Eagelton - Postmodernism, Modernism, Capitalism

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r o Aga,inst he Grain

nothing in them: 'That's bombast; hat's Hitler and Mussolini. '8rHis aim in philosophy, he remarks in the Inaestigations, s to'teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to some-thing that is patent nonsense' (464): to demystify bombast, toreturn fiom the slippery ice where we cannot walk to the roughground. Bertolt Brecht, in conversation with Walter Benjamin,referred to fascism as the 'new ice age'. The icy language ofmetaphysics, which includes the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,produces a picture which 'held us captive'. Who is held captivehere? 'Russell and the parsons have done in{inite harm, infiniteharm.' But not only Russell and the parsons. Does Wittgensteinmake reparation in the Inuestigations for the metaphysics,including the Tractatu.s, which have helped to hold captiveAntonio Gramsci? What is your aim in philosophy? - To shewthe fly the way out of the fly-bottle' (3og). Who is this flyimprisoned in a fly-bottle, and how is he to be let out?

9.

Capitalism, Modernismand Postmodernism

In his article 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism' (New Left Reaiew r46), Fredric Jameson irgues thatpastiche, rather than parody, is the appropriate modJof post-modernist culture. 'Pastiche' , he writes, tis , like parody, th eimitation.of a peculiar mask, speech n a dead languffl$ut it,ise_39-gggl_glgt{e of such.nl_q}_iq,fy, without a.ry oT parody;sulterior morives, amputated of the satiric impuise, devoid of 'laughter and of any convicrion that alongside the abnormaltongue-you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguisticnormality still exists.' This is an excellent point; bur I wint tot:fl-g.r. here that .pargcly of a s.o1t .ip_tq.-r*ry.lgl"ly_.1|9q_1o-the6 or

lr l rL (r 41- r r4rvs/ ur d sur l ts I lot wnolly al len to lne

SIg 9{f,99 [gggr.rr{m, though it is-n6i one ofwhiCh it couldsard o be particularly onscious.What is parodied by post_l^--:^. ^..t .---^ - - : - r - - l : r - '1., . :

culture of

modernist culrure, with its dissqlqti-o,p f atgln-_t-o_h. preyftinef"p_"f .*gllunqdtrJ-Brsd"A6n,t;el}i- ii_ir ii." rf,. i"u;l: 9l3Iy-i"I-:9J . lS -rryslggJ'--."er-urJl-ara.n-t€a:-de. is asthough posrnioilernism is among other things a sickjoke at theexpense of such revolutionary. qy_4ql:safdiim, ond of whosemajor im-pulses, as'{e_ter.Brirge{has convincingly argued in hisTheory of the Auant-Garde, was fo dlC"fAUde;tie_.Gstitutionalautonomy 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^soclal lgqr_i-c.s as a whole., In thecommodrfied artelacts of postmodernisml the a-vant-gardistdream of an integration of art,and society returns in mon-strously caricatured form; the tragedg of a Mayakovsky s plavedthrough- once more, but thi3 time'asLfarq.. lt is i, thougtpostmodernism represents the /nical belated revenge wreakEd

lF



r t2 Against the Gratn

by bourgeois culture upon its revolutionzrry antagonists, whoseutopian desire fbr a lusion of art and social praxis is seized,distorted and jeeringly turned back upon them as dystopianreality. Postmodernism, rom this perspective, mimes the fbrmalresolution of art and social life attempted by the avant-garde,while remorselessly emptying it of its political content; Maya-kovsky's poetry readings in the factory yard become Warhol'sshoes and soup-cans.

I say it is as th,ough postmodernism eff'ects such a parody,because Jameson is surely right to claim that in reality it issometimes blankly innocent of any such devious satirical im -pulse, and is entirely devoid of the kind of historical memorywhich might make such a disfiguring self-conscious. o place apile of bricks in the Tate gallery once might be consideredironic; to repeat the gesture endlessly s sheer carelessness f anysuch ironic intention, as its shock value is inexorably drainedaway to leave nothing beyond brute f'act. The depthless, style-less, dehistoricized, decathected surfaces of postmodernist cul-ture are not mearlt to signily an alienation, for the very conceptof alienation must secretly posit a dream of Ufheqti-qity whichposfffinism finds quite'unintelligible. Those flaifened sur-faces and hollowed interiors are not'alienated' because here is

no longer any subject to be alienated and nothing to be alienatedfrom, 'authenticity' having been less rejected than merely ftrr-gotten. It is impossible to discern in such fbrms, as it is in theartefacts of modernism proper, a wry, anguished or derisiveawareness of the normative traditional humanism they deface.If depth is metaphysical illusion, then there can be nothing'superficial' about such art-fbrms, fbr the very term has ceasedto have fbrce. Postmodernism is thus a grisly parody of socialist

ize that u

the very criteria by which it can be recognized fbr what it is andso triumphantly abolishes tself, returning everything to nor-mality. The traditional metaphysical mystery was a question ofdepths, absences, oundations, abysmal explorations; the mys-tery of some modernist art is ust the mind-bending truth that

sh a

dissolve nto social ife, turns out, it would reed, t.t have beeri ,

Capita,lism, Modernism and postmodernism r 3

things are what they are,inrrigui.gly sell-identical, urterly sh.r-rrof cause, motive

'rratificaticrn; fostmoclernism preserves hi s

self-identity, but erases ts modernist scandalousness. he <li_lemma .f David Hume is surpassed y a simple c'nflati.n: fact r,r

upon a commodity fbrm which is already invesred with aesthetirallure, in a sealed circle. The eschaton, t would appear, s alrearlyhere under our very noses, but so pervasive and'immediate as ri rbe invisible to those whose eyes ar-e till turned stubbornlv awlrvto the past or the future.

i@ a 'reflection' than an image oflGelf, ir sentire material bein ;, ,

' Ihe productivist aesthetics of the early twentieth-centurvavant-garde spulned the notion of artistic .representation' foian art which would be less ti,rrr

a ld o,rgaqizing folce.'f he aesrhetics of' postmocle..ris* Flior kparody of such anti-representationalism: f art no longer re _flects, it is not because t seeks o change the world rathEr tharrmimic it, but because there is in tru-th nothins there to lrt.r.eflelte{ ry_realiyjhich (. ,simulacrum, i alifffier-vasrvely ommocrrhed s . say har i t is always alreadv 'aes thet i( . '- textured, packaged, fetishized, libidinalized; and' for arr l( )reflect reality is then for it to do no more than mirror itself, in ;rcryptic self-ref 'erentiality which is indeed one o{' the innroslstructures of the commodity felish. fne_crunrrroO.rfy_lqJess lrrl

anti-rlate ca

true prophet- of late capitalism: by- anticipating such a desirt:,bringing it about with premarure hasre, ate irpitalism d_e{ilve has te , ate capiral ism def i lv

ainrs that if the ar tefacr_is rnverts its own logic

utopia, having abolished all alienati<ln at a stroke. Ey rglsingalienation to tlie second power, alienatinir'us even frffitfiown

k. Reification, once ithas ex its empiie across he whole of'social reality, effaces

ob{ects' f the unreality of rhe artistic image mr-iiiffi-lTG trrr-reality of its society as a whole, hen this is t<lsay hat it mirr.r.snothing real and so does not really mirror at ;ll. Beneath thisparadox lies the historical truth that the very autonomv an(lbrute self-identity of the postmodernist arrefact is the effLct .l

i€E@;.



r 8 Against the Grain

dogmatism - practice is necessarily self-blinded, tradition neces-sarily impeding - that de Man is able ro arrive at his politicallvquietistic aporias.a Given these initial definirions, a certainjudiciou-s d_econstrucrion of their binary opposition is politicallyessential, f the Nietzschean belief in affirmative acdo; is nor tolicense a radical politics; but such deconstruction is not per-mitted to transform the metaphysical trust thar there is indebd asingle dominant structure of action (blindness, error), and asingle form of tradition (obfuscating rather than enabling anencounter with the 'real'). The Maixism of Louis Althrissercomes close to this Nietzscheanism: practice is an .imaginary'affair which thrives upon the repreision of truly theo"reticilunderstanding,.theory a reflection upon the ne.eisu.y fiction-ality of such acrion. The two, as with Nietzsche and de ivlurr, u.eontologically disjunct, necessarily non-synchronous.

De Man, then, is characteristically rather more prudent aboutthe possibilities of modernist experiment than the somewharrashly celebratory Lyotard. All literature for de Man is a ruinedor baffled modernism, and the institutionalization of such im-

literature mastelfi

De Man's resolute ontologizingernism, which is of a piece with rhe sready, silent an-ti-Marxistpolemic running throL:ghout his work, does at least give onepause to reflect upon what the term mi.qht actually mean. perryAnderson, in his illuminating essay'Modernity and Revolution'(New Left Reuieu r44), concludes by rejecting the very desig-nation 'modernism' as one 'completely iackin[ in positive cofr-f." .. . whose only referent.is the blank passage oi time itselC.This impatient nominalism is to so@able,

pulses,is a permanenr rather than political affair. Indeed it ispart of what brings literature about in the first place, constitutiveof its very possibility. It is as though, in an uliimate modernist

ti

l

Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism r J9

given the elasticity of the concept; yet the very nebulousness ofthe word may be in some sense significant. 'N49ds Iisd--as a

popular use of the term 'futuristic', to denote modernist ex-

ileiiment, is symptomatic of this fact. Modernism - and hereLyotard's case may be given some qualified credence - is not \omuch a punctual mo.m:n:ll t.i*: as a(rbvalry of gmg-tls$bthe sense of an epochal shift in the veYymeaning and modalitf'of temporality, a qualitative break in our ideological styles ofliving history. What seems o be moving in such moments is less'history' than that which is unleashed by its rupture and suspe-n-sion; and the typically modernist images of the vortex and th eabyss, vertical' inruptions into temporality within which forcesswirl restlessly in an eclipse of linear time, represent thisambivalent consciousness. So, indeed, does the Benjaminesquespatializing or 'constellating' of history, which at once brings it to^a shocking standstill and shimmers with all the unquietness ofcrisis or catastrophe.

High moderniim, as Fredric Jameson has argued elsewherefwas bbrn at a stroke with mass commodity culture.'This is a factabout ts tggrnal&gn. ffitTilnprt-ebout its external history.

sense of one's particular

'v,'ilfciisis and chan

immediate present, from which vantage point all previous de-velopments may be complacently consigned to the ashcan of'tradition', and a disorientating sense of history moving with

nothing m6Fe than ntatlon: so that the I

awareness of the present as deferment,

fan empty excitedali6ffiGln'another sense et to come' The'modern'lformost of us, is that which we have always o catc h up with: the



nlsm lsts com

historical .world, toforestall instant consum.ability, nd?ia*s its_oFian$uge@me a mysreriously utotelicJUj.E,free of all contaminating truck with the reai. Brooding ielf-reflexively on its own being, it distances tsdfthrough-ironyfrom the shame of being no more than { brup, self-"identicJlthing. R-ut he most devaitating rony of alflf-that in doing thisthe modernist work escapes rom one form of commodifidtiononly to fall prey ro another. If it avoids the humiliation of

r4o Against the Grain

other th i whereby the work

{ggdlng, igp.".rt"nt*-"44 ".r.f+t,-ifr-51fits-isotiGd

autonomy which

becoming an abstract, erialized, nstantly exchangeable hing, itdoes so only by virrue of reproducing that othir side of ihecommodity. which is its fetishisrq. The aulenemogs, .gSIf-

Capitali;m, Modernism and Postmod,ernism r4r

conflict between its material reality and its aesthetic structure, itcan always collapse that conflict on one side, bec_oming esthetic-ally what it is eConomically. The modernist reification - the artwork as isolated fetish - is therefore exchanged for the re-ification of everyday life in the capitalist marketplace. Thecommodity as mechanically reproducible exchange ousts thecommodity as magical aura. [n a sardonic commentary on theavant-garde work, postmodernist culture will dissolve its ownboundaries and become coextensive with ordinary commodifiedlife itself, whose ceaseless xchanges and mutations in any caserecognize no formal frontiers which are not constantly trans-gressed. If all artefacts can be appropriated by the ruling order,then better impudently to pre-empt this fate than suffer itunwillingly; only that which is already a commodity can resistcommodlfication. If the high modernist work has been institu-tionalized within the superstructure, postmodernist culture willreact demotically to such elitism by installing itself within th ebase. Better, as Brecht remarked, to start from the 'bad newthings', rather than from the 'good old ones'.

T[at, however, is also where postmodernism stops. Brecht'smment alludes to the Marxist habit of extracting the pro-comment alludes to the Marxist habit of extracting pro-

T'rTfr rffich contradittio"ffi -e-T",is]troJ:ctwill, r. In bracketing frTF?alsoctal world, establlshrng a critical, negating distance betweenitself and the ruling social order, modernism must simul-taneously bracket off the political forces which seek o transformthat order. There is indeed a political modernism - what else sBertolt Brecht? - but it is hardly characteristic of the movementas a whole. Moreover, by removing itself frgrn society into itsown.impermeable space,' he modejnist woi( paradoxically re-produces - indeed inlsnsifiss - the very illuiion of aestheticerv ll luston ol aesfhetic

ts numanlsl order tt also

gressive moment from an otherwise unpalatable or ambivalent

ieality, a habit well exemplified by the early avant-garde'sespousal of a technology able both to emancipate and enslave. Ata later, less euphoric stage of technological capitalism, the post-modernism which celebrates kitsch and camp caricatures theBrechtian slogan by proclaiming not that the bad contains thegood, but that the bad zi good - or rather that both of thesetnetpphysical' terms have now been decisively outmoded by asocial order which is to be neither affirmed nor denounced butsimply accepted. From where, in a fully reified world, would wederive the Criteria by which acts of affirmation'or denunciationwould be possible? Certainly not from history, which post-modernisrn must at all costs e{face, or spatialize to a range ofpossible styles, f it is to persuade us to forge-t-that we-have everknown or could know any alternative to itself. Such forgetting,as with the healthy amnesiac animal of Nietzsche and his con-temporary acolytes, is value: value lies not in this or that dis-crimination within contemporary experi6iFbTfTThElerycapaclty to stop our ears to the Slren calls oI nlstory anoconfront the contemporary for what it is, in all its blank im-mediacy. Ethical

*--

reg_Egagst. Modernist works are after all woiFJl?isireteand bounded entities for all the free play within them, which isjust what the bourgeois art institution understands. The revo-lutionary avant garde, alive to this dilemma, were defeated atthe hands of political history. Postmodernism, confronted withthis situation, will then take the other way out. If the work of artreally is a commodiry then it might as well admit it, with all thesangfroid it can muster. Rather than languish in some intolerable



r44 Against the Grain

I, lslqrq

version. It- thus pits what is increasi felt to be

appropriate to such social conditions, and in another sensenhiaty at all. This ambiguity is overlooked by those post-structuralist heorists who appear o stake all on the assumptionthat the 'unified subject' s ndeed an integral part of contem-porary bourgeois deology, and is thus ripe for urgent decon-itr,r.tion. A[ainst such a view, it is surely ar[uable that^lat€capitalism hfs deconstructed. uch a subject much more effici-

Capitalisrn, Mod,erni'sm nd, Postmodern'km r 45

enily than meditations on r4criture. s postmodernist cultureattests, themonaol

network of libidinal attachments,lsDersec. oecentrect nelwol.K uf llulLtllrdl dLLd,Luu

oftTffical siiffi-n-ce an@

-ThE- contradiction of modernism in this respect s that inorder valuably o deconstruct he unified subieCt f boureeois

-rym'it-dra l

6xperience f such subjects n late bouigeois ociety, which oftenenough does not at all correspond ro rhe official ideological

seg ry1+.g9gqntP"l-*:^^LjLL^'^+L +nsdar

"-ffiJlffiriti"r..Zff-.-'f a shibboleth r stiaw arget,

u'hungougr.-from n older iberal epoch of capitalism, efole

between them are practically negotiable, 9aPttallgnlglr.9".ideal consumer is siMqy r"b"*putilt. *ienft6= il

techndlosv and consumerism cattered ur bodies o the windsur so

-uilybits and pieces f reified technique, appetite, mech-

anical operation or reflex of desire'If thi's were wholly true, of course' postmodernist culture

would be triumphantly vindicated: he unthinkable or the uto-

pian, dependinh upon one's perspective, wouldalready have

hupp*t.d. But"the bourgeois humanist subject s not in- factsimolv part of a clapped--out istory we can all agreeably orreluctantlv eave behind: if it is an increasingly nappropriatemodel at'certain levels of subjecthood, t remains a potently-relevant one at others. Consider, or example, he condition ofbeins a father and a co4lulqer J .lqgltanequsly. he former role

ency, duty, auto-,.roi-,y, uthoriiy, responsibility; he.latter, while no.t wholly freeof srich strictures; puts them into significant question' The.tworoles are not of corrrse merely disjunct; but though relations

SO

I humanist

is precisely what enables he phenomenological eality to 6echaracterized s negative. Modernism hus dramatises n'its veryinternal stuctures a crucial contradiction q_rbideology of thisubject, he force of which ws-fi-efiFffiiate if we ask oliGlves

eirrwhat s siibjectas free, active, autonomous and self-identical s a workabld orappropriate ideology for late capitalist society. The answerwould seem o be that in one sense uch an ideology s highly

mav be less the strenuous

speak, between ft*$- and Ssciqm; an?-ifr-?ifp:articularconJuncture he questlon of what counts as a revolutionaryrather than barbarous break with the dominant Western deo-

meaninglessness'

rde culturCinto

nor merely a decentred networK o re'



Against he GrainEssays 975-1985

TERRY EAGLETON

,l



Contents

Preface

l. Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory

2. Form, Ideology andThe Secret gent

3. Liberality and Order: The Criticism ofJohn Bayley

I

I

2333 .

British LibraryCataloguing in Publication Data

Eagleton, TerryAgainst he grain.1. English iterature- History and criticismI. Title

820.9 PR83

First published 986O Terry Eagleton 986Second mpression 988

VersoUK: 6 Meard Street, ondon WlV 3HRUSA: 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY lffil-2291

Filmset n Baskerville yCover o Cover, Cambridge

Printed by Thetford Press imitedThetford, Norfolk

lsBN 0-86091-134-9ISBN 0-86091-841- 6 bk

"I

4. The Idealism of American Criticism 49

5. FredricJameson: The Politics of Style 65

6. FrdreJacques: he Politics of Deconstruction 79

7. Marxism, Structuralism and 89Post-structuralism

8. Wittgenstein's Friends ',999. Capitalism,Modernism and Postmodernism 3l

10. The Critic as Clown 149

I l. Brecht and Rhetoric 167

12. Poetry, Pleasure nd Politics 173

13. The Revoltof the Reader l8l

14. The Ballad of Engli sh Literature 185

Notes

Index

187

r97

Eagelton - Postmodernism, Modernism, Capitalism

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