Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism by Terry Eagleton

 

Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism

Terry Eagleton

Abridged and simplified summary for students of Indian Universities. 

There are two summaries in this blog.

Introduction

 

Terry Eagleton expresses his disillusionment with the postmodernist agenda in Against the Grain. The essay, Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism, comes from Against the Grain. Eagleton says that postmodernism is not a critique of contemporary society, as claimed by Frederic Jameson. Eagleton has no faith in postmodernism. He feels that postmodernism parodies the revolutionary art of the twentieth-century avant-garde. It also dissolves art into modes of commodity production.

 

The aims of Avant-garde & Postmodernism 

 

• Avant-garde attempted to remove the autonomy of art by erasing the borderlines between culture and society. It wanted to assign to art its humble, unprivileged place within the social order.  
• The Russian poet, Mayakovsky, attempted to unify art and society. He took poetry to the factory workers during the Russian Revolution. 
• Postmodernism, on the other hand, treated art as a commodity. The pop-art on shoes and soap-cans by Andy Warhol was an example of a postmodernist attempt to commoditize art. Avant-garde wanted art to be Utopian. Postmodernism turned it dystopian.

The alienation of postmodernism

 

Postmodernists claim that because of alienation, their works are depthless, styleless, and dehistoricized.  But Eagleton refuses to buy this argument. According to him, postmodernists could not feel alienated because alienation suggests some form of authenticity. Such authenticity is something postmodernism can never understand. Scepticism in everything authentic or real forms the foundations of postmodernism. 

 

Postmodernism and Late Capitalism

 

If postmodernism commoditized art, late capitalism went one step further by asserting that if art can become a commodity, a commodity can also become an art. Art and life interbreed—art models itself upon a commodity form with aesthetic attraction. 

 

Art as imitation (mimesis) —the different views of the avant-garde, postmodernism & capitalism

 

• Avant-garde rejected the notion of artistic representation (that art is a reflection of society). Avant-garde believed that art is not an imitation of the world. Art must try to change the world rather than imitate it.
• Postmodernism parodies this anti-representationalism of the avant-garde. It believes that art does not reflect the world because there is nothing to mirror. What we consider real is nothing but an image, spectacle, simulacrum, or gratuitous fiction. 

 

• Postmodernist art gains autonomy and self-identity. Its integration into the capitalist economic system makes these possible. In the capitalist system, self-identity and self-sufficiency appear as a commodity fetish. In capitalism, a commodity is a fetish, a talisman.

 

Art as performativity principle—views of the avant-garde, capitalism, and postmodernism

 

• Avant-garde views art as a practice, strategy, performance, and not as an institutionalized object. Late capitalism caricatures this.
• For capitalism, the performativity principle is all that counts, according to Lyotard. Thus, we understand the relation between the philosophy of J. L. Austin and IBM. 
• Classical models of truth and understanding are not relevant anymore. What matters is whether you deliver commercial or rhetorical goods. The goal is no longer truth but performativity, not reason but power. 
• Lyotard admits that postmodernism has no alternatives to offer against the commercial goals of late capitalism. It can offer only an anarchist version of the classical models of truth and understanding and nothing more. 

 

Modernism is eternal

 

Modernism is not a cultural practice or historical period, says Eagleton. It is a philosophical possibility that is permanent. No historical narrative can contain it because it is a timeless gesture. Hence, it can never die. It surfaces in different modes in different periods. History can never defeat modernity because they occupy different levels of human knowledge. 

 

 

History and Paul de Man.

 

Eagleton considers the views of Paul de Man, the most influential of American deconstructionists. De Man argues that the Nietzschean sense of active forgetting of history can never be successful. He argues that to forget something, we have to remember it. Thus the active attempt to forget will make us think about what we are trying to forget. The attempts to erase history are doomed to failure because that will only perpetuate history. Literature, says De Man, shows our continuous inability to wake up from the nightmare of history.

 

 

Literature is practice and its deconstruction. 

 

In an essay in Blindness and Insight, De Man points out that literature is practice and simultaneous deconstruction. ‘Writing is both action and a reflection upon that action…’ Eagleton agrees with the views of de Man. But he regrets that de Man concludes with political comments. De Man says that if we extend the notion of writing as both action and reflection on that action, we will have to concede that our knowledge of history is based only on written texts. We have not seen any wars or revolutions ourselves. But we speak about them based on texts written by others. De Man’s opinions are in accord with his views on history. 

 

If the power of history is accepted, it will destroy de Man’s arguments. 

 

Did High Modernism succeed in resisting commodification?

 

High Modernism was born with a mass commodity culture. It wanted to resist the forces trying to make art a commodity. To defeat commodification, the modernists thickened the texture of their works and deranged the art forms. They hoped that the elite nature of the work would prevent instant consumability. But by that very act, the work became unintelligible to the common man and lost its power to change the world. Ironically, it could not escape commodification also. The work that avoided one type of commodification became another. Eliot’s high-modernist The Waste Land is also a ‘work’ like Wordsworth’s bourgeois humanist The Prelude. 

 

What are the views of postmodernism on commodification? 

 

Postmodernism takes the stand that if a work of art is a commodity, it must as well admit the fact. The modernist conceives a work of art as an isolated fetish. The work becomes a product of everyday life in the capitalist marketplace. 

 

The relevance of modernism. 

 

Modernism stubbornly refuses to abandon the struggle for Meaning. For Eagleton, modernism is interesting because it struggles for Meaning. This struggle continuously drives it towards classical styles of sense-making that may be empty and unacceptable. But we can never deny their force. Eagleton quotes Kafka as an example. The fiction of Kafka inherits the form of traditional storytelling without its truth contents. The old model of representation is in crisis. But this does not mean that we have to abandon the search for truth.  

 

As against this, postmodernism believes that with the death of the principles of representation, the truth has died. The disintegration of ideologies does not lead to the dissolution of the subject.

 

The anguish and exhilaration of Modernism

 

• Modernism destabilizes traditional humanism.  
• This destabilization has two aspects. It anguishes and exhilarates, like a ride on a roller-coaster. 
• Eagleton points out that in classical rationality, we can see progressive forces (like Feminism) and barbarous and irrational forces (like Fascism/ Nazism).
• Postmodernist overlooks these contradictions when they assume that the unified subject is an integral part of contemporary bourgeois society and ripe for urgent deconstruction.  
• Here, Eagleton thinks that late capitalism has deconstructed the unified subject more efficiently than postmodernism. 

 

The contemporary subject (human being) as a fragmented entity 

 

• The contemporary subject is not a monadic agent. He is a ‘dispersed, decentered network of libidinal attachments, without any ethical substance, function of some consumption, media experience, sexual relationship, trend, or fashion’. 
• The unified subject is ‘a shibboleth, a hangover from an earlier epoch of capitalism before technology and consumerism scattered our bodies to the winds as to many bits and pieces of reified technique, appetite, mechanical operation, or reflex of desire’.

 

Does the disintegration of the contemporary subject mean that postmodernism is victorious? 

 

• Is there any truth in the disintegration of the unified subject? If so, it would have heralded the victory of postmodernism. The unthinkable or the utopian has already happened. 
• But the bourgeois humanist subject is not part of a history we can leave behind—agreeably or reluctantly. Though it is an increasingly inappropriate model at certain levels, it remains potently relevant at some other. 
•  Eagleton gives the example of being a father and a consumer simultaneously. Ideological requirements of duty, autonomy, authority, and responsibility govern the former (father) role. The latter (consumer) questions all these, though it is not entirely free from all those commitments. 
• The current ideal consumer of capitalism and the model parent are two different beings. The subject of late capitalism is a mixture of the two. 

 

Postmodernism is not universal.

 

Eclecticism, writes Lyotard, is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro-clothing in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter of TV games.

 

Eagleton writes: It is not just that there are millions of other human subjects, less exotic than Lyotard’s jet-setters, who educate their children, vote as responsible citizens, withdraw their labour and clock in for work; it is also that many subjects live more and more at the points of the contradictory intersection between these two definitions. 

 

 

Concluding remarks

 

• Postmodernism takes something from both modernism and the avant-garde and plays one off against the other. 
• From modernism proper, postmodernism inherits the fragmentary self but eradicates all critical distance from it. 
• From the avant-garde, postmodernism takes the dissolution of art into social life, the rejection of tradition, and opposition to high culture. 

 

The way ahead

 

The contradictions of the modernist work are implicitly political. But modernism considered politics as belonging to the traditional humanism from which it wanted to escape. Therefore, it submerged the political beneath the mythological and metaphysical. Moreover, the self-reflexiveness of modernist culture rendered its products opaque and unavailable to the public. 

 

 

Today, we have to frame the contradictions of modernism in a political light. We have to present modernism thus. Otherwise, it will appear as part of the tradition from which it wanted to escape. 

 

 

This is an abridged and simplified version of the original. Please read the original.

[This blog has two summaries of Eagleton's Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism].

 

S. Sreekumar.