(From "The Illusions of Postmodernism," Blackwell, 1996) If postmodernism covers everything from punk rock to the death of metanarrative, fanzines to Foucault, then it is difficult to see how any single explanatory scheme could do justice to such a bizarrely heterogeneous entity. And if the creature is so diverse then it is hard to see how one could be in some simple sense either for or against it, any more than one could be for or against Peru. If there is any unity to postmodernism at all, then it can only be a matter of Wittgensteinian 'family resemblances'; and in this sense it seems to provide an instructive example of its own dogmatic anti-essentialism, of which more later on. If postmodernism were nothing but the backwash of a political debacle, it would be hard, impressionistically speaking, to account for its often exuberant tone, and impossible to account for any of its more positive attributes. One would, for example, be forced to claim that its single most enduring achievement -- the fact that it has helped to place questions of sexuality, gender and ethnicity so firmly on the political agenda that it is impossible to imagine them being erased without an almighty struggle -- was nothing more than a substitute for more classical forms of radical politics, which dealt in class, state, ideology, revolution, material modes of production. That postmodernism's privileged political topics are indeed, among other things, substitutionary seems to me undeniable. Nobody who has run across the feeble concept of 'classism', which seems to come down to not feeling socially superior to people, or who has observed the lamentable effects on some postmodernist debates about gender or neo-colonialism of their ignorance of class structure and material conditions, could underestimate for a moment the disastrous political losses at stake here. The West is now bulging at the seams with political radicals whose ignorance of socialist traditions, not least their own, is certainly among other things the effect of post-modernist amnesia. And we are speaking here of the greatest reform movement that history has ever witnessed. We now find ourselves confronted with the mildly farcical situation of a cultural left which maintains an indifferent or embarrassed silence about that power which is the invisible colour of daily life itself, which determines our existence -- sometimes literally so -- in almost every quarter, which decides in large measure the destiny of nations and the internecine conflicts between them. It is as though almost every other form of oppressive system -- state, media, patriarchy, racism, neo--colonialism can be readily debated, but not the one which so often sets the long--term agenda for all of these matters, or is at the very least implicated with them to their roots. The power of capital is now so drearily familiar, so sublimely omnipotent and omnipresent, that even large sectors of the left have succeeded in naturalizing it, taking it for granted such an unbudgable structure that it is as though they hardly have the heart to speak of it. One would need, for an apt analogy to imagine a defeated right wing eagerly embroiled in discussions of the monarchy, the family, the death of chivalry and the possibility of reclaiming India, while maintaining a coy silence on what after all engages them most viscerally, the rights of property, since these had been so thoroughly expropriated that it seemed merely academicist to speak of them. With Darwinian conformity, much of the cultural left has taken on the colour of its historical environs: if we live in an epoch in which capitalism cannot be successfully challenged, then to all intents and purposes it does not exist. As for Lenin was just an 'elitist', theory and political organization are 'male', and-- a slight intellectual advance, this-- historical progress is 'teleology' and any concern with material production 'economism'. As far as 'theory' goes, that the West is indeed now stuffed with brilliant young male zombies who know all about Foucault and not much about feeling is no reason for concluding that Julia Kristeva should have stuck to poetry. A long time ago we fell into an obscure disaster known as Enlightenment, to be rescued around 1972 by the lucky reader of Ferdinand de Saussure. The political illiteracy and historical oblivion fostered by much postmodernism, its cult of flashy theoretical fashion and instant intellectual consumption, must surely be a cause for rejoicing in the White House, assuming that the trend does not pass out of existence before it reaches their ears. None of this, however, implies that the politics of postmodernism are nothing but placeholders for a political desire which dare not speak its name. On the contrary, they represent not only questions of world-historical importance, but the appearance on the theoretical centre stage of millions who have been dumped and discarded, as often by traditional leftists as by the system itself The claims of these men and women have figured not merely as a fresh set of political demands, but as an imaginative transfiguration of the very concept of the political. We would know that the dispossessed had really come to power when the word 'power' no longer meant what it used to. The paradigm shift which has accordingly been brought to birth -- a veritable revolution in our conception of the relations between power, desire, identity, political practice -- represents an immeasurable deepening of the fleshless, anaemic, tight-lipped politics of an earlier era. Any socialism which fails to transform itself in the light of this fecund, articulate culture will surely be bankrupt from the outset. Every one of its treasured concepts -- class, ideology, history, totality, material production -- will need to be thought through again, along with the philosophical anthropology which underpins them. The complicities between classical left-wing thought, and some of the dominative categories it opposes, have been embarrassingly laid bare. At its most militant, postmodernism has lent a voice to the humiliated and reviled, and in doing so has threatened to shake the imperious self-identity of the system to its core. And for this one might almost forgive it the whole of its egregious excesses. The politics of postmodernism, then, have been at once enrichment and evasion. If they have opened up vital new political questions, it is partly because they have beat an undignified retreat from older political issues -- not because these have disappeared or been resolved, but because they are for the moment proving intractable. In the early 1970s, cultural theorists were to be found discussing socialism, signs and sexuality; in the late 1970s and early 1980s they were arguing the toss over signs and sexuality; by the late 1980s they were talking about sexuality. This was not, need one say, a displacement from politics to something else, since language and sexuality are political to their roots; but it proved, for all that, a way of valuably reaching beyond certain classical political questions, such as why most people do not get enough to eat, which ended- up by all but edging them from the agenda. Feminism and ethnicity are popular today because they are markers in the mind of some of the most vital political struggles we confront in reality. They are also popular because they are not :necessarily anti-capitalist, and so fit well enough with a post-radical age. Post-structuralism, which emerged in oblique ways from the political ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and which like some repentant militant became gradually depoliticized after being deported abroad, has been among other things a way of keeping warm at the level of discourse a political culture which had been flushed off the streets. It has succeeded in hijacking much of that political energy, sublimating it into the signifier in an era when precious little subversion of any other sort seemed easily available. The language of subjectivity has at once ousted and augmented questions of political action and organization. Issues of gender and ethnicity permanently breached the enclosure of the white male Western left, of whom the most that can be said is that at least we are not dead, and couched themselves for the most part in a rampantly culturalist discourse which belongs to precisely that corner of the globe. Pleasure has returned with a vengeance to plague a chronically puritanical radicalism, and has also figured as a cynical brand of consumerist hedonism. The body -- so obvious, obtrusive a matter as to have been idly overlooked for centuries -- has ruffled the edges of a bloodless rationalist discourse, and is currently en route to becoming the greatest fetish of all. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
