10 October 2004Daily TimesTerry Eagleton
Postmodernism, wedded as it is to the particular, would be reluctant to accept that there are propositions which are true of all times and places, yet which are not simply vacuous or trivial. The statement ‘In all times and places, most men and women have led lives of fairly futile labour, usually for the profit of a few’ seems one such utterance. ‘Women have always suffered oppression’ is another. To narrativise these propositions is to help de-familiarise them — to recover something of our naive astonishment at what we had taken for granted. There is a sense in which we can forget or deny what is most common exactly because it is so common, as in Roland Barthes’s celebrated example of those names of countries which march across the map in such huge capitals that they are effectively invisible. Grand narratives are in this sense a bit like transcendental conditions, so much the very framework of our perception that it is hard to stare at them straight.Similarly, it is difficult for us to recapture the imaginative excitement which must have burst upon the world with the concept of universality. What could have sounded more scandalous to a profoundly particularist culture, one in which what you were was bound up with your region, function, social rank, than the extraordinary notion that everyone was entitled to individual respect quite independently of these things? This outlandish new doctrine was of course launched into philosophical orbit from a highly specific position, that of a wing of the European bourgeoisie, but so is every doctrine, universal or otherwise. Whether Jean Baudrillard’s ideas are true or false is not to be determined by the fact that he is a Frenchman working in California, even if these facts may have some relevance to their formation. The exotic new thesis was abroad that you were entitled to freedom, autonomy, justice, happiness, political equality and the rest not because you were the son of a minor Prussian count but simply on account of your humanity. We now had rights, obligations and responsibilities which put in brackets all of our most intimately individuating features. Postmodernism is in general allergic to any such trampling on the particular, and this ferocious abstraction trampled on it with a vengeance. It was also one of the greatest emancipatory ideas of world history, one which postmodernism has come so much to take for granted that it can apparently only identify it by its blind spots. It was not at all true in practice that everyone — women, for example, or non-Europeans or the lower peasantry — was accorded equal respect. But everyone’s freedom mattered in theory, and ‘in theory’ is a sizeable improvement on its not mattering even as that. It is an improvement not least because middle-class society could now be challenged by those it suppressed according to its own logic, caught out in a performative contradiction between what it said and what it did. And this is always a far sharper form of critique than measuring a social order against values whose validity it would not even acknowledge.This great revolutionary concept was of course thoroughly essentialist. It was by virtue of our shared human nature that we had ethical and political claims upon one another, not for any more parochial, paternalist or sheerly cultural reason. These matters were too important to be left to the tender mercies of custom or tradition, to the whim of your masters or the tacit codes of your community. The respect you had been contingently granted could be just as contingently withdrawn, and this was too feeble a basis for an ethics. Justice had to be indifferent; it was the anciens regimes which were the great apologists for difference, in the sense that how you were treated depended on how you were ranked. Difference was now a reactionary idea, and sameness or identity a revolutionary one. If you wanted to reject elitism or autocracy on any thing stronger than pragmatic grounds, you had to go universalist. Postmodernism, which tends to both anti-elitism and anti-universalism, thus lives a certain tension between its political and philosophical values. It seeks to resolve this by short-circuiting universality and returning in a sense of pre-modern particularism, but now to a particularism without privilege, which is to say to a difference without hierarchy. Its problem is how a difference without hierarchy is not to collapse into pure indifference, so becoming a kind of inverted mirror-image of the universalism it repudiates.Professor Terry Eagleton’s specialties are ‘Pure’ literary theory — formalism, semiotics, hermeneutics, narratatology, psychoanalysis, reception theory, phenomenology and the English-language literature and culture of Ireland. He is a professor at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Manchester. He has written an introduction to literary theory, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, The Illusions of Postmodernism and a collection of his works is available in The Eagleton Reader. The above passage is from The Illusions of Postmodernism
