A grammatically-correct friend explained to me recently that when terms like “Post-Modernism” are written as “Postmodernism” it represents the linguistic equivalent of coming of age. Which, like so many apparently momentous passages in life, may be full of sound and fury, but in the end signify very little. Nevertheless, as Terry Eagleton points out in the preface to this very clever and readable book, “Part of the power of postmodernism is that it exists, whereas how true this is of socialism these days is rather more debateable. Pace Hegel, it would seem at present that what is real is irrational, and what is rational is unreal.”

The Illusions of Postmodernism sets out to challenge not so much the heavy hitters of the postmodernist canon but the “sensibility of postmodernism” which has seeped down to become part of the intellectual “common sense” of many young (and not-so-young) people, especially if they have come within a stones throw of a university classroom in the past ten years. As Eagleton explains, “Postmodernism is a style of thought which is suspicious of classical notions of truth, reason, identity, and objectivity, of the idea of universal progress or emancipation, of single frameworks, grand narratives or ultimate grounds of explanation. Against these Enlightenment norms, it sees the world as contingent, ungrounded, diverse, unstable, indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations which breed a degree of skepticism about the objectivity of truth, history, and norms, the giveness of natures and the coherence of identities.”

For the not-so-young adherents of postmodernism, the appeal of this way of viewing things has much to do with the fact that the world has not turned out quite as expected. For many, the youthful political optimism that the world could be set to rights which inspired a generation of radicals thirty years ago, has given way to a kind of “libertarian pessimism,” a belief that not much change is possible (or perhaps even desirable) and maybe capitalism isn't so bad after all, especially in its more exotic consumer forms. “Radicals, like everyone else,” Eagleton reminds us, “can come to hug their chains, decorate their prison cells, rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic and discover true freedom in dire necessity.”

In a satirical first chapter (which first appeared in MR July-August 1995 and subsequently in the MRP collection In Defence of History), Eagleton invites us, using a rhetorical device dear to postmodernists, to imagine a world in which the Left had suffered a crippling political defeat. In such a world one would expect that big ideas like “social totality,” “class system,” and “mode of production” would become suspect, in part because the only kind of political activity around would seem to be restricted to the cracks and crevices of the system. The grand political projects of yesterday would have given way to an apparently more feasible and sensible “micropolitics.” One could visualize a new politics celebrating the fragmentary and the ephemeral aspects of life emerging, or perhaps “a new somatics” in which the body (but definitely not labouring ones) would be seen as the primary site of struggle and resistance. In the realm of knowledge one could imagine the belief taking hold that not much of anything could really be known for sure about the world—which raises the sticky question of how one would know that such a belief was true in the first place. If all scientific and other forms of knowledge had been levelled to the common denominator of “culture,” with no culturally produced “discourse” any better than another, one could equally conceive of many well-intentioned people at a loss to justify why democracy might be preferable, to say, fascism. When political horizons shrink, “rigorous, determinate knowledge is rather less in demand when there seems no question of full-blooded political transformation.”

Like all good political satire, Eagleton's actual message isn't very funny at all. The world he depicts is, of course, not fictional but entirely real. It is the depressingly familiar intellectual and political landscape inhabited by much of what is left of the Left. But, as Eagleton is well aware, his thought-experiment raises an important question. For younger adherents of postmodernism, the experience of political defeat has been largely absent: “If postmodernism were nothing but the backwash of political debacle, it would be hard, impressionistically speaking, to account for its often exuberant tone, and impossible to account for any of its positive attributes.” Among postmodernism's positive achievements has been to highlight issues of gender, race and ethnicity as well as placing questions of sexuality, desire and identity firmly on the political agenda. Marxism has dealt tolerably well with the first set of issues but less well with the latter. Postmodernism can at least be credited with “an immeasurable deepening of the fleshless, anaemic, tight-lipped politics of an earlier era.”

The problem is that it has done so in a haphazard, one-sided and frequently censorious manner. For all its emphasis on the “cultural” and the “material,” postmodernism has a skewed conception of both. “One may, by and large, speak of human culture but not human nature, gender but not class, the body but not biology, jouissance but not justice, post-colonialism but not the petty bourgeoisie.” For example, class is reduced in laundry-list fashion to “classism” alongside racism and sexism, as if it were the result of discriminatory practices directed against people from certain social backgrounds. This confused form of culturalism, as Eagleton observes, “is bound to miss what is peculiar about those forms of oppression which move at the interface of Nature and Culture.” Women's oppression and racism have social roots as does class exploitation. But women and people of colour are oppressed as women and people of colour. In a liberated world there will still be women and people of colour but not proletarians.

Postmodernism's aversion to anything that smacks of “grand narratives” or teleology also prevents it from grasping just how mired we still are in what Eagleton calls “the impossibilities of modernity.” Put simply, for well over two hundred years liberal capitalism has been promising “liberty, equality and fraternity” for all but has instead delivered a world in which these ideals are systematically subverted by its own operations. The “liberty” of capitalists to accumulate wealth undermines the freedom of just about everyone else; political equality is subdued and restricted by the overarching powers of capital. It has been the task of socialism to point out these contradictions and to offer a way of overcoming them. It is no excuse for letting capitalism off the hook if what has gone by the name of socialism for most of this century has failed to achieve these ends.

One of the odd things about postmodernism is its remarkable lack of self-awareness about its own place in history. Just when capitalism has entered perhaps its most “totalizing” phase, “history” and “totality” have fallen out of fashion. But, as Eagleton points out, “though we may forget about totality, we may be sure that it will not forget about us.” In the current period postmodernism plays a contradictory role, at once aggressively exposing and uncritically celebrating, aspects of capitalism. It is, Eagleton suggests, radical and conservative at the same time, which is true of capitalism too. The logic of the capitalist market is disruptive, wildly transgressive and saturated with desire. Consequently, it is always in danger of dissolving its own moral and ideological foundations. At the same time, it retains a resolute commitment to its own values, ensuring that those who “transgress,” for example, rights to property, are duly punished. That is why capitalists are, in one sense, “spontaneous postmodernists”; ideological guardians of the system cannot afford to be. Postmodernism may be compatible with certain aspects of capitalism's current zeitgeist, especially its rampant consumerism. But it is hardly a suitable ideology for a system which still depends so deeply on the moral and physical discipline of those whose labour it exploits.

There is one sense, though, in which postmodernism and Marxism share a common set of goals. Both wish for a world in which plurality and difference are respected, in which people are able to choose whatever identity suits them, and where human desires and their gratification can be savoured to the full. The problem is that some postmodernists think that we are already there. Radical postmodernists think it still lies somewhere in the future but have very little to say about how we might get there. This is where “grand narratives” like Marxism come in handy. Marxism may not have a lot to crow about these days, but its method of understanding the world and its moral vision of the kind of society needed to replace the present system, still remains superior to anything on offer from postmodernism. This superb book goes a great distance toward explaining why.