Customer Reviews

The Illusions of Postmodernism

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Let me begin by confessing a bias--I positively love Terry Eagleton as a critic and writer. His _Intro to Literary Theory_ is amazingly lucid and influenced me a great deal.

I was first exposed to PoMo while working on an MA in German Studies @ Rice University. It was a subject I had never before confronted in my undergrad years. I walked into my first Intro to PoMo class a naive optimist and humanist and naive beliver in the Enlightenment tradition. Needless to say I was thrown for a heavy loop...PoMo utterly overwhelmed me, scrambled my brains, and in no small measure derailed my MA thesis for at least a year, trying to wrap my mind around this difficult subject. I felt a gut-level dislike of J.F. Lyotard and an immediate affinity for J. Habermas. Among PoMo writers, I felt most attracted to F. Jameson, who, of whom, of course, we got the least coverage in my class.

In many ways, Eagleton picks up where Jameson leaves off. Both are conscientious Marxist theorists who offer a welcome critque of PoMo from a Leftist perspective that I can embrace as opposed to the usual gamut of Right-Wing/Conservative PoMo bashing ala Alan Bloom, et. al. that I only partially can stomach and tends to leave me cold. In defense of PoMo's positive aspects, I highly recommend the writings of US Professors Michael Berube and Cary Nelson.

But Eagleton is a mint...a unabashed socialist from Britain, a true cultural heir of Orwell, I think...He and fellow Briton Christopher Norris both offer solid, fair critques of PoMo free of Rightist blather.

Eagleton gives the best of PoMo its due, but also takes it to task time and time again, often quite humorously with intellectual irony.

I recall reading _Teach Yourself Postmodernism_ and enjoying its solid critques of the failings of (classical) Modernism, but then it wandered off into advanced PoMo and I found myself dismayed, watching my sympthies dry up and evaporate as the elucidation of PoMo drifted from Modernist critque to positive assertions about PoMo that struck me as so wrong-headed. Eagleton points out in detail and says more eloquently than I could muster, just what is "wrong w/ PoMo"... (Norris does an equally fine job, too, i might add).

Eagleton in a number of ways reminds me of Noam Chomsky's response to PoMo. But whereas Chomsky is utterly dismissive of PoMo, Eagleton at least engages it forwardly, gives it a fair hearing.

Anyhow...This latest book by Terry Eagleton, it has much to recommend it. Enjoy!

-JJR

This is not a scholarly work (few footnotes), but it does make scholarly demands.The reader needs to know a lot about postmodernism and Marxism before picking it up , because Eagleton doesn't fill in the background. In short, the book does not serve as a primer. Still, pomo is a big subject and this is a slender volume, so a lot gets left out. Individual thinkers like Derrida, Kristeva, Lyotard and the usual suspects, are replaced by a popular view or what Eagleton calls the "sensibility of postmodernism as a whole." (p.viii). This amounts to a corporate image, a synthesis of the movement as a whole -- but is the synthesis really a straw man, a travesty of the real thing? On that, the reader will have to judge for herself; in any case fidelity to the originators is really not the point. Eagleton is not interested in what these thinkers precisely think or say. Instead, he's interested in what people believe pomo says, and just as importantly, in the kind of society that popularizes a pomo sensibility. His aim, therefore, is more about society and politics than which thinker said what and when. This is consistent with his Marxism, which is not much interested in where an idea comes from, but instead how it affects where society is going.

But, given the eclipse of international socialism, who cares what Marx or socialists say. Even postmodernism, Marxism's quandom successor, celebrates the god of the free market; so who cares. Well, as Eagleton points out, capitalism triumphant is an exploitative mess that is not likely (not certainly) to get better; thus, there remains a clear need for principles embracing collective solutions to collective problems. Still and all, pomo earned its reputation by taking apart those grand ideas that Enlightenment thinkers, including Marx, needed for traction -- concepts such as universals, reason, humanism, et. al. The core of the book are the chapters where Eagleton shows how these modernist pillars still hold together despite attacks from pomo's deconstruction wing. How successfully he does this is again up to the reader to decide. In my view, he's pretty effective, especially when showing up pomo's political sterility. At times, however, I wasn't sure whether he was arguing that such pivotal concepts as universals and essences are really real or merely indispensible. Politically, I suppose the question comes to the same thing. Anyhow, this is a worthwhile book for those who are looking for a learned Marxist reply to the postmodern challenge and are willing to put up with the vagaries of an allusive style.

In his attempt to find a working definition, Eagleton makes a distinction between postmodernism and postmodernity. For him, postmodernism is a style of culture reflecting something of the epochal changes during the historical phase of postmodernity. He explores the culture and milieu of postmodernist philosophy as a whole and does not much discuss particular works of art or specific theorists. Eagleton's approach is to look at what a student today might believe about postmodernism and to prove that most of that is false. Although his view is mainly negative, he judges both postmodernism's strengths and its failures from a broadly socialist political and theoretical perspective.

The book draws extensively on the author's writings in the London Review Of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Monthly Review, Textual Practice and Socialist Register and is divided into the chapters Beginnings, Ambivalences, Histories, Subjects, Fallacies and Contradictions. Eagleton's sense of irony and gift of satire ensure an engaging text, especially when he comes up with turns of phrase like: " ... from Lyotard to leotards ...". He also touches on subjects are disparate as Madonna, graphic novels and gothic architecture, which enliven the text.

Eagleton considers the politics of postmodernism to have been both enrichment and evasion. For all its supposed openness, Pomo can be just as censorious and exclusivist as the orthodoxies it opposes. He explains that it is a type of orthodox heterodoxy that needs its straw men in order to stay in business. In its attempt to cut the ground from under its opponents' feet, Pomo unavoidably pulls the rug from under its own. He explores pomo's hatred of essentialism (the specific "whatness" of a thing) and concludes that if enlightenment universalism is exclusivist in practice, ethnic particularism can be exclusivist in both practice and theory.

Eagleton concludes that pomo is not just some theoretical mistake. It is the ideology of a particular historical epoch in the West when reviled and humiliated groups discovered something of their history and selfhood. But its inherent failings are its cultural relativism, moral conventionalism, cynicism, localism and lack of any adequate theory of political agency. As such, he concludes that postmodernism cannot confront authoritarian ideologies.

In simple parlance, pomo thought with its relativism denies distinctions between right and wrong or good and evil, whilst claiming that everything is just a power game and we are all victims. It in fact provides a fertile breeding ground for fascism, something that Eagleton is perhaps too polite to spell out. But his thoughts have broadened my perspective on this jargon-jaded phenomenon, all thanks to his elegant prose and intellectual acuity.

The book concludes with notes and an index. I also recommend Intellectual Impostures (Fashionable Nonsense) by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, an investigation of how postmodernist theorists twist and abuse the language of the natural sciences. Further books of interest include Why Truth Matters by Ophelia Benson and Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks.

Professor Eagleton takes no prisoners in this thorough albeit short critique on the theories of postmodernism. Focus is placed on postmodernism's general theories in relation to philosophy and political theory as opposed to postmodernism's contribution in the arts and architecture. This, in fact, could well be the subject of an entirely new book, however, aesthetics, in this case, is not Eagleton's main concern.

It probably should be stressed that a general knowledge of philosophy, postmodern theory and political science would be advantageous before cracking this text, however, someone with only a slight awareness of these subjects could push through the book (dictionary in hand) without too much difficulty.

By definition, post modernism is hard to define, as it claims no foundational tenets: it is more a method or perspective against established ideas in philosophy. As Eagleton writes, "It is animated by the critical spirit, and rarely brings to bear upon its own propositions." (P.26)

From a socio-political standpoint, postmodern theories are part of a culture of "unmaking". It can be characterized as a rejection of all "metanarratives" or "grandnarratives"; a protest of modernisms inclusion into the established order of the `canon', a snubbing of intellectual elites, a blurring between high and low art, where Bart Simpson sits comfortably with Shakespeare. I would characterize it as a cynical "anti" position on just about any idea that claims validity or application in society. The key principles of all postmodern theories include: "...decreation, disintergration, deconstruction, decentrement, displacement, difference, discontinuity, disappearance, demoralization and delegitimation." (Post Modern Theory, Best, Kellner, 1991)

In one respect, Eagleton applauds postmodernism's huge body of work over a short time, and its stubborn demystification of natural institutions and conventions, though, criticises its blatant lack of self-criticism and ability to offer any alternatives after its deconstruction of all other theories. There is a certain feeling of excitement and freedom after reading such postmodern luminaries as Derrida, Lyotard or Kristiva, but after wading through their dense and at times "cult-like" prose, one is left with the feeling of utter nihilism, realising that these theories are empty rhetoric, that over three thousand years of human progress was all a lie, a "grand-narrative" to keep us chained.

For the most part Eagleton criticises postmodern theory against the theories of Marxism and socialism, and does a remarkable job revealing postmodernism's na?ve, almost adolescent view of the present world situation.

He concludes that postmodern end-of-history thinking gives us no future other than the present. That there are many possible futures, including fascism: how would postmodern theory shape to such a future? In my opinion, not too well.

This book is a valid discussion and a persuasive argument on the many pitfalls of postmodern theory.

Despite "a reader's" review of the work below, Eagleton is, as usual, clear and convincing in his argument.

"A reader" has made the mistake to come to a book entitled "The illusions of postmodernism" to find advice about sexual orientation. The lack of answers has nothing to do with Eagleton, but with the questioner. I mean, I have questions about the hard drive on my computer, but I wouldn't go to Eagleton for answers.

As for the absence of gays, minorities, and women in Eagleton's texts, one must be familiar with Marxist theory to understand how he approaches the issue. To a Marxist, these are merely artificial divisions created by ideology meant to separate women and men from one another. Thus, they ought not to be confronted as separate entities, but as members of a class. With the breakdown of the classes comes the breakdown of the petty differences perpetuated by the bourgeoisie. Confronting and even fixing issues of ethnicity, sexism, sexual orientation, etc, only puts a band aid on real problem: economic and political inequality.

Reading "a reader's" review one would think that Eagleton's work is solely about white, middle class, men. It's not. In this case, it is about a cultural movement (not sociological distinctions), and thus, Eagleton writes about the artists, artistry, and theorists that engage the movement, including women, minorities and gays. But, I guess if Eagleton doesn't reduce his work to labeling every person about whom he writes a "minority" then it doesn't count for some. Don't make the mistake of assuming every person mentioned without a cheap qualifier is a white, straight, male.

Concerning Jameson, Eagleton has been very clear in all of his texts that Jameson is the premier Marxist in the west, so I don't know of the rivalry that "a reader" has conjectured between the two. Writing that Jameson has "said it all, in terms of Marxism" is utterly naive however. Jameson is brilliant, but such a comment disregards the revolutionary work of Aijaz Ahmad, Chidi Amuta, Teresa Ebert, Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt, Pierre Macherey, Julia Kristeva, and a litany of other Marxist theorists who have defined the field in recent years. No woman or man, no matter how influential, can "say it all" within a philosophy as complex and infinite as Marxism, something about which "a reader" has no apparent knowledge.

Eagleton debunks some of the central tenets of PoMo thinking in order to re-claim rationality, enlightened critique, the human subject, history and epistemology for left-wing critical theory. PoMo has, for too long, held students and university professors captive and this book argues that the "death-dealing" beliefs that they peddle are well-founded nor necessary. READ IT!!!

Postmodernism is an incredibly fuzzy concept. Eagleton is able to sharpen it and make it crystal clear. His criticism, from a theoretically deep Marxist prospective, shows what is true and progressive in Postmodernism and what is nonsense and off-the-wall. It is outstanding and brilliant. Read it or be square. Assign it to your students or wish you had.

Terry Eagleton, THE ILLUSIONS OF POSTMODERNISM (Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 1996)
It is delightful to find a book written about post-modernism by someone who is actively employed in one of the vocations in which the movement was planted, and in which it has flourished. It is especially welcome that this English writer can write, well, in English, unlike so many of the original workers in this field, such as Derrida and Foucault. Eagleton is both a scholar (currently Distinguished Professor of English at the National University of Ireland) and a leading practitioner of literary criticism.

Note that I especially agree with much of what Mr. Doepke says in his review, so I will not bother repeating it

As you will surmise from the title, this book is critical of much which goes on under the heading of `post-modernism'. I am especially pleased with his statement that the movement suffers from having been developed primarily in the field of literature, and when its way of thinking is translated to other fields, especially ethics and epistemology; it gets in way over its head. Eagleton's primary credentials for speaking on matters relating to religion are his literary and ideological views on Jesus in the Gospels, The Meaning of Life, and his critique of the `new atheists' in Reason, Faith and Revolution, Reflections on the God Debate.
The most dramatic impression one gets from reading this book is that `post-modernism' is neither a philosophy, such as `British Empiricism', a method of literary criticism, such as `The New Criticism', or even a framework for research, such as `Structuralism'. Post-Modernism is a political ideology, very similar to `socialism', `liberalism', or `fascism'. This contributes to the fact that there is post-modern architecture, art, dance, feminism, literature, music, anthropology, theatre, and film. There is even a post-modern post-modernism. This explains why so much of Eagleton's book is a play of `post-modernism' off against liberalism and socialism / Marxism. In this regard, Marxism has an unfair advantage, since Eagleton's arguments are based on a single theorist's works, and not on the mélange of ideas from great, average, and mediocre minds which contribute to his picture of `post-modernism'.
This diversity of `fronts' on which post-modernism battles often leads to a lot of damage inflicted upon itself by friendly fire. There are often contradictions between people who operate under the post-modern umbrella. To some, the most interesting contradiction is in religion, where post-modernism celebrates diversity. On the one hand, Christianity and Islam are given the license to thrive, each in their own cultural crib, but it prevents the two from seeing eye to eye about things, such as the condemnation of the ideological basis of Islamic terrorism. (The fact that Christianity and Islam do see eye to eye on this matter is a sign that post-modernism has serious flaws).
The fact that post-modernism is a political ideology makes Eagleton's book, at the outset, somewhat difficult to follow. From other books, such as Stanley Grenz' A Primer on Post-modernism, we are left with the sense that post-modernism is a coherent philosophy. It is nothing like this at all. It is a Weltanschauung, born of literary criticism and nurtured by several disparate sources, from Wittgenstein to French structuralism, to American pragmatism. This difficulty is compounded by Eagleton's very `literary' style which seems to enjoy the bon mot overmuch. But it explains why the book opens with a myth about a political ideology which has lost all traction on the minds of the populace. On the other hand, it seems that fellow literary critic Eagleton is speaking from the best possible vantage point to tease out post-modernism's clay feet.
It is not until well into the second chapter of this book that Eagleton seems to get down to brass tacks, in this opening summary of his subject:
`Postmodernist culture has produced, in its brief existence, a rich, bold exhilarating body of work across the whole span of the arts, which can by no means be laid at the door of a political rebuff. It has also generated more than its share of execrable kitsch'.
Post-modernism, as its name declares, is a reaction to the `modernist meta-narrative' exemplified by Rene' Descartes, but traceable all the way back to Plato. Three pillars of modernism are the separation of mind (thinking) from the body (as in Descartes' cogito, ergo sum), the reality of universal truths (Plato's theory of forms), and the primacy of rationality as a method for arriving at knowledge. Unfortunately, as Eagleton often points out, the post-moderns are often aiming their arguments at straw men, positions which no one actually held, or at least, not as broadly as they would like us to believe. For example, The third `modernist' pillar is central only to what the History of Philosophy gang calls the `Continental Rationalists', epitomized by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz. And the irony is that two of these three were mathematicians, where this tenant is, was, and always will be true. In fact, since post-modernism, at its heart, is an epistemological skepticism, it fits right in with the primary tenants of that other Age of Enlightenment gang of philosophers, the English Empiricists, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Many of their tenants are so much like Locke's and Hume's philosophy, it's positively embarrassing. Similarly, when post-moderns enter the world of Ethics, they are `depressingly reliant of this Kantian terminology'.
The reliance on Kant in Ethics is a good example of how the post-moderns waffle on one of their primary dogmas, the rejection, or at least the devaluing. of universals. Kant's Ethics (and the basis of modern Kantian justice systems by John Rawls) are all about arriving at universals, from another very non-post-modern point of view, the ideal disinterested observer or, in Kantian terms, the perfectly good will. Post-moderns devalue universals or `essential characteristics'. `one of the most heinous crimes in the post-modernist book'. Essential properties are as old as Aristotle. A flip way of characterizing them is the old saw, `If it walks like a duck and it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it's a duck.' If you remove an essential property from an idea of an object, it becomes a different object, not unlike the mechanism of evolution, where arms and scales evolve into wings and feathers, changing a Subclass Diapsida (reptilian dinosaur) into Class Aves (birds).
To be sure, essentialism works a bit differently when it comes to cultural categories. The post-modernists love cultural diversity, but seem to ignore the fact that humans, by their nature, have both culture and language, even though there are great differences between cultures and languages.
Eagleton is an unapologetic Marxist socialist, and it is from this point of view that much of his criticism of post-modernism is based, especially his final word on the subject. Leftist socialism is all about social action and reformation but `In confronting its political antagonists, the left, now more than ever, has need of strong ethical and even anthropological foundations; nothing short of this is likely to furnish us with the political resources we require. And on this score, post-modernism is in the end part of the problem rather than of the solution.

Eagleton offers a political and theoretical critique of postmodernism (ix), from a position he considers pluralist, "believing in postmodern fashion that there are different narratives to be told of postmodernism too, some of them less positive than others" (26). TE prefers a plurality of metanarratives (110). Three of his concerns appeal to me:

First, illusion of no-subject. TE challenges the popular assumption that the postmodern critique of the modern subject, the so-called Cartesian self/ego, is a nihilist drive toward no self (15f.). Postmodernism seeks on the other hand to disclose this unified subject, like language, as a fetish: A construction, a desire, a wish. The subject of postmodernism is therefore a "cultural" subject, cultural by virtue of its nature hence "cultural being" and "natural being" coincide (72f.). This cultural subject is both free and determined (88), so the challenge is how to exist with that tension.

This concern accounts for the "rootedness" of the reading subject. The problem is obvious: when we seek to define "this place" from which we read, our positionality, we quickly realize that we are always reading from "several places." We always already read from these places. Here (!) also we are trapped not so much by a particular "theory," as by the confines of "language" because we can only "speak" of one place at a time. In that sense, we can speak of our rootedness because of our failure to be able to speak of the multiplicity of our rootedness: we are able because we can fail (cf. 21).

Language gives us the illusion that we can speak of, and listen to, multiple voices when in fact we can only speak and hear one voice at a time. As such, vernacular languages has a better chance of representing TE's kind of pluralism.

Second, the illusion of History: "What postmodernism refuses is not history but History-the idea that there is an entity called History possessed of an immanent meaning and purpose which is stealthily unfolding around us even as we speak" (30). The reading subject reads from within history, so the "cultural subject" coincides with the "historical figure." TE's "history" echoes Jameson's idea of "History," both are influenced by marxist teachings, and we should be careful not to confuse Jameson's "History" (capital H) with the History against which TE writes. The relation between these first two concerns are obvious: subject<>history.

This concern dispels another popular assumption, that postmodernism is ahistorical. On the other hand, postmodernism points to the complexity of history: history is not static, nor linear. TE's history is always beyond the grasp of the reading subject. History is within the reach of deconstruction but history cannot be captured!

Finally, the illusion of classism. Classes are wholly social constructions. They are conditions of life. So are the hierarchies. The problem is not with the presence of classes (gender, race, class) in human societies, as the old marxist teaching maintained (57), but with their absolutizing (94f.). In order to give order to human societies, some kind of classification is necessary. Classes and hierarchies are necessary. When they are absolutized, they become oppressive. In this case "universalism" is at the expense of "particularism," which was the issue at the heart of Levinas's concern for the other. It is this tendency to absolutize and universalize that postmodernism challenges.

TE dispels another assumption, that in postmodernism anything goes. Similar to Derrida, for instance, who claimed that "justice" is undeconstructible, that deconstruction is justice. Levinas's concern for the "other" and Lyotard's concern for "les juifs" also dispel the anything-goes assumption. So is Caputo's jewgreek program. That is, postmodernism is ethical (so Bauman)!

In the light of these three concerns it is apparent that TE's title, "the illusions of postmodernism," is a postmodern title. We are urged to read the "illusions" both in the Marxian and Freudian senses: that TE is here (!) both critiquing and demonstrating the desires of postmodernism. Deconstructing. Almost!

Some people think of postmodernism as intruing
truth of capitalism,but according to the standpoint of vast majority of people,we have to
respect their opinions.Maybe dictatorship is not
suitable for this period.