficult to see how one can truly speak of freedom here, just as the dust particles dancing in the sunlight are not free. For any "positive" tenets of freedom, a truly random world would not remain still long enough for me to take reasonably determined steps to advance the plans I have chosen, in which sense I have time to realize my freedom. Freedom requires closure, which is a paradox that postmodernism seems reluctantly to accept. This is why its conception of freedom is often aligned with the "negative" concept of freedom approved by classical liberalism, and is equally flawed. But at least for liberalism, there exists a subject dense enough to be considered the locus of this freedom; however, if the postmodern subject is diffused by contingent forces, split by an endless game of difference, then there is no concept of freedom that can attach to anything. The effort to give this subject "grounding" risks making it meaningless, and turns all talk of freedom, whether positive or negative, into entirely superfluous. Woman becomes a self-sufficient subject—in the reasonable, not whimsical, sense of the term—and postmodernism begins to deconstruct this entire category. Then, it is certain radical postmodernist politics that deals with the concept of liberation, which seems to be pierced by some other postmodernist theories. Why does the stable identity to be liberated exist? Is the entire concept of liberation just another variant of the inner/outer, expression/repression paradigm? Then, perhaps liberation is not a process or an event, but merely an awareness of what the subject truly is—nothing particularly special to say this—even now, how the subject is "free" in the sense of being diffused, decentered, and temporary, and how it is merely our metaphysical fashion regarding order, which makes this concept worthless. It seems that we are free as long as we think—provided we replace a false self-concept with a true one. But this not only involves an epistemology that postmodernism dislikes; it also repeats the traditional error of philosophical idealism in a more popular form. Whatever limits the self, it is impossible to simply eliminate it by changing our perspective on it, as the more radical currents of postmodernism fully understand. For these political currents, it is not about changing people's thoughts about eliminating grand narratives, as if they will disappear simply because we stop looking at them, but about certain material transformations within developed capitalism. Then, we can return to the ambiguous "post" in the term "postmodernism." Which part of modernity has postmodernism left behind? All of it? The concept of human equality and the idea of historical progress? The liberation of women and the working class? The belief in individual freedom and conscience, and the belief in the authority of reason? Certain parts of modernity, like the idea of revolution, seem theoretically to have collapsed, but not in practice, as recent revolutionary events in Eastern Europe have proven (for postmodernism, it should be embarrassing that while it discards the concepts of political revolution, collective subject, and epochal transformation as metaphysical flourishes, these very things erupt where they least expected them to. However, it also offers some comfort to these theorists: the aforementioned revolutions quickly turned toward the market culture they themselves praised). The belief in universal progress has been shaken, but particular kinds of historical progress (such as the breakdown of racial segregation) may still occur, although such liberation is not universal, it is hard to see why anyone would not consider it a valuable goal. But perhaps, it involves the terrible concept of "teleology"; now we can turn to this and other matters.