The illusions of postmodernism

Abstract

Can postmodernism, with its commitments to "the other," and its radical deconstructions of race, class, and gender, enhance and extend our understanding of the liberationist "option for the poor?"Or, are postmodernists an ethically uncommitted, anti-historical, privileged European and North American intellectual elite who threaten to coopt the liberationist project entirely?These are the two questions that haunt both of these books.The answer that emerges from each book to both of these questions is "yes."For Eagleton, Marxist literary critic at Oxford, it is the relationship between Marxism and postmodernism that is at stake.For the multiple authors of Liberation Theologies, Postmodernity, and the Americas, it is the relationship between a Marxist-informed liberation theology and postmodernity that is the issue.Eagleton is pessimistic about the potential relationship between postmodernism and Marxism.He worries that postmodernism represents a tossing in of the towel by political radicals, who have left the streets where they were challenging modes of production, social systems, and doctrinal formulations in favor of intramural conversations about "prisons, patriarchy, the body, and absolutist political orders."(p.11) According to Eagleton, academic discourse that belabors questions of epistemology ("talk of whether the signifier produces the signified or vice versa") is symptomatic of a complete abandonment of the material world (and any form of historical materialism) altogether.At its worst, it encourages a kind of Stalinist pragmatism (cf.Rorty) that "sees your cognitive propositions simply as ways of promoting your desired political goals . . .." (p.13) Eagleton appreciates the decentering and deconstructing impulse within postmodernism, but wonders whether this impulse can be "intentional" and "transitive," so that it moves "towards certain projects and into intricate solidarities with others," (p.15) rather than toward endless intransitive differánce.Even more critically, Eagleton wonders whether the clarion postmodern cry that history has ended and that metanarratives are dead is not part and parcel of the historical contradiction and metanarrative of late capitalism.He finds this same kind of "dogmatic anti-essentialism" to be part of the mystifying logic of capitalism.Using the arguments of postmodernism itself, he shows how the