9. Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism
r jo Aga,inst the Grain nothing in them: 'That's bombast;that's Hitler and Mussolini.'8r 9. His aim in philosophy, he remarks in the Inaestigations,is to 'teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to some- thing that is patent nonsense' (464): to demystify bombast, to Capitalism,Modernism return fiom the slippery ice where we cannot walk to the rough and Postmodernism ground. Bertolt Brecht, in conversation with Walter Benjamin, referred to fascism as the 'new ice age'. The icy language of metaphysics, which includes the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, produces a picture which 'held us captive'. Who is held captive here? 'Russell and the parsons have done in{inite harm, infinite harm.' But not only Russelland the parsons. Does Wittgenstein make reparation in the Inuestigations for the metaphysics, including the Tractatu.s,which have helped to hold captive Antonio Gramsci? 'What is your aim in philosophy? - To shew In his article 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late way out of the fly-bottle' (3og). Who is this fly the fly the Capitalism' (New Left Reaiew r46), Fredric irgues that he to be let out? Jameson imprisoned in a fly-bottle, and how is pastiche, rather than parody, is the appropriate modJof post- tis, modernist culture. 'Pastiche', he writes, like parody, the imitation.of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead languffl$ut it,is e_39-gggl_glgt{e of such.nl_q}_iq,fy, without a.ry oT parody;s ulterior morives, amputated of the satiric impuise, devoid of' laughter and of any convicrion that alongside the abnormal tongue-you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists.'This is an excellent point; bur I wint to (r!41- t:fl-g.r. herelrlrL that rr4rvs/ ofur ad s.o1tsurl ts Ilot wnolly allen to lne '6!or .pargcly .ip_ttq.-r*ry.lgl"ly_. 31|9q_1o cultureSIg 9{f,99![gggr.rr{m,of though it is-n6ione ofwhiCh it could-the sardto be particularlyconscious. What is parodiedby post_ modernistl^--:^. culrure,^..t.---^ with--:-r its!-- dissqlqti-o,pl: r - of atgln-_t-o_gh. preyftine'1.,.: f"p_"f .*gllunqdtrJ-Brsd"A6n,it;el}i- ii_iriii." rf,. i"u; l :!9l3Iy-i"I-:9J . tlS -rryslggJ'--."er t-urJl-ara.n-t€a:-de. I t is as though posrnioilernism is among other things a sickjoke at the expense of such revolutionary. qy_4ql:safdiim, ond of whose major im-pulses,as'{e_ter.Brirge{has convincingly argued in his Theory of the Auant-Garde, was fo dlC"fAUde;tie_.Gstitutional autonomy of art, erase the frontiers between culture and ooli_ 'tical socrety and iliurrl a9q!!q,re--pfg{"g!r9_{l- !o itl _b_qnble. unprlvtte.gect,ptace rvlr.htn^soclalplgqr_i-c.s as a whole., In the commodrfied artelacts of postmodernisml the a-vant-gardist dream of an integration of art,and society returns in mon- strously caricatured form; the tragedg of a Mayakovskyis plaved through- once more, but thi3 time'asLfarq.. lt is i, thougt rlF postmodernism represents the !/nical belated revenge wreakEd r t2 Against the Gratn postmodernism Capita,lism,Modernism and r 3 j by bourgeois culture upon its revolutionzrry antagonists,whose utopian desire fbr a lusion of art and social praxis is seized, things are what they are,inrrigui.gly sell-identical,urterly sh.r-rr distorted and jeeringly turned back upon them as dystopian of cause, motive ratificaticrn; preserves this 'r fostmoclernism reality. Postmodernism, from this perspective,mimes the fbrmal self-identity, but erases its modernist scandalousness.The i€E@;. t I Capitalism, postrnod,ernism l r j4 Against the Grain Modernism and r jZ reproduction. We are all, its thorough integrationinto an economic system where such auton- simultaneously and inextricably, mod_ ernisrs and traditionalists. omy, in the form of the commodity fetish, is the order of the day. terms which fo. a.-Uur;;rl;;;;. neither cultural movements To seeart in the manner of the revolutionary avant-garde, not nor aesthetic ideologies ;;;rh.";;;y o.f that duplicitous phenomenon, as institutionalized object but as practice, strategy, performance, :. "^.,_y1. alwa'ysi. u"J ume slmultaneously, qamed literature, ""t "f production: all of thii, once agaifilTgrott6QGly c?Tica-tui&I by ' where this common di_ t.,T:i. u r".Jf with rhetorical self_consciousness. Iate capitalism, for which, as Jean-FranEois Lyotard has pointed lqy:.r, Literary nlsrory nere, de Man contends, .could out, the'performativity principle' is really all that counts. In his in fact be paradigmatic for.history in general,; Condition, Lyotard calls attention to capitalism's and what this means, translated from The Postmodern cle-Manese, ls that though we will never abandon our radical political illusions (the fond oft fantasy of emanciputi'n o,,.r.1u., rrom rradrtlon and conlronring the real eyeball_to_eyEball as it beirrg, It is were,a pe.rmanentpath"orogicut ttlt. ;i;#;;"ir"i.ri *h6evJr is wealthiest has the best dhance of being right.'2 such acrions to see relation between the philosophy ofJ. L. will alwaysprove self_defeating,will ,i;;;;'^;; not difficult, then, incorporaredby rsl{, or between the various neo-Nietzscheanisms of !r a historywhich has foreseerr'it._ Austin and upon them asruses ""J?.L.a a post-structuralist epoch and Standard Oil. It is not surprising t, own self-perpetuation-ifr. a".ffi 'radical' recourse to tlNietzsche, itr that classicalmodels of truth and cognition are increasingly out that'is tL ,uy, turns out to land li beratr)emocrar of favour in a society where what matters is whether you deliver :::, 1i-i :,i:1.:ly position,*.yty r."ptt*i U,ri ge_ntallytolerant of the the commercial or rhetorical goods. Whether among discourse radical antics of the young. What is at stake here, theorists or the Institute of Directors, the goal is no longer truth under the guise of a ?ebate about his.tory and modernity, but performativity, not-reason bu14owgr. The cst are in this is nothing lesi rhan tne aiatecticat re_ lation of theory and practice. sense spontaneous post-ETiil-iuralists to a man, utterly disen- For"if practice is defined il;;;_ r\.letzscneanstyle as-spontaneous chanted (did they but know it) with epistemological realism and error, productive blindness or nlstortcal amnesla,then the correspondence theory of truth. That this is so is no reason theory can of course be no more than a for pretending that we can relievedly return to Locke or ,"1*1,L. its uI ti m a te i.n p o', iu i ii ty. ;i,"; John aporeticl:::'spot ?:in which.:p:l trurh i!sd;; Georg Luk6cs; it is simply to recognize that it is not always easy and..roi i.rdirr"riiu4ffi;, il; to distinguish politically radical assaultson classicalepistemology @nstructionof (among which the early Lukiics must himself be numbered, whrchin an un- medlated encounter witht i^q:11"I. .pursuing alongside the Soviet avant-garde) from flagrantly reactionary reality in the same instant iiterprets that veryimpulse asao metaphysical truuon. ones. Indeed it is a sign of this difficulty that Lyotard him- 1...,:y"."- 'rL,Ldprr/JrLd.r fictio'. w.i,i"sl;'L;il;5;;;wrltlng lS both action ^-:;,- a rettectlon upon self, having grimly outlined the most oppressive aspects of the 119 that action, but the two are ontolosicallv olsJunct; and hterature capitalist performativity principle, has really nothjpg to offer in- is the privileged place where pia.ti.6 comes ro know and its place but what amounts in effect to an anhrtfiist version of' name its eteinar diiference rr"- ,r,.Jr"Jil, not surprising, then, that very same epistemology, namely the guerrilla skirmishes of that the last sentence of de M";;;';;; maKesa sudden .If to time induce ruptu.res, swerve to the political: we extend this notioir a'paralogism'which might from time beyondlirerarure, instabilities, paradoxes and micro-catastrophic discontinuities it merely.onfi.msthat the uur., r"r riirio-ri*i knowledge are not into this terroristic techno-scientific system. A'good' pragmatics, empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts, masquerade.in in short, is turned against a 'bad' one; but it will always be a the guise of wars and revoluti""r., e i.*, wnlcn starts out wrth loser from the outset, since it has long since abandoned the En- a probrem in literary history ends up as an which assaukon Marxism.Foi it is of courserrllr*t- 1u"". lightenment's grand narrative of human emancipation, has insisted wb all now know to be disreputably metaphysical. Lyotard is in rhat actionsmay be theoreticallyi"i";;d "ii*ni.i, ;;; histories emancipatory, no doubt that '[socialist] struggles and their instruments have notions capable of scuppering de Man,s enrrre case. It is only been transformed into regulators of the system' in all the by virtu-e of an initiar Nletrr.h.u" T r j8 Against the Grain Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism r J9 dogmatism - practice is necessarily self-blinded, tradition neces- sarily impeding - that de Man is able ro arrive at his politicallv given the elasticity of the concept; yet the very nebulousness of 'N49ds!Iisd--as quietistic aporias.a Given these initial definirions, a certain the word may be in some sense significant. a particular judiciou-s d_econstrucrionof their binary opposition is politically sense of one's essential, if the Nietzschean belief in affirmative acdo; is nor to 'v,'ilfciisis license a radical politics; but such deconstruction is not per- and chan mitted to transform the metaphysical trust thar there is indebd a single dominant structure of action (blindness, error), and a single form of tradition (obfuscating rather than enabling an encounter with the 'real'). The Maixism of Louis Althrisser comes close to this Nietzscheanism: practice is an .imaginary' immediate present, from which vantage point all previous de- affair which thrives upon the repreision of truly theo"reticil velopments may be complacently consigned to the ashcan of understanding,.theory a reflection upon the ne.eisu.y fiction- 'tradition', and a disorientating sense of history moving with ality of such acrion. The two, as with Nietzsche and de ivlurr, u.e ontologically disjunct, necessarily non-synchronous. De Man, then, is characteristically rather more prudent about the possibilities of modernist experiment than the somewhar rashly celebratory Lyotard. All literature for de Man is a ruined or baffled modernism, and the institutionalization of such im- pulses,is a permanenr rather than political affair. Indeed it is nothing m6Fe than ntatlon: so that the I part of what brings literature about in the first place, constitutive present of its very possibility. It is as though, in an uliimate modernist awareness of the as deferment, literature mastelfi fan empty excited ali6ffiGln'another senseyet to come' The'modern'lfor most of us, is that which we have alwaysto catch up with: the popular use of the term 'futuristic', to denote modernist ex- ileiiment, is symptomatic of this fact. Modernism - and here Lyotard's case may be given some qualified credence - is not \o mucha punctualmo.m:n: ll t.i*: asa(rbvalry of gmg-tls$b the sense of an epochal shift in the veYymeaning and modalitf' of temporality, a qualitative break in our ideological styles of living history. What seems to be moving in such moments is less 'history' than that which is unleashed by its rupture and suspe-n- De Man's resolute ontologizing sion; and the typically modernist images of the vortex and the ernism, which is of a piece with rhe sready, silent an-ti-Marxist abyss, 'vertical' inruptions into temporality within which forces polemic running throL:ghout his work, does at least give one swirl restlessly in an eclipse of linear time, represent this pause to reflect upon what the term mi.qht actually mean. perry ambivalent consciousness.So, indeed, does the Benjaminesque Anderson, in his illuminating essay'Modernity and Revolution' spatializing or 'constellating' of history, which at once brings it to^ (New Left Reuieu r44), concludes by rejecting the very desig- a shocking standstill and shimmers with all the unquietness of nation 'modernism' as one 'completely iackin[ in positive cofr- crisis or catastrophe. .. . whose only referent.is ti High moderniim, as Fredric has argued elsewheref f."! the blank passageoi time itselC. Jameson This impatient was bbrn at a stroke with mass commodity culture.'This is a fact nominalism is to so@able, l about its tggrnal&gn. ffitTilnprt-ebout its external history. Capitali;m, Modernism and Postmod,ernism r4r r4o Against the Grain conflict between its material reality and its aesthetic structure, it nlsm ls other thi whereby the work that conflict on one side, bec_omingaesthetic- ts com can always collapse ally what it is eConomically. The modernist reification - the art work as isolated fetish - is therefore exchanged for the re- ification of everyday life in the capitalist marketplace. The commodity as mechanically reproducible exchange ousts the commodity as magical aura. [n a sardonic commentary on the avant-garde work, postmodernist culture will dissolve its own coextensive with ordinary commodified historical t boundaries and become .world, to life itself, whose ceaselessexchanges and mutations in any case forestall instant consum.ability,Tnd?ia*s its_oFian$uge recognize no formal frontiers which are not constantly trans- a mysreriouslyautotelic @me JUj.E, gressed. If all artefacts can be appropriated by the ruling order, free of all contaminating truck with the reai. Brooding ielf- better impudently to pre-empt this fate than suffer it reflexively on its own being, it distancesjtsdfthrough-irony then unwillingly; only that which is already a commodity can resist from the shame of being no more than brup, self-"identicJl { commodlfication. If the high modernist work has been institu- thing. R-utthe most devaitating irony of alflf-that in doing this tionalized within the superstructure, postmodernist culture will the modernist work escapesfrom one form of commodifidtion react demotically to such elitism by installing itself within the only to fall prey ro another. If it avoids the humiliation of base. Better, as Brecht remarked, to start from the 'bad new becomingan abstract,serialized, instantly exchangeable thing, it things', rather than from the 'good old ones'. does so only by virrue of reproducing that othir side of ihe T[at, however, is also where postmodernism stops. Brecht's commodity. which is its fetishisrq. The aulenemogs, .gSIf- commentmment alludes to the Marxist habit of extracting the pro- {ggdlng, igp.".rt"nt*-"44 ".r.f+t,-ifr-51fits-isotiGd gressive moment from an otherwise unpalatable or ambivalent ieality, a habit well exemplified by the early avant-garde's T'rTfr rffich espousal of a technology able both to emancipate and enslave. At contradittio"ffi - capitalism, the post- e-T",is]tproJ:ct will, r. In bracketing a later, less euphoric stage of technological ofrTF?al modernism which celebrates kitsch and camp caricatures the soctal world, establlshrnga critical, negating distance between Brechtian slogan by proclaiming not that the bad contains the itself and the ruling social order, modernism must simul- good, but that the bad zi good - or rather that both of these taneously bracket off the political forces which seek to transform tnetpphysical' terms have now been decisively outmoded by a that order. There is indeed a political modernism - what else is social order which is to be neither affirmed nor denounced but Bertolt Brecht? - but it is hardly characteristic of the movement simply accepted. From where, in a fully reified world, would we as a whole. Moreover, by removing itself frgrn society into its derive the Criteria by which acts of affirmation'or denunciation own.impermeable space,'the modejnist woi( paradoxically re- would be possible? Certainly not from history, which post- produces - indeed inlsnsifiss - the veryverv illuiionllluston ofol aestheticaesfhetic modernisrn must at all costs e{face, or spatialize to a range of autonomy which ts numanlsl order tt also if it is to persuade us to forge-t-that we-have ever Modernistworks are after possible styles, reg_Egagst. all woiFJl?isirete known or could know any alternative to itself. Such forgetting, and bounded entities for all the free play within them, which is as with the healthy amnesiac animal of Nietzsche and his con- just what the bourgeois art institution understands. The revo- temporary acolytes, is value: value lies not in this or that dis- lutionary avant garde, alive to this dilemma, were defeated at crimination within contemporary experi6iFbTfTThElery the hands of political history. Postmodernism, confronted with capaclty to stop our ears to the Slren calls oI nlstory ano this situation, will then take the other way out. If the work of art confront the contemporary for what it is, in all its blank im- really is a commodiry then it might as well admit it, with all the mediacy. Ethical sangfroid it can muster. Rather than languish in some intolerable *-- r42 Against the Crain Capitalisrn, Modernism and Postm,odernism r 4) l contem ig severits self-identity,put libidinal flows are subject to a tyrannical ethical, semiotic and juridical order; what is wrong with late capitalismis not this or >. oI value can ihar .l"sire but th ly eqough. But if o r t truth; meaning and history, of which Marxism is perhaps the prototype, we might come to recognisethat desire is here and F6lix Guattari'sAnti-Oediper.o In posr-1968paris, an eyeball-to- now, fragments and lg@gs 3ll wg e-ve,rhave, kitsch quite as eyeballencounter with the real still seemedon the cards,if only the obfuscatorymediations of Marx and Freud could be aban- doned. For Deleuze and Guartari, ttfa!_feal' i!.-dggife,which in a natel refuses to full-blown metaphysical positiuisnffi6Fbe deceived', needs no_interpretation and simply n In this apodicticismof desire,of which the schizophrenicis l€ro, there can be no place for political discourseproper, for such discourseis exactly the ceaslesslabour of interpretationof desire, a labour of interpre- tation which does not leave its object untouched. For Deleuze and Guattari, any such move renders desire vulnerable to the m-e1a-physicaltraps of meaning.But that interpretation of desire which is the political is necessaryprecisely because desire is not a single,supremely positive entity; and it is Deleuzeand Guattari, for all their insistenceupon desire'sdiffuse and perversemani- festations,who are the true metaphysiciansin holding to such hich can covert essentialism. Theory and can .revo- reedrng Parisian_intellectuals.to do it for him,. The only utlon' conceivable, given such a protagonist, is disorder; and still enthralled to a norm on what it sets out to decon- Deleuze and Guattari significantly uselhe rwo rerms synony- struct. But if we are now posteriorto ysrcalhuman- mously, in the most banal anarchist rhetoric. isfi-There is really nothing left to struggle against, other than 11 s.om-epostmodernist theory, the injunction to glimpse the those inherited illusions (law, ethics, class struggle, the Oedipus good in the bad has been pursued with-a vengeancJ. Capitalist cornplex) which prevent us from seeing things as they are. technology can be viewed as an immense d4lliing machine, an Byt the f4ct that niodsrnism coptinues to stluggle.for mean- enormous circuit of messagesand exchanges in wliich pluralistic ins is exactlv what makes lt so lnterestlng. For thls struggle idioms proliferate and random objects, bdhies, surfaces come ro co-htinually drrves lt towards classlcal stytes ot sense-maKlng glow with libidinal intensity. 'The inreresting thing', writes Lyo- which are at once unacceptable and inescapable, traditional tard in his Economie libid,inale,'would be ro stay where we are - matrices of meaning which have become progressively empty, but to grab withour noise all opportunities to function as bodies but which nevertheless continue to exert their implacable force. and good conductors of intensities. No need of declarations, It is in just this way that Walter Benjamin reads Franz Kafka, manifestos, organizations; not even for exemplary actions. To whose fiction inherits the form of a traditional storytelling let dissimulation play in favour of intensities.-'7If is all rather without its truth contents. A whole traditional ideology of repre- closer to Walter Pater than to Walter Benjamin. Of course sentation is in crisis, yet this does not mean that the search for capitalism is nor uncritically endorsed by suth theory, for,its truth is abandoned. Postmodernism, by contrast, commits the r44 Against the Grain Capitalisrn, Mod,erni'smand, Postmodern'km r 45 appropriate to such social conditions, and in another sense nhiaty at all. This ambiguity is overlooked by those post- structuralisttheorists who appear to stakeall on the assumption that the 'unified subject'is indeed an integral part of contem- porary bourgeois ideology, and is thus ripe for urgent decon- itr,r.tion. A[ainst such a view, it is surely ar[uable that^lat€ such a subject much more effici- I, lslqrq capitalismhfs deconstructed. enily than meditations on r4criture.As postmodernist culture attests, the mav be less the strenuous monaol dlsDersec. oecentrect networknelwol.K ofuf libidinalllulLtllrdl attachments,dLLd,Luu oftTffical siiffi-n-ce an@ seg!ry1+.g9gqntP"l-*:^ iti"r..Zff-.-'f a shibboleth^LjLL^'^+L or stiawtarget,+nsdar speak, between "-ffiJlffir an older liberalepoch of capitalism,befole ft*$- and Ssciqm; an?-ifr-?ifp:articular u'hungougr.-from conJuncture the questlon of what counts as a revolutionary techndlosvand consumerismscattered our bodies to the winds rather than barbarousbreak with the dominant Western ideo- ur so bits and piecesof reified technique,appetite, mech- anical-uily operation or reflex of desire' If thi's were wholly true, of course' postmodernist culture meaninglessness' would be triumphantly vindicated:the unthinkable or the uto- rde culturCinto pian, dependinh upon one's perspective,would already have hupp*t.d. But"the bourgeois humanist subject is not in- fact -ThE- contradiction of modernism in this respect is that in simolv part of a clapped--outhistory we can all agreeablyor order valuably to deconstructthe unified subieCtof boureeois reluctantlv leave behind: if it is an increasinglyinappropriate it-dra l model at'certain levels of subjecthood,it remains a potently- -rym'6xperience of suchsubjects in late bouigeoisiociety, which often relevant one at others. Consider,for example,the condition of enough does not at all correspond ro rhe official ideological beins a father and a co4lulqer J!.lqgltanequsly.The former role version. It- thus pits what is increasi felt to be ency, duty, auto- ,.roi-,y,authoriiy, responsibility;the.latter, while no.twholly free SO of srich strictures;puts them into significantquestion' The.two I humanist roles are not of corrrsemerely disjunct; but though relations between them are practically negotiable, 9aPttallgnlglr.9". is precisely what enables the phenomenologicalreality to 6e ideal consumer is siMqy r"b"*putilt. *ienft6= il characterizedas negative.Modernism thus dramatisesin'its very internal stucturesa crucial contradiction iq_rbideology of thi subject, the force of which ws-fi-efiFffiiate if we ask oliGlves nor merely a decentred networK o re' eirrwhat s siibject as free, active,autonomous and self-identicalis a workabld or appropriate ideology for late capitalist society. The answer would seem to be that in one sensesuch an ideology is highly L&p'tLuLL\m,Modernism and Postmodernism r47 t45 Against the Grain western, eats MacDonald's f certaln avant r rnlsm takes t issolution of art into reJectlon oI tra \ Againstthe Grain Essays1975-1985 TERRY EAGLETON ,l Contents Preface I l. Machereyand Marxist Literary Theory I 2. Form, Ideology andTheSecret Agent 23 3. Liberality and Order: The Criticism of 33. John Bayley 4. The Idealismof American Criticism 49 5. FredricJameson:The Politicsof Style 65 6. FrdreJacques:The Politicsof Deconstruction 79 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data 7. Marxism, Structuralismand 89 Eagleton,Terry Post-structuralism Againstthe grain. 1. Englishliterature-History and criticism 8. Wittgenstein'sFriends ',99 I. Title 820.9 PR83 9. Capitalism,Modernism and Postmodernism l3l First published1986 O Terry Eagleton1986 10. The Critic asClown 149 Secondimpression 1988 "I I l. Brecht and Rhetoric 167 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street,London WlV 3HR 12. Poetry,Pleasure and Politics 173 USA: 29 West 35th Street,New York, NY lffil-2291 13. The Revoltof the Reader l8l Filmset in Baskervilleby Cover to Cover,Cambridge 14. The Ballad of English Literature 185 Printedby ThetfordPress Limited Thetford,Norfolk Notes 187 lsBN 0-86091-134-9 ISBN 0-86091-841-6Pbk Index r97