avant grade/ post modernism

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M.Phil. in European Literature  
Fictions of Modernity

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All I can try to do in less than half an hour today is to sketch in extremely rapid overview some of the theoretical positions underlying the terms avant-garde, modernism, and postmodernism, peppering them with some examples inevitably torn out of context and simplified to fit the framework of my argument. But I'll have achieved what I intended if I can encourage you to follow up through the bibliography some of these ideas.

The terms 'modernity' and 'modernism' are perplexing enough without the addition of the prefix 'post-'. Even the attempt to historicize modernity, to try and define its boundaries historically, is a paradoxical task because, in the words of Tony Pinkney (see bibliography), modernity's awareness of itself as modern announces [Q] "merely the empty flow of time itself" [U], and its self-periodization is offered only as a break with the "mythic or circular temporality" (or non-temporality) of the organic community. This is to say that modernity can only define itself in terms of a temporal break with an organic past, but it is a break that has always already occurred no matter which moment one chooses as its starting point. Needless to say, this understanding of the infinite expandability of the modern, and the infinite regress of its origins, itself remains caught up within modernism's internal ideology.

Some commentators attempt to align modernity with the rise of the bourgeoisie during the 19^th Century, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and its embrace of rationalism and positivism. Such arguments then see modernity as the culmination of Enlightenment rationality, with its beliefs in science and progress. The argument is often loosely based on Theodor Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's foundational text, Dialectic of Enlightenment, which, written in 1944 towards the end of the Nazi terror, proclaims that [Q] "Enlightenment is totalitarian". Enlightenment rationality is seen as a mode of thought so bound up with knowledge as a form of mastery, that it is destined to reach its grizzly culmination in the rationalized and technologized slaughter of the Nazi concentration camps, as well as, with hindsight, in the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In many such accounts, the Messianic faith of modernity reaches its end in those techno-scientific slaughterhouses too, and the post-war world, dominated economically and culturally by the United States of America, emerges into its post-modern dawn.

Other, more economically grounded arguments, such as David Harvey's meticulously argued book, or Fredric Jameson's more sweeping account, lay less stress on thought or rationality, and more on ideology and the rise of industrial capitalism, with its unleashing of the mobilizing forces of "creative destruction", following Marx's view of capitalism as simultaneously a dissolving and a creative force. It is the phase of capitalist expansion during the 19^th Century, with its radical restructuring of social relations, that distinguishes the modern epoch from everything that comes before. Capitalism, in the Marxist view, is seen as "a social system internalizing rules that ensure it will remain a permanently revolutionary and disruptive force in its own world history" (Harvey, p. 107), or to quote Marx and Engels directly:

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober sense the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men. (The Communist Manifesto, cit. Harvey, pp. 99-100)

For Harvey, very crudely, capitalism has experienced, from the mid 19^th Century onwards, repeated crises of overaccumulation, leading to a phenomenon he terms "time-space compression", after Marx's idea that capitalism is driven through the desire for faster and faster turnover to the "annihilation of space by time". This leads to fundamentally new and disorientating experiences of space and time and in turn to crises in spatial-temporal representation, issuing in strong æsthetic responses. One such period occurs from the 1870s to the 1930s, when capitalism finds a spatial fix to the crisis of overaccumulation in rapid Imperial expansion. Under this argument, the modernist city is, of necessity, the Imperialist city. The latest bout of time-space compression, for Harvey, is the transition, starting in the late 1960s, from Industrial Fordism -- Ford's famous rationalization of capitalist production via the assembly-line -- to a new capitalist regime of "flexible accumulation". It is this shift that marks the transition from modernity to postmodernity within the terms of this argument. The wholesale capitalist takeover of the sphere of culture and representation together with the æsthetic responses generated by this, are part and parcel of this attempt to outline the historical condition of postmodernity.

We have however jumped too far ahead of ourselves, and we need to go back and ask ourselves what continuities and discontinuities there might be between the terms modernism and modernity, let alone between postmodernism and postmodernity. Modernism may of course be considered as a cultural reaction to modernity, whether to the economic, social, or technological environment of high capitalism. If we accept this notion of cultural 'reaction' to a social environment, then we should expect modernism to be sometimes engaged with, and sometimes distanced from and critical of, the experience of modernity. It might try to engage, for example, with heightened experiences of speed and turnover within the urban environment, or it might withdraw from the shocks and jolts of an alienated and alienating social environment into an æsthetic world nostalgic for the lost myths governing an ordered and organic sense of community. Or it might partake of both of these impulses at the same time, becoming internally split, or schizophrenic.

This is more or less the thesis on modernism of Peter Bürger's now classic text, Theory of the Avant-Garde, which attempts to elaborate a theory of the cultural movements extending from the turn of the century until the Second World War. Bürger distinguishes quite sharply between modernism, and what he terms the historical avant-garde or, elsewhere, the revolutionary avant-garde. Modernism, what is even termed æsthetic modernism, is understood by Bürger as a self-protective gesture. Modernist texts -- of which The Waste Land is usually taken as a paradigm -- attempt to forestall their own consumption in the undifferentiated homogenization of either bourgeois utilitarianism, or, at a later stage, of mass-industrial capitalism. The modernist text draws its discourse protectively around itself, resisting its reduction to the status of a mere commodity, in an antagonistic relationship to modernity. While on the one hand it 'thickens its textures' to forestall logical reduction, on the other it is still governed by a desire to re-organize the shattered fragments of modernity into an organic, meaningful whole. Tony Pinkney puts it succinctly in his introduction to Raymond Williams' book The Politics of Modernism, claiming that the great prototypes of twentieth century urban modernism, The Waste Land and Ulysses, are internally split -- there is a dissociation in these works [Q] "between texture and structure, between heightened or even pathological subjectivity and the static absolutist myths which govern these texts" (p. 13).

The important point for Bürger, however, is that the schizoid modernist artefact is unable to recognize its own protective gestures as ideological, nor does it call into question its own institutional status as art: indeed, it can align itself with a highly reactionary politics by highlighting and reinforcing the self-defining institutional role of autonomous art in the face of the 'masses' or 'crowd'. For, under the terms of this argument, the supposed 'autonomy' of art within bourgeois society, as a privileged realm of free play, is in fact in the service of that selfsame bourgeois, capitalist system, providing it with a safety-valve, a neutralized, institutionalized space in which it is possible to believe that one is free.

The avant-garde, on the other hand, is precisely that which recognizes the unpolitical impulses of modernism for what they are and rejects the illusion of æsthetic autonomy within a self-reinforcing 'high' culture. The avant-garde tends to a much more productive acceptance of the energies of popular culture and even mass culture, and, in opposition to high culture as such, attempts to dissolve art into social life, to make its transformatory æsthetic projects into projects for the transformation of the whole of the social sphere, and not of a privileged minority. Walter Benjamin's famous essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1936), with its embracing of the politically demystifying possibilities inherent in the mass reproduction of artefacts, the way mass reproduction destroys the aura of distance and autonomy surrounding the work of art, is in clear contrast both to the modernist's lament at the cheapening of art and, as we shall see later, to the postmodern embrace of the mass-reproduced artefact as an emptied-out simulacrum.

Eliot's writings on art and tradition may be taken as emblematic of modernism's problematic relationship to high-cultural tradition. Erik Svarny in a book called The Men of 1914 (pp. 172-3) points out that in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' there is a curious semantic undecidability given to words like "conformity" and "order" in which the relationship of modern art to tradition slips insidiously between the construction of tradition as an infinitely rewritable text -- a co-hering and con-forming of past and present -- and the establishment of tradition as an authority from whose order the present gains its meaning in conformity. Eliot's poetical texts, too, hover between on the one hand a desperate heterogeneity of clashing discourses which comprise the 'unreal' City, fragmented quotations of tradition as a lost totality which can no longer give any coherent structure to the present, and on the other, the attempt to salvage some sense of 'order' by shoring up identity with these fragments of previous discourses, "these fragments I have shored against my ruins" and "shall I at least set my lands in order?" (The Waste Land, p. 79).

Eliot declared in 1923 that the "mythical method" of Joyce's Ulysses was [Q] "simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history [ . . . ] It is, I seriously believe, a step towards making the modern world possible for art". Eliot, a paradigm of modernism within this argument, whose Waste Land gives us an apocalyptic vision of a sexually (read racially) degenerate, tinned baked-bean-eating mass bourgeoisie, proposes ultimately to bring the modern world into line with the higher aims of art, whereas, it is argued, the artists and thinkers of the revolutionary avant-garde, from the surrealists to Walter Benjamin, are looking for an art form that would turn the forms of ruling culture, æsthetic or otherwise, against themselves.

Theories of modernism, which for Schulte-Sasse include much post-structuralist textual theory from Barthes to Derrida and Kristeva, privilege those modernist authors who foreground their signifying material, seeing in the distorting and disruptive effects of textuality -- the semiotic elements of language -- an inherently revolutionary process at work, one which disturbs and finally undoes all totalizing ideologies. Thus, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Lautréamont, Joyce, Céline, Robbe-Grillet and Celan are held up as paradigms of an inherently disruptive 'modern' writing, sometimes even of a 'feminine' writing, which, beyond or rather despite any political 'content' which their texts might contain, just is revolutionary. Politicized theories of the avant-garde, on the other hand, such as those of Walter Benjamin and Peter Bürger, where they pay attention to æsthetic principles tend instead to stress the techniques of fragmentation and montage. Montage and collage are terms which describe a non-hierarchical way of incorporating diverse fragments within the work of art without subsuming them to any totalizing æsthetic order, indeed disrupting any such notion (e.g. Cubism). The emphasis on fragments, or heterogeneous 'chips' of unarticulated experience, is seen as setting up a tension between the annihilated vision of the present as a debased fragment of lost totality and the transformatory, liberating power of remembrance which those fragments enclose, precisely because they liberate us from totality. This radical dialectical vision is perhaps best summed up in Walter Benjamin's description of Paul Klee's 'Angelus Novus', often termed the Angel of History: 

[The Angel's] eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. ('Theses on the Philosophy of History', p. 249)

For Bürger, the avant-garde's heroic attempt to sublate art into life, to destroy the autonomous category of art and turn it into praxis, failed, possibly because the bourgeois culture industry was able to incorporate and neutralize even its most radical gestures. Terry Eagleton's essay on 'Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism' interprets postmodernist culture precisely in terms of an emptied-out or hollow version of the revolutionary avant-garde's desire to erase the boundaries between culture and society, claiming that postmodernism [Q] "mimes the formal resolution of art and social life attempted by the avant-garde while remorselessly emptying it of its political content; Mayakovsky's poetry readings in the factory yard become Warhol's shoes and soup-cans" [U].

Eagleton's analysis is hostile to postmodernist culture on account of its ''depthless, styleless, dehistoricized, decathected surfaces'' (p. 132), but above all because it abolishes critical distance and expels political content in its conflation of itself with the form of the stereotype. It nevertheless provides an interesting characterization of the phenomenon which shows how it has developed from a peculiar combination of, on the one hand, æstheticist modernism, from which it inherits the fragmentary or schizoid self, self-reflexivity and fetishism, and on the other, the revolutionary avant-garde, from which it inherits the breakdown of the barriers between art and social life, the rejection of tradition, and pastiche quotation of commodified social relations (p. 146f). For Eagleton, as for a number of commentators, postmodernism does not in any way transcend the politico-æsthetic debates of modernism and the avant-garde, but is seen rather as a collapse into an endless miming of the earlier debates now emptied of any political content. Postmodernism is not a new departure, but is seen as a culture still caught within the very terms of high modernity.

Fredric Jameson, in his programme piece on 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', claims that postmodernism is characterized not by parody, which has a critical ulterior motive, but by pastiche, which is a kind of neutral or ''blank parody'', the imitation of dead styles, pure 'simulacrum' or identical copy without source (pp. 16-18). By way of response, Eagleton argues that if postmodernism parodies anything, it is parodying, in the form of a sick joke, the serious attempts by the revolutionary avant-garde of the 1930s to dismantle the frontiers between art (as institution) and life (as social praxis). This, he suggests, represents an ultimate irony in that postmodernism achieves this crossover in a way which would have horrified the early practitioners: instead of either resisting commodification in the way that modernism did by withdrawing into self-reflexive, auto-telic isolation, or else passing over into revolutionary social praxis in the ways proposed by the avant-garde, the postmodern artefact sweeps away this opposition by 'discovering' that, since the whole social sphere has already been commodified and æstheticized, turned over to ceaseless mechanical reproduction in the compulsive repetition of the market place, it might as well give up all claims to separate status and simply 'copy the copy', become one more commodity/stereotype -- a 'simulacrum', copy of the copy for which there never was any 'original'. Whereas this miming of mime might in the 1930s have carried a revolutionary force, an explosive anti-mimetic, anti-representational power, it has now collapsed into mere tautology and compulsive repetition: [Q] "if art no longer reflects, it is not because it seeks to change the world rather than mimic it, but because there is in truth nothing there to be reflected, no reality which is not itself already image, spectacle, simulacrum, gratuitous fiction" (Eagleton, p. 133).

The various arguments over the political 'effectiveness' or otherwise of postmodern artefacts (by which is meant the possibilities they provide for intervention and socio-political change of the commodified relations of 'late capitalism') turn on whether or not any critical stance is maintained in this conflation of artefact and commodity/stereotype, of which Andy Warhol's reproduced images of Marilyn Monroe, fetishized women's shoes or brand-name soup cans have themselves become the stereotypical example, postmodernism's 'already made'. While Eagleton and Jameson argue that postmodernism is characterized precisely by its disinterest in politics, by its blank pastiche, and ultimately by its complicity with doxa and stereotype, Linda Hutcheon in her The Politics of Postmodernism suggests that postmodernism is characterized, rather, by a double-coding, being undecidably ''both complicitous with and contesting of the cultural dominants within which it operates'' (p. 142). One of Hutcheon's main arguments is that [Q] although ''the postmodern has no effective theory of agency that enables a move into political action, it does work to turn its inevitable ideological grounding into a site of de-naturalizing critique'' (p. 3), which is to say that it carries out a work of 'de-doxification' in contrast to Eagleton's view of it as entirely complicit with the doxa or stereotype. I would like to suggest that it is not enough to look for a critical 'intention' inhering in Warhol's soup cans, indeed ultimately it is futile to try to do so -- and I would add that taking these prints as the paradigmatic example of postmodernist æsthetics is itself highly problematic and tends to lead to a flattening out of the debate which some attention to postmodernist narrative might help to resolve. Instead it would be much more fruitful to focus on reception, to look to a strategy of 'reading' the social and cultural sphere which places the onus of the construction of 'meaning' on the viewer/spectator/reader as opposed to the artist/producer/author. Postmodernism may in fact be at its most effective as a strategy for interrogating the way we read socio-cultural codes and objects which surround us.

One of the problems surrounding the debate on postmodernism turns on its lack of a theory of agency. For Jean-François Lyotard, the postmodern condition can be defined in terms of what he calls the "death of metanarratives", of the "grands récits" of modernity from scientific rationalism, through psychoanalysis, to Marxism. The postmodern era no longer believes in grand narratives of human progress, or in the possibility of an all-encompassing rational standpoint from which it is possible to know the human mind, nor in any grand transformatory political project. The human subject has been colonized by a wholly libidinalized capitalist economy which keeps us in pursuit of the latest commodity. We are the sum of the stereotypes against which we measure our identity, and there is no human agent in control of his/her subjectivity.

In many ways this vision is in stark contrast to one of the most important political movements to have made a successful transition from its foundation at the heart of modernity to the postmodern era, namely feminism. Linda Hutcheon has argued that because feminism sets itself a very precise agenda for social and political change, it tends to maintain a certain critical distance from postmodernism. For example, feminism needs a theory of agency, and needs to be able to understand cultural dominants in terms of 'master' discourses, i.e., literally discourses of the 'Master' which can be contested and overturned, all of which, we are told, postmodernism no longer believes in. It is also likely that the political agendas of various feminisms [Q] ''would be endangered, or at least obscured by the double coding of postmodernism's complicitous critique'' (p. 152). Nevertheless, she argues that there has been an important interchange of techniques and purpose between feminism and postmodernism. Feminism has perhaps to some extent rewritten postmodernism's 'blank parody' (can we any longer refrain from applying a critical feminist reading to Warhol's prints of Marilyn Monroe?), and some feminist practitioners have taken on board postmodern play with stereotype, in ways that provoke a rethinking of our strategies of reading those stereotypes: [Q] ''By using postmodern parodic modes of installing and then subverting conventions, such as the maleness of the gaze, representation of woman can be 'de-doxified''' (p. 151).

Similar to the feminist critique and transformation of the political (non­)content of postmodernist culture is that being undertaken by postcolonial critics. Kumkum Sangari, for example, in her essay 'The Politics of the Possible', on the epistemological framing of 'Third World' cultural products by Western postmodernism, argues that postmodern preoccupation with the crisis of meaning does not have universal validity outside of the specific historical conjuncture from which it emerges and which it is completely unable to acknowledge. The dismantling of the "unifying" intellectual traditions of the West [Q] "denies to all the truth of or the desire for totalizing narratives" (p. 243), and, what is worse, for non-Western or peripherically Western countries, postmodernism's denial of agency "preempts change by fragmenting the ground of praxis" (p. 240) at precise moments when such cultures may be engaging in an attempt to produce meaningful historical and/or national narratives (p. 242). Even radical Western theorists of postmodernity, she argues, fail to unpick this new "master narrative" which provides an unexamined frame through which all culture, Western or otherwise, is reduced to the non-dynamics of the Same. [Q] "From there it continues to nourish the self-defining critiques of the West, conducted in the interest of ongoing disruptions and reformulations of the self-ironizing bourgeois subject" (p. 243).

I want to finish this far too hasty birdseye view of the modernism/postmodernism debate with a quotation from Derek Gregory's Geographical Imaginations, itself something of a pastiche of various commentators' views, from Manuel Castells through David Harvey to Fredric Jameson, which underlines from a Marxist perspective the continuity, rather than the disjuncture, between the shrinking experience of space and speedup of time of the modern era, with its rapid global colonization, and an analagous but possibly even more intensified shrinkage of space which we are experiencing towards the end of the Second Christian Millennium:

the emergent forms of high modernity, perhaps even of postmodernity, depend upon tense and turbulent landscapes of accumulation whose dynamics are so volatile and whose space-economies are so disjointed that one can glimpse within the dazzling sequences of deterritorialization and reterritorialization a new and intensified fluidity to the politico-economic structures of capitalism; that the hyper-mobility of finance capital and information cascading through the circuits of this new world system, surging from one node to another in nanoseconds, is conjuring up unprecedented landscapes of power in which, as Castells put it, "space is dissolved into flows," "cities become shadows," and places are emptied of their local meanings; and that ever-extending areas of social life are being wired into a vast postmodern hyperspace, an electronic inscription of the cultural logic of late capitalism, whose putative abolition of distance renders us all but incapable of comprehending -- of mapping -- the decentred communication networks whose global webs enmesh our daily lives. (Gregory, pp. 97-98)

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An arbitrary annotated bibliography 

Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air. The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso, 1982. [A classic. The title cites Karl Marx's famous description of modernity in The Communist Manifesto.]

Brooker, Peter, ed. and intr. Modernism/Postmodernism. Longman Critical Readers. Harlow: Longman, 1992. [Contains a useful collection of modernist/avant-garde documents by Adorno, Brecht, Lukacs, Benjamin, as well as some fundamental postmodernist ones by Baudrillard, Lyotard, Jameson, etc.]

Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. from the German by Michael Shaw. Theory and History of Literature #4. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984 (1974). [The classic account of the avant-garde project as an attempt to transform the "bourgeois institution of art", arguing that avant-garde art is characterized by an awareness of art's complicity, in its very "autonomy", with the bourgeois social order.]

Docherty, Thomas, ed. and intr. Postmodernism: A Reader. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. [A very useful postmodernist reader with good introductions by Docherty.]

Eagleton, Terry. 'Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism'. Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985. London: Verso, 1986. 131-47. [Polemic and lively response to Fredric Jameson's programme piece on postmodernism (below). It is highly critical of postmodernism's apolitical/complicitous impulses (as opposed to the historical avant-garde). Has a lot to say about avant-garde/modernism too.]

---. The Illusions of Postmodernism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. [A slightly belated attempt to convince us that we never really believed in the more extreme dictates of postmodern theory; useful in countering its worst excesses.]

---. Walter Benjamin, or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. London: Verso, 1981. [A brilliant reading of Walter Benjamin's work through the lens of post-structuralist theories, with the aim of shaking up the latter and producing a genuinely political criticism.]

Gregory, Derek. Geographical Imaginations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994. [An excellent overview of trends in cultural theory from the perspective of cultural geography. Has a lot to say about modernity, postmodernity, post-colonial theory, etc. See in particular Chapter 3, 'City/commodity/culture: spatiality and the politics of representation', and Chapter 4, 'Uncovering postmodern geographies'.]

Haraway, Donna J. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. [A fascinating account of the interfaces between feminism, postmodernism, information technology, and (biomedical) technoscience, concentrating on the proliferating, haunting, hybrids (OncoMouse, FemaleMan) which are materialized from these encounters.]

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. [A highly influential Marxist cultural/economic account of the transition from modernity to postmodernity. Includes a reading of Blade Runner and Wings of Desire(Chapter 18).]

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. New Accents. London: Routledge, 1989. [Good, if at times over-eclectic, introduction to the notion of postmodern narrative as "historiographic metaficiton" and to postmodernism's difficult relationship to left and feminist politics.]

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986. [A classic.]

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso, 1991. [Rewritten versions of influential polemical essays that set the agenda for the political debate surrounding postmodernism, including the title piece originally published in what was a major running debate in New Left Review (1984).]

Pinkney, Tony. 'Modernism and Cultural Theory', editor's introduction to Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (below). 1-29. [A very good, sophisticated, overview of the relationship between modernism, Williams' thought, and modern cultural theory.]

Poggioli, Renato. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Gerald Fitzgerald. Cambridge Mass.: 1968. [Still cited, but surpassed by Bürger.]

Sangari, Kumkum. 'The Politics of the Possible'. In Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd (eds.), The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse. Oxford and New York, 1990. 216-45. [An account of the problems involved in the application of postmodern categories to non- or peripherically-Western societies, comparing Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie.]

Schulte-Sasse, Jochen. 'Theory of Modernism versus Theory of the Avant-Garde'. Introduction to Bürger (above). vii-xlvii. [A very useful overview of Bürger's theory, and its limitations, in relation to modernist/post-structuralist theories.]

Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. Ed. and Introduced by Tony Pinkney. London: Verso, 1989. [A posthumously published collection of Williams' later writings on modernism. See also Pinkney (above).]

from-http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/egk10/notes/postmodernism.htm

feminist post modernism

Stabile, Carol A.

Postmodernism, feminism, and Marx: Notes from the abyss.

Monthly Review. 47(3):89-107. 1995 Jul. [References]


Abstract

The points at which postmodernism intersects with contemporary feminism

and the political implications of that intersection are examined. The

capitalist system has worked against socialist politics and will continue

to do so.






For over a year now, the trial of O.J. Simpson has been headline news not

only for the tabloids, but for the mainstream press as well. In the days

following the grisly murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, the

case was the hot topic on almost all television or radio talk shows; it

appeared on the covers of popular magazines such as Time and Newsweek, and

was featured regularly on the front page of major newspapers. Shock radio

host Howard Stern, after playing the now infamous 911 tapes, suddenly

discovered domestic violence, while millions of television viewers tuned

in to watch the Los Angeles Police Department's stately pursuit of

Simpson's white Bronco.



The story had a surrealistic air to it even from the beginning, a distance

from the real event that ended the lives of Simpson and Goldman. As the

weeks lengthened into months, the distance between the event and media

coverage grew wider, while the case itself overshadowed healthcare, the

passage of Proposition 187, and the "Contract with America."



Domestic violence dropped out of the picture as coverage focused on the

trial as game, sporting event, or performance. The question became less

and less Simpson's guilt or innocence--what really happened-and more and

more how the defense and prosecution would play their respective hands.

Few in the mainstream media mentioned economic privilege, but race and

gender were repeatedly raised as "issues," first in relation to Simpson

and Nicole Brown Simpson, then as the court became a battleground between

Johnnie Cochran, the African-American head of the defense team, and Marcia

Clark, the white chief prosecutor. In the coverage of the case, the lines

between information and entertainment, reality and fiction, weren't just

blurred: they disappeared.



Welcome to postmodernism: world of the media spectacle, the disappearance

of reality, the end of history, the death of Marxism, and a host of other

millenarian claims. While celebrity trials have provoked sensationalized

coverage historically, few would deny that the media themselves have

undergone massive changes in the past decades, or that the media now

control and manipulate vast flows of information. But while some of us

might want to offer a historical and materialist explanation for these

changes, for postmodernists the collapse of reality into its

"representations," the disappearance of the line between reality and

fiction that allegedly constitutes "popular culture" today, actually is

the reality of the late twentieth century. There's nothing to explain, in

other words, because the media's representations and fictions are all

there is to know, all we can know. Society has moved to the edge of a now

flattened world, postmodernists claim, and the only fact we can know with

certainty is that we cannot understand what has moved us there or what

lies down below, in the abyss.



It would be easy to dismiss or explain postmodernism's apocalyptic vision

of society as just another instance of the intellectual's divorce from

reality. In this essay, however, I want to treat this trend not just as an

intellectual abstraction, but as a historical phenomenon and as an

intellectual retreat from politics. In particular, I want to consider the

points at which postmodernism intersects with contemporary feminism and

the political implications of that intersection.



WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?



Let me first try to define these two very broad and often incoherent

terms, "postmodernism" and "feminism," at least as they are used today in

the academy. Postmodernism is loosely used to identify a historical epoch,

the condition of postindustrial, post-Fordist, or even postcapitalist

society. The relations of production (if one can still call them that) of

this epoch are variously described as fragmented (this applies to both the

social fabric and the mode of production), diffused or disorganized (in

the sense that systemic power relations are everywhere and nowhere,

pervasive but with no identifiable source), and ultimately unhinged from

history. Consumption has overtaken production, making class struggle (or

even the notion that society is antagonistically divided into workers and

capitalists) an obsolete concept. People no longer identify themselves

with, or as, a class, but through various, more particular identities

(e.g.,woman, lesbian, gay, African-American, Latina), identities that are

not only, or not at all, economically defined. Oppression has no systemic

material foundation.



Central to the postmodernist understanding of society is the belief that

the "grand," or totalizing, principles of modernity and the

Enlightenment--including appeals to rationality, progress, humanity,

justice, and even the ability to represent reality--have been fatally

undermined. This line of reasoning emerges from poststructuralist

critiques of language, subjectivity, and representation; but where

poststructuralism refers to theory, postmodernism is the practice. In

other words, where poststructuralists criticized the foundations of

modernism, postmodernists read these critiques as mandates for rejecting

foundations altogether.



For postmodernists, then, the system--rarely (if ever) named as

"capitalism"--has become so diffuse and heterogeneous that it not only

surpasses understanding but no longer offers any point from which it can

be opposed since power is allegedly everywhere and polymorphous. Indeed,

capitalism's "disorganization" signifies that there is no central point,

or system, to oppose. In a media-saturated age in which no one knows, with

any degree of certainty, what's really real, representation--whether

political or artistic--has become impossible. Capitalism, now fragmented

and lacking any organic unity, is no longer comprehensible as a system;

and, in any case, the very grounds for understanding or knowing have been

swept away.



European postmodernists, like Jean-Francois Lyotard, have expressed the

belief that Marxism, like the Enlightenment in general, culminated in

Stalinism because of its "totalizing" impulses. Some postmodernists,

especially in the United States, have gone much further than this

identification of Marxism with Soviet-style systems, holding Marxism

responsible for all kinds of oppression. "Twentieth-century Marxism,"

maintains Linda Nicholson, "has used the generalizing categories of

production and class to delegitimize demands of women, black people, gays,

lesbians, and others whose oppression cannot be reduced to economics."(1)

This kind of judgment dramatically displays yet another feature of

postmodernism: its historical amnesia. An argument like Nicholson's not

only represses a rich history of democratic class politics it is

remarkably insensitive to the simple fact that Marxism and socialist

organizations in general have been repeatedly marginalized and

delegitimized by capitalism. The transplantation of postmodernist modes of

thought from Europe to North America has tended to be doubly ahistorical,

divorced from the historical and material conditions that first produced

them, and then, in a climate of backlash against class-based political

struggles, appropriated by a society whose history of class struggles has

been assiduously repressed. It would seem ironic, if the political stakes

weren't so high, that both postmodernists and the likes of George Bush and

Dick Armey seem to be arguing that we don't have classes in the United

States.



Postmodernist social theory, and postmodernism in general, exist for the

most part in humanities and social science programs in the university.

Eschewing empiricism and quantitative methods (which assume the existence

of some form of reality that can be represented), most postmodernists rely

on interpretive methods borrowed from Saussurean linguistics and

hermeneutics to support their often contradictory claims. Postmodernist

social theorists, in replaying traditional debates within philosophy about

idealism and materialism, haven't transcended the terms of the debate laid

out by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology. Rather, they claim an

absolute victory for idealism, as materiality and the economic base are

consigned to the dumpster of history, and only language remains. Working

from this foundation, postmodernist social theorists argue that politics,

in the waning years of the century, can only work haphazardly, or through

the fragmented, divided, and often conflicting categories with which

people identify.



Despite its many contradictions and confusions, postmodernism does have

some unifying principles: an uncritical and idealist focus on the

discursive construction of the "real" (i.e., what is "real" is constructed

in and by language, although no one really explains what this means) and a

related privileging of the notion of "difference." If, in the end, we

cannot point to any "real" interests that might unify "us," then the only

form of political action conceivable is one based on "differences" in

identity. As opposed to Marx's notion of unity in difference, or E.P.

Thompson's "identity of interests," in which people share widelycommon

interests which can be represented by political agencies, postmodernists

reject any such representation in favor of particular and localized

differences.



WHAT IS FEMINISM?



Feminism seems at first a more accessible category than postmodernism,

since it apparently refers to women as a political category with an

identifiable constituency. Although the dominant trends in feminism

generally share with postmodernism a rejection of historical materialism

as a method and Marxism as a political critique, poststructuralist

critiques within feminism have followed a distinctive trajectory. Most

significantly, and unlike postmodernism, contemporary feminist theory

began not by rejecting the very idea of system or "totality" but, on the

contrary, by elaborating its own systemic analysis, in which, at least at

first, "patriarchy" was proposed as an alternative to, or occasionally the

accomplice of, capitalism. In this theoretical framework, women were

oppressed by a patriarchal system and had a common interest in opposing

it. The project for feminism has been both intellectual and political: to

raise women's consciousness of their oppression as women and promote

social change around gender issues, through collectively organizing women

as a distinct revolutionary class.



From the beginning, however, this project was rife with problems. The

concept of women as a uniform group proved an inadequate foundation for

feminists, either as a theory or a framework for activism, for although it

cannot be denied that most women experience the effects of a profoundly

misogynist system, they do so in various ways and to varying degrees. An

academic's experience of sexism, for example, however viscerally lived, is

mitigated by the resources she possesses by virtue of her class position

and is far different from that experienced by a working-class woman or a

woman on welfare. By substituting "women" for "working class," feminism

tends to deny that not all women share an interest in liberation, much

less a common ground for political action. African-American feminists have

pointed out that exclusions and oppressive practices were built into the

category of women as defined by white feminists, that certain groups of

women benefit from the oppression of other women, and that women, like

men, participate in racist, sexist, and homophobic practices. Postcolonial

feminists have argued that not all "patriarchal" systems are the same:

that "patriarchy" encompasses qualitatively different relations within

different societies and that these relations are themselves subject to

historical changes. Furthermore, for feminists to place exclusive emphasis

on division between women and men was not only to deny divisions among

women, but to reproduce a stereotypical view of female nature as caring,

nurturing, and relational. In short, the concept of patriarchy has run the

risk of reproducing sexist understandings of what it means to be female or

male and could, therefore, be yoked to antifeminist, reactionary politics,

as in the case of antiporn feminists' alliance with the reactionary Meese

Commission in 1986.



During the 1980s, the debate within feminist theory revolved around

essentialism (the argument that there is some foundation for the category

"women," grounded in female nature) and antiessentialism (the argument

that "women" is a historically specific and socially constructed

category). For essentialists (and it is instructive that few feminists

would claim this label, since it functions as a pejorative), women share

common characteristics upon which political action can be based. For

antiessentialists, categories such as "female" and "male" are not fixed by

nature and cannot be located in some unchanging natural essence. Instead,

they are socially constructed and vary considerably across cultures and

historical moments. If essentialism emphasizes differences with a capital

"D," or the absolute difference between male and female, antiessentialism

stresses the plural, lowercase "differences" within the category "women."



The critique of essentialism has been important in identifying the

exclusions upon which much feminist theory and practice were based, but

the opposition between essentialism and antiessentialism has exhausted

whatever utility it once had. It is here that we can begin to notice the

convergence of the dominant tendencies in academic feminism with

postmodernism, insofar as both lead to the same political dead end.

Anti-essentialist feminism, having taken note of the differences among

women, has now moved on to something like the postmodernist blindness to

anything but difference. In other words, just as postmodernists argue that

"the real" no longer refers to any concrete, objective reality, current

trends in feminism are dissolving the category "women" into a "discursive"

construct, so fragmented and variable that it is hard to see how it could

be the basis for a political project. It is not surprising that, as

feminism adopts postmodernism's emphasis on language and discourse, the

abstract opposition between essentialism and antiessentialism has produced

much theory, but has precluded practice.



However, despite these points of intersection between postmodernism and

anti-essentialist feminism, some would argue that the main distinction

between the two is that where postmodernism's critique culminates in the

impossibility of politics, feminism remains committed to the emancipation

of women (though by what means is unclear). Postmodernism is and always

has been a hyper-intellectualized movement, while feminism's trajectory

within the U.S. academy has maintained some connection to a political

constituency. Where postmodernism can be dismissed as an elite disavowal

of social and political realities, feminism's continuing political

validity is guaranteed by its original, if now quite tenuous, connection

to oppositional politics.



But as a word referring to an approach or even a political position,

"feminism" has become ever more vague in recent years. One can be an

explicitly postmodernist feminist, with a focus on gender-constitution,

language, and representation. One can also be a socialist-feminist, an

antiporn feminist, an anti-antiporn feminist, a liberal feminist, a

cultural feminist, or an ecofeminist. And while it was once understood

that feminism unilaterally stood for abortion rights, there are now

anti-abortion feminists within the academy and "Feminists for Life"

outside.



Despite these seemingly contradictory impulses within feminism, certain

commonalities can be observed at the intersection of anti-essentialism and

postmodernism. For example, although antiessentialists claim a connection

to feminist politics, the category "politics" (like the term "women") is

often emptied, as is postmodernism in general, of any connection to

material struggles or, indeed, any connection to social relations, since

the "social" is collapsed into the "discursive," and social relations into

linguistic patterns. In arguing for differences, individualized power

relations are emphasized, to the exclusion of their systemic

interconnection; and, of course, as any systemic source of power

disappears, so too does the capitalist mode of production (not to mention

any understanding of how academic feminists themselves fit into it) . The

upshot of this micropolitical focus is that a politics of identity based

on "life-style," consumption, and individualism has replaced a politics of

common interest and collective social struggle.



When political struggle is reduced to abstractions based on language and

language-games, there is no way to identify the system against which

people must struggle or the revolutionary agencies that might conduct such

a struggle. Postmodernists openly concede-in fact, they insist--that there

will be no site from which any antisystemic struggle can emanate, because

(even if "systems" exist) identities are infinitely fragmented and mobile.

Feminists attempt to avoid such nihilism by invoking patriarchy, a system

of masculine power against which women can struggle; but some fundamental

differences among women must be set aside if all women are to be treated

as primarily and uniformly oppressed by the patriarchal system. It will

seem a truism to those working within socialist organizations (or,

incidentally, those who are working class) to observe that those groups of

women who benefit from the exploitation of other human beings occupy a

more privileged class position than those who are exploited. But

anti-essentialist feminists can only take class position into account by

introducing a theory of economic determination that they have worked very

hard to deny, which would undermine their own theoretical foundations.



WHY NOT MARXISM?



To explain the origins of postmodernist trends, we would have to explore

both the successes of capitalism in the 1950s and the 1960s (the rise of

"consumer capitalism," or the so-called "affluent society") and its

failures in the 1970s and 1980s. We would also have to examine changes in

the conditions of academics in those decades. These complex developments

are beyond the scope of this article, but it is not so difficult to

describe the conditions in the academy today that have helped promote the

intellectual centrality of language and "identity," divorced from

economic, social, and political contexts.(2)



The trend away from "economistic" concerns has a long history on the

intellectual left. The current displacement of productive activity by

intellectual practice can be traced to earlier, more prosperous periods of

capitalism, when many people were convinced that consumer capitalism had

won the hearts and minds of the working class. Since then, the changing

structure of capitalism, the increased mobility of capital, and the growth

of the "consumer society' have contributed to a conception of identity as

shifting and variable, subject to changes in "life-style" and consumption

patterns (at least for those who can afford it). For others, the power of

capital, and its vicious attacks on the working class and the poor, have

made change appear to be impossible. But if capitalist success had

something to do with current trends, today these tendencies have been

strengthened by capitalist decline, not least by the financial squeeze on

the academy itself.



As education itself is increasingly subject to commodification and the

economic imperatives of capitalism, job opportunities for academics are

becoming much more limited and insecure. While the academic profession

remains a privileged career, graduate students today, many of whom have

already worked in low-wage and insecure jobs outside the academy, are

likely to end up in debt, in temporary and insecure academic work, or in

chronic unemployment. There is a powerful incentive for junior faculty to

"distinguish" themselves by adopting ever more fashionable, sexy, and

"cutting-edge" theories. Theories that elaborate the grim, monotone

realities of class struggle and capitalist exploitation don't sell very

well, especially when contrasted with, say, Madonna's "resistant"

feminism. And this kind of "resistance," based on life-style and

consumption, seems radical without being threatening. In addition, the

pressure to publish has speeded up the production process, favoring sheer

quantity over quality, as well as an emphasis on topical, contemporary

issues which are easier to produce than carefully researched analytic

work, based on historical accounts or fieldwork.



Given this more direct experience of economic realities, academics today,

and feminists in particular, should find a critical analysis of capitalism

especially compelling, since the contradictions confronting them are

becoming ever more evident But in the academy, it has become a kind of

intellectual common sense to dismiss Marxism and its methods in toto as

"totalizing" (because it seeks to explain society through an analysis of

its mode of production-capitalism), "reductive" (because economic

structures are said to shape legal and political structures), or

"universalizing" (because class is said to shape consciousness).A main

feminist critique has been that women and female labor were excluded from

analysis. These knee-jerk responses have become so pervasive that it is no

longer necessary to explain what "totalizing," "reductive," or

"universalizing" mean--in fact, they are just understood. For a younger

generation of scholars, whose formative political experiences have been in

various feminist movements, the rejection of Marxist-oriented political

activism is based on a set of myths about the masculinist virulence

inherent in Marxism.



How justified is this rejection of Marxism? Let's look at the three main

charges leveled against it by many feminists: that it is "reductive," that

it is too "universalistic," and that it fails to consider female labor. On

the first point, the general claim is that historical materialism reduces

structures of oppression to class exploitation, thereby ignoring or

minimizing sexism, racism, and homophobia. While it is certainly true that

historical materialism places relations of production at the foundation of

society, there is nothing simple or reductive about how these relations

structure oppressions. Rather, historical materialist analyses, instead of

examining only one form of oppression--like sexism, racism, or

homophobia--would explore the way they all function within the overarching

system of class domination in determining women's and men's life choices.

Sweatshop workers in New York City, for example, experience sexism and

racism that are both quantitatively and qualitatively different from those

experienced by middle-class women. The racism directed at poor

African-American youths occurs in a different context than that directed

at African-American women in the academy. This is not to claim that the

latter forms of oppression do not exist or are inconsequential, but by

situating both forms within the material context and historical framework

in which they occur, we can highlight the variable discriminatory

mechanisms that are central to capitalism as a system.



The charge of reductivism might be leveled more accurately against

anti-Marxist feminism. For although feminists have been forced to confront

the inequalities that exist among and between women, some have been less

than careful in considering the inequalities that exist among and between

women and men. Isn't it reductive to suggest that the oppression I

ostensibly suffer as an educated, middle-class woman should be accorded

primacy over the oppression of working-class men It may very well be the

case that some working-class men are sexist, but to what extent does a

focus on "their" sexism work to erase my class privilege, as well as the

fact that the most powerful and oppressive forms of sexism are wielded by

capitalists rather than disempowered workers? In short, while experiences

of sexism, racism, and homophobia vary in intensity and extremity across

class lines, those very class lines (demarcated by relations of

production) remain much more rigid and inflexible. It takes a certain

distance from economic hardship to claim that relations of production and

class position are unimportant, so it is not surprising that the claims of

economic reductivism invariably issue from more privileged class

positions.



The charge of "universalism" is closely related to that of reductivism.

This objection starts with the critique of modernity (including Marxism)

on the grounds that its conceptions of truth, reason, and justice (in

fact, its conception of "humanity" itself) are too universalistic, too

insensitive to the many differences among human beings (for that matter,

"humanity" has often been an exclusive category, like the "people" in the

U.S. Constitution, which excludes anyone but white males). This critique

has been valuable in challenging the oppressive uses of concepts like

"justice" and "reason," or the destructive applications of science and

technology in the name of rationality and progress. But at the same time,

it poses some serious problems for feminists. First, if there can be no

standards of truth, justice, or reason, we cannot appeal to them as

criteria of judgment or action. In fact, postmodernists, including

postmodern feminists, have often been criticized on the grounds that,

without the kind of standards they are so swift to reject, they themselves

can have no basis for supporting or justifying resistance to oppression.

Second, the possibility of opposition to oppression is also undermined by

the presumption that the common interests among human beings are so narrow

and fleeting that any politics beyond the most particularistic and narrow

forms of resistance are impossible. Accordingly, people can struggle

against "power" (defined provisionally and contingently) only through

single-issue politics, and the best that can be hoped for is piecemeal

reform. Since power can no longer be located or identified, since "real"

unifying interests are a colonizing fiction, part of a uniformly

oppressive Enlightenment world view (to which Marxism also belongs), an

organized opposition is neither feasible nor desirable. Politics, let

alone revolution, is reduced to a turf war among "discourses."



The third charge against historical materialism--that it has excluded

female labor from its analysis--has always been debatable. While it may be

true that women's unpaid domestic labor wasn't systematically integrated

into classical Marxist analyses of the mode of production (although both

Marx and Engels discuss the sexual division of labor),from the 1970s on

there have been Marxist revisions of this concept, particularly within

anthropology and economics. In addition, while antiessentialist feminists

have been swift to appropriate and revise poststructuralist theories (that

either neglect gender or deal with it in profoundly sexist ways) in order

to further analyses of gender, only Marxism seems to be singled out for

rejection on the grounds of this alleged omission.



At any rate, the development of contemporary capitalism has to some extent

made this question moot. With the increased blurring between the public

and private spheres, the heightened commodification of previously unpaid

female labor (care of the elderly, child care, cooking, cleaning, etc.),

and the wholesale entry of middle-class women into the labor force,

women's conditions are more obviously determined by relations of

production in a very Marxist sense. Non-Marxist feminism, with its lack of

attention to relations of production, is beginning to look far more

inadequate than even the most gender-blind Marxism in explaining the

conditions of women.



THE LIMITS OF CONVENTIONAL FEMINISM



The inadequacies of conventional feminism, both in explaining the

conditions of women as workers and in constructing a foundation for

effective political action, are illustrated by the narrowness of the

struggle over abortion rights. This has, of course, been the central issue

for mainstream women's movements for the last thirty years. There is room

for argument about the importance of this issue in relation to others that

affect women, but the point I want to make here has to do not so much with

the relative importance of this question but with the angle from which it

is being approached. For example, the passage of the Hyde Amendment in

1977 (which effectively closed off economic access to abortion for poor

women) generated very little feminist op position compared to the more

recent Webster Decision (1990). Abortion "rights," in this context, seem

to mean the rights of more privileged women. The very fact that abortion

rights have emerged as the defining focus of mainstream feminist activism,

to the exclusion of both economic access to abortion and economic support

in the form of day care and subsidies for those women who continue to

mother, suggests a narrow and skewed conception of feminist interests.



In the winter of 1994, I was involved in organizing a reproductive rights

coalition, the goal of which was to break out of the

abortion/anti-abortion deadlock by emphasizing economic issues such as

health care (including both prenatal and postnatal care, as well as

abortion services), day care, and welfare. Several members of the

coalition, sympathetic to NOW and Planned Parenthood, suggested that we

focus our energies on supporting the passage of the Freedom of Access to

Clinic Entrances Act (FACE). Others objected, voicing concern about how

this legislation might be used against striking workers and political

protesters in general. Although this predictably elicited heated

commentary about unions and sexism, what emerged most forcefully from this

debate was that the "rights" we were being asked to endorse were viewed

from a privileged perspective. Because the state was perceived simply as

an ally which promoted the particular interests of the more economically

privileged, these women could overlook the fact that at the same time (and

often in the very same places), the state was brutally dismantling and

repressing the rights of the vast majority of women and men. The struggle

for "rights" was being viewed apart from the larger system of power and

privilege in which those rights were situated.



Similar points could be made about the struggles against sexism and

homophobia in the military. Of course, struggles for the democratization

of any institution should be welcomed by socialists, but there is

something profoundly disturbing about an attempt to democratize the inner

workings of an institution like the military while ignoring, even

accepting, the antidemocratic and oppressive functions of the institution

itself. And lifting the ban on combat cannot change the fact that many

women (who may have little interest in career advancement within the

military) enlist because it is, as a friend of mine once put it, a steady

gig with good benefits for those who have few economic opportunities.



The defense of "rights," abstracted from historical, political, and

economic contexts, has weakened feminist politics and contributed to a

general sense that feminism serves only narrow and privileged interests.

Historical materialism offers the possibility of coalitions based on a

broader understanding of the exploitative nature of capitalist relations

of production, enlisting women and men in struggles against family

violence, further cuts to already severely diminished social programs,

and, moreover, against the system that benefits from these ills.

Furthermore, it proposes that women's liberation--if indeed it is to

include all women--is incompatible with capitalism.



Historical materialism has the advantage of offering the kind of

self-reflexivity--so lacking in postmodernism and contemporary

feminism--that I've tried to underscore in this essay. It at once forces

us to understand our theories, our practices, and our positions in

relation to the dominant structure of power and provides a much more

effective basis for an understanding of the positions of both women and

men within multinational capitalism and of contemporary shifts in these

positions.



Consider, for example, the debate about "family values." The conventional

feminist argument is that the New Right's call for a return to family

values is simply a backlash. On the one hand, this backlash is said to

represent an attempt to reinstate a traditional version of the nuclear

family in order to force women out of the labor force and back into the

home. On the other hand, it is seen as a measure of the effectiveness of

the feminist movement, insofar as women now have the "choice" of working.

What disappears from view in these analyses is the fact that economic

conditions have forced upon middle-class women the dubious advantage of

working one or more full time jobs in addition to domestic labor, and that

this social change benefits capitalism, and not individual men. Poor and

working-class women (many of them women of color) have long worked outside

the home, although few of them would call their alienated and often

desperate labor a matter of "choice." What is being represented as a gain

for women simply means that middle-class women are now being compelled by

the necessities of capitalism to make the "choice" that has traditionally

been available to poor and working-class women. To argue that the debates

about family values are intended to force women back into the domestic

sphere overlooks the fact that there can be no return to the traditional

nuclear family because it is no longer economically feasible. To argue

that these debates about family values were provoked by feminist successes

is to accept the ideological mystification that treats the economic

mandates of capitalism as if they were free life-style "choices."



I would like to believe that feminists are, in fact, committed to

revolutionary social change, but there's another, less pleasant

possibility to contemplate--one that points to the dangers of ignoring

class position. It could be that many who call themselves feminists are

interested only in maintaining their own class privilege or in gaining

celebrity status. From that point of view, Marxism is a serious threat not

only because it represents a challenge to the theoretical foundations of a

postmodern feminism, but also because it reveals the historical, material,

and class foundations of certain forms of knowledge. It is fairly clear

how women such as Katie Roiphe, Naomi Wolf, and Camille Paglia use

feminism as a marketing strategy to promote their books, images, and

careers, instead of promoting equality and social justice. But as long as

so many feminists refuse to acknowledge their own privilege and the ways

in which we all "benefit" from the exploitation of less privileged women

and men, feminism in general will be in danger of becoming a professional

strategy rather than a political project.



Let's return briefly to the world of the media spectacle and the trial of

O.J. Simpson. The trappings of stardom and courtroom melodrama aside, the

courtroom seems to stand in for a multicultural society--a place where

identities abound and flourish. Most of the jury members are

African-American, the key participants in the debate are a woman and an

African-American man, and a kindly but stern Asian-American presides over

the courtroom. But do people really buy into the spectacle at a time when

a massive consolidation of capitalism is taking place at the top of

society? Do people actually buy into the image of the multicultural

society at a time when black unemployment is more than twice that of

whites, when the rights of women, men, children, and their families are

being dismantled in such an open and brutal manner, when lesbians and gays

are under attack throughout the United States, when striking workers are

being pepper-gassed by police in places like Decatur, Illinois?



In the end, the media spectacle tells us nothing at all about what people

want or how they identify. Few, in fact, can afford to blur the division

between reality and fiction during a time in which reality bears so little

resemblance to its media representations. Those who continue to believe in

the possibility of revolutionary social change cannot abandon a belief in

the power of critical consciousness and the tools that enable people

(particularly those facing an unstable economic future) to make sense of

their situation and learn how best to fight against it, and not simply

make their peace with it. If feminist analyses are to maintain any claim

to analytic and political coherence (not to mention efficacy), then we

need to understand better how the projects some of us

promote-postmodernist, feminist, or some combination thereof--may actually

feed into and reinforce capitalism. By repudiating the very categories of

analysis that might enable understanding, these projects obscure our own

positions within relations of systemic exploitation and preempt any

project of social transformation.



Instead of seeing the fragmentation of identities as a cause for

celebration, we should try to understand how identity has been transformed

into a commodity for those with the capital to consume it and how the

capitalist system has worked (and will continue to work) against the

organization of socialist politics. In place of an identity politics that

serves only to pit groups against one another in a never ending litany of

competing claims to oppression, we need a more cogent understanding of the

systemic nature of oppression. We need to consider the extent to which the

politics of identity represents not a challenge to, but a product of, the

system, a manifestation of market segmentation and the commodification of

identity produced by the globalization of capital as a world system. What

appear to be oppositional strategies may very well turn out to be the

symptoms of oppression.



NOTES



1. Linda Nicholson, Conflicts in Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1990), p.

11.



2. See Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class (London: Verso, 1986)

for the most sustained analysis of these points. See also Wood, "A

Chronology of the New Left and Its Successors, or: Who's Old-Fashioned

Now?" Socialist Register (London: Merlin Press, 1995).



Carol A, Stabile teaches media criticism at the University of Pittsburgh

and is the author of Feminism and the Technological Fix: (New York:

Manchester University Press, 1994), She would like to thank Mark Unger,

Sudeep Dasgupta, Johnathan Sterne, the members of her graduate seminars on

postmoderism at the University of Illinois and the University

 from - https://www.google.co.in/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=notes+on+feminist+post+modernism

Notes on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922)

Notes on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922)

             Largely written at Lausanne (Switzerland) in 1921, the poem relies on themes Eliot addresses as early as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (written 1911, first published 1915).  The dedication of the poem to Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro, is a quotation of Dante’s tribute in Purgatorio to the Provençal poet, Arnaut Daniel, as “the better craftsman of the mother tongue.”  Eliot’s indebtedness to Pound for cuts and revisions in The Waste Land is well documented, primarily in the facsimile edition of The Waste Land published by Eliot’s widow, Valerie Eliot, in 1971.  Pound cut several hundred lines, discouraged Eliot from prefacing the poem with “Gerontion,” and cut three short lyrics that Eliot planned as interludes.

            Eliot’s reliance on Jesse Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) is recorded in his own notes (which were prepared for the book publication of the poem in 1922).  The argument of Weston’s book is that the Arthurian legends of the quest for the Holy Grail are founded on basic fertility myths and rituals, such as those described by Sir James George Frazer in The Golden Bough, a work of Victorian scholarship that argued all myths derive from common concerns of human survival—namely, the fertility and cultivation of the soil, seasonal changes, and other relevant natural phenomena.  According to Weston, “In Arthurian legend, a Fisher King (the fish being an ancient symbol of life) has been maimed or killed, and his country has therefore become a dry Waste Land; he can only be regenerated and his land restored to fertility by a knight (Parsifal) who perseveres through various ordeals to the Perilous Chapel and learns the answers to certain ritual questions about the Grail.”  And, we should add, the lance.  The Grail (or Holy Cup) and the lance are the crucial symbols of Arthurian legend for Weston.  They are obvious symbols of fertility—Cup=Mother, and Lance=Father.  In the syncretic mythography (the anthropological study of myth designed to discover common sources for different cultural myths) of Weston, the Fisher King is the archetype for Christian (Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection), Greek (the myth of Aphrodite and Adonis), Egyptian (the seasonal dismemberment and reconstruction of Osiris) vegetation and fertility myths linked to seasonal cycles and the regeneration of plant, animal, and human life.

            In many ways, then, The Waste Land brings together the mythic concerns of modernism in a particularly concrete manner.  Weston’s From Ritual to Romance is a work of cultural anthropology that belongs to modernism, although it is not specifically a “literary” work.  Weston’s work, like Frazer’s Golden Bough, helped give renewed authority to the founding legends of English history, in particular the Arthurian legends, because Weston and Frazer connected these legends with the most ancient myths and religions.  In many ways, Eliot’s The Waste Land offers itself as a special kind of “cultural anthropology,” because it depends upon a complex set of mythic, religious, and literary references (allusions) that at first appear unrelated, but on “closer reading,” reveal shared concerns, thematic relations that are themselves part of the solution to the “waste land” condition.  The “Grail Knight” who helps “answer” the riddles at the Chapel Perilous and thus revives the Fisher King is thus some version of the Poet for Eliot.  The very act of creating the poetic relations among different historical materials incorporated into the poem is Eliot’s “answer” to the riddle of modern London.  That “poetic” answer in his essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” 

Epigram

From Petronius’ Satyricon, a work that also criticized a dying culture, that of the declining Roman Empire: “For I saw with my own eyes that Sibyl hanging in a jar at Cumae, and when the acolytes said, ‘Sibyl, what do you wish?’ she replied, ‘I wish to die.’”

I.  The Burial of the Dead (The title refers to the Anglican burial service)

Structural Characteristics

1. This section sets up the main themes of the poem by associating the “Unreal City” of modern London and its living-dead with the loss of any genuine mythic consciousness.

2. The “cruel April” of the opening lines suggests that the natural order of things (Spring as bountiful, welcome, has become unnatural.

   

3. The “cosmopolitanism” of post-World War I Europe reflects a loss of a sense of place, origin, tradition.

Textual Notes  

1. German, 1, 12: “I’m definitely no Russian, I come from Lithuania, true German.”  “Marie” seems to be the Countess Marie Larisch, whom Eliot uses here as a figure for the declining European aristocracy, its nostalgia, its sense of displacement.  The Countess was a confidante of Empress Elizabeth of Austria and reminisced about pre-war Europe in conversations with Eliot.

2. The second stanza (l. 19 ff) begins with rapid-fire quotations from the Bible—Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, and Isaiah—as Eliot’s notes indicate.  The Biblical passages suggest some metaphysical drama hidden by the bored, decadent cosmopolitanism of modern Europe.

3. Verses from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, in which a sailor recalls the girl he has left behind “Fresh blows the wind to the homeland; my Irish child, where are you waiting?”  The lines establish the theme of desire/yearning for sexual and divine love.

4. The final German line in the stanza, also from Tristan und Isolde, is the shepherd’s report to the dying Tristan, hoping for some sign of Isolde’s arrival: “Desolate and empty is the sea.”  The “rhythm” of this stanza establishes that of the entire poem—desire/yearning for sexual and divine love is repeatedly frustrated by the “waste land” world.

5. The Tarot pack is linked by Jesse Weston with fertility myths.  The four suits she discusses are the cup, lance, sword, and dish—the life symbols of the Grail legend.  See Eliot’s note to this section regarding his use of the Tarot pack.  Incorporating various figures of the Tarot pack in his poetic narrative, Eliot seems to be reaffirming Weston’s complaint, “Today the Tarot has fallen somewhat into disrepute, being principally used for purposes of divination.” 

6. Madame Sosostris of l. 43 is a parody of Madame Blavatsky, a popular occultist among literary circles in the early 1900s.  Her name also seems to be a parody of the Egyptian name, “Sesostris,” a pharaoh.  Eliot probably borrowed this name from the character, “Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana,” in Aldous Huxley’s novel, Chrome Yellow.

7. “Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,” puns on the poisonous plant, belladonna, which as also used to make a cosmetic, which accords nicely with the other meaning, “Beautiful lady.”  Like the “beautiful lady” in “A Game of Chess,” most of the women in the poem are dangerously seductive, threatening to masculinity. 

8. l. 60-76: The final stanza of the first section is a mixture of references to Baudelaire, the French Symbolist poet, and Dante’s Inferno.  The final line of the stanza is take from Baudelaire’s “Au Lecteur” (“To the Reader”): “Hypocrite reader!—my double—my brother!”  Eliot implicated the reader in this waste land, perhaps associating him with “Stetson” (a kind of hat) in the preceding lines, who has buried a “corpse” in the “garden.”  Does this suggest that the reader is responsible for the waste land, insofar as the reader has failed to connect the fragments of myth and history that the poet has given the reader?

II.  A Game of Chess

The title refers to Thomas Middleton’s (1580-1627) A Game of Chess and Women Beware Women, the latter of which has a scene in which a mother-in-law is distracted by a game of chess while her daughter-in-law is seduced.  In our age, Eliot suggests, sexual reproduction (always a metaphor for cultural reproduction) has been reduced to a game of flirtation and seduction of conventional moves, like a game of chess. 

Structural Characteristics 

1. This section concentrated on the failure of love/sexuality in this modern world.

2. The only regeneration possible is suggested ironically by Philomel.  Raped by her sister’s husband, King Tereus, Philomel’s tongue was cut out to prevent her from telling.  Philomel embroidered the story of her rape and this tells her sister, Procne, who took revenge by feeding Tereus their son, Itys, at a banquet.  Philomel was changed into a nightingale to forever sing her story, which is her ultimate, perhaps poetic, revenge upon her violator.  The mythic story is taken by Eliot from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as he notes.  Unlike Romantic Nightingales, this nightingale sings not of beauty, but of false rule.  King Tereus’ violation of his sister-in-law is “poetically” punished in that he consumes his own heir.  The mythic story, then, is about the failure of the transmission of the right to rule, which is just what Philomel (and Eliot) sings. 

3. The rest of this section, set primarily in an English pub, weaves myriad references from Milton, Ovid, Webster, Middleton, and other major literary figures from Classical times to the seventeenth Century (the Tradition Eliot thinks we have lost) into a fragment of modern life, which suggests how this rich tradition had been degraded.  The barroom conversation focuses on “Lil” and “Albert,” and how Lil has had an abortion.  The “Abortion” in this scene, of course, is that of the rich cultural tradition suggested by the literary references that drift through the dialogue.

  

Textual Notes

1. l. 117-120: See Eliot’s note to Webster’s The Devil’s Law Case.  In the particular scene, a doctor finds that the victim of a murder attempt is still breathing, he asks this question, “I the wind in that door still?”

2. The “Shakepeherian Rag” was an American ragtime song, a bit of Ziegfield’s Follies in 1912. 

3. l. 139: “demobbed” refers to being demobilized from the army at the end of WWI. 

4. The refrain, “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME,” is the traditional call of the British bartender at closing time, but also an ironic reference to a) the expediency of modern life; and b) the traditional call to judgment.  This “double reference”—like the Tarot pack, to something richly suggestive and historical while at the same time to something modern and trivial—is characteristic of Eliot’s poetic technique in this poem. 

  

III.  The Fire Sermon

The title refers to Buddha’s Fire Sermon, in which he preached against the fires of lust and other passions which destroy men and prevent their spiritual regeneration.  He counsels his disciples to pursue higher lives and freedom from earthly passions.  This section this is a sort of “answer: to the various “seductions” represented in “A Game of Chess.” 

Structural Characteristics 

1. This section will weave together three basic lines of religious influence: Buddhism (the Fire Sermon), Classical prophecy (Tiresias), and Christianity (St. Augustine).  Like Frazer and Weston, Eliot is performing his won sort of “mythic synthesis” in this section of the poem.


2. Now is season is autumn, and the regeneration of the fertility myths is denied.  The “Fisher King” is reduced to the speaker reflecting on his “brother’s wreck” and “on the king my father’s death before him.” 

3. In a sense, we have reached the center of the “waste land” or of the Inferno (thus the fire imagery). 

4. It is at this moment of utter despair, nearly complete alienation, that a prophetic figure like Tiresias can be reborn.  Tiresias, like Philomel, is some version of the poet, Eliot.  What begins to become clear in this poem is that the frustrated sexuality of “A Game of Chess” and of the typist and the “young man carbuncular” in this poem is to be replaced by a more authentic sort of reproduction, which for Eliot is the power of poetic language as it recalls and reshapes the cultural heritage.  Thus the poet may become androgynous, like Tiresias. 

5. The river Thames winds through this section.  At first it seems merely to bring the waste of the urban world, but gradually it is associated with the “Song of the Thames-daughters,” who are derived from Wagner’s Rhine-maidens in both Das Reingold (The Rhine Gold) and Götterdämerung (The Twilight of the Gods).  The Rhine-maidens signify both the beginning and the end, the birth and the death of the Norse gods as associated with the Norse tale Das Nibelungenlied (The Song of the Niebelungs), the story associated with the Norse Ring cycle.  The river, then, begins to resume some of its magical, mythical qualities, in part because it becomes a poetic river that carries us back into history.  The River, then, will become one source of fertility.   

    

Textual Notes 

1. l. 197-98: “Mrs. Porter” takes the place of the mythic Diana to suggest how far myth has fallen.  Diana and her prototype, Artemis, were Greek fertility goddesses.  Sweeney and Mrs. Porter (characters from other poems by Eliot) have replaced Actaeon and Diana.  The degradation of the classical myth of the “hunt” and “chase” into “the sound of horns and motors” is obvious enough.

2. French, l. 202: “And O those children’s voices singing in the dome” is from Verlaine’s Parsifal.  Verlaine’s Parsifal, the Questing Knight, is trying to resist all sensual temptations to keep himself pure for the Grail.

3. “Mr. Eugenides” picks up the Tarot pack prophesies from the first section.  Here the economic forces at work to “cheapen the age” and the failure of communication (“asked me in demotic French”) and the perversion of love to mere carnality )“to luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel / Followed by a weekend at the Metropole”) repeat common themes of the poem. 

4. Tiresias.  The Latin in Eliot’s note to this section: “The story goes that once Jove, having drunk a great deal, jested with Juno.  He said, “Your pleasure in love is really greater than that enjoyed by men.  She denied it, so they decided to seek the opinion of wise Tiresias, for he know both aspects of love.   For once, with a blow of his staff, he had committed violence on two huge snakes as they copulated in the green forest; and—wonderful to tell—was turned from a man into a woman and thus spent seven years.  In the eighth year, he saw the same snakes again and said, ‘If a blow struck at you is so powerful that it changes the sex of the giver, I will now strike at you again.’  With these words he struck the snakes, and his former shape was restored to him and he became as he had been born.  So he was appointed arbitrator in that playful quarell, and supported Jove’s statement.  It is said that Juno was quite disproportionately upset, and condemned the arbitrator to perpetual blindness.  But the almighty father (for no god may undo what has been done by another god), in return for the sight that had been taken away, gave him the power to know the future and so lightened the penalty paid by the honor.” Tiresias lived in Thebes for many generations, where he witnessed the tragic fates of Oedipus and Creon; he prophesied in the market place by the wall of Thebes (see l. 245).

5. l. 279.  “Elizabeth and Leicester.”  The poem has focused at various points on the failure of proper governance as a cause for the Waste Land.  King Tereus is a good example of a bad ruler.  Here Eliot refers to Queen Elizabeth I’s love affair with the Earl of Leicester.  Eliot’s note to this passage provides the reference to Froude’s biography of Elizabeth,  but the passage is particularly important, since Elizabeth did not marry Leicester, in part because she recognized the difference between her role as ruler and her romantic interests.  Sexist as Eliot can be in this poem—with all his fears of seductive feminine charms as tokens of the Modern Age and its corrupt sexuality—he seems to suggest here that Woman (Elizabeth I) need not be simply a decorative, seductive, and finally dependent part of man, but can approach the sort of authority claimed by Philomel, the androgynous Tiresias, and finally Eliot, the Poet.

6. thus the final references in this section to St. Augustine’s Confessions, which are to Augustine’s efforts to overcome the temptations of Carthage and the pagan world, suggests that poetry, like religion and good governance, ought to be the sublimation of a sexual drive that otherwise leads only to biological reproduction a fragmentation.

  

IV.  Death by Water

Like the water imagery in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the “water” in this section of the poem can be taken in two ways: a) as the “drowning” the reader has been experiencing in these unrelated bits an pieces that Eliot had deliberately jumbled together from modern life and from history; and b) as a sacrificial, baptismal immersion in Culture and History that has been made possible by purging the “Self” (the Ego of sexual desire).  Such “purgation” has been addressed explicitly in “The Fire Sermon.”  One form of “purgation” is religious, as Buddha and Augustine recommend; another is governance (Elizabeth I).  Still another is the discipline of poetry. 

V.  What the Thunder Said

Structural Characteristics

1. Whether the drowning of section 4 is a warning or a preparation, in this section we travel to the Chapel itself, only to find it empty and ruined, then wait for the rain that comes with this awareness.  Perhaps the discovery of the “heap of broken images”—i.e., of a modern age that has lost its traditions—is itself the basis for a new mythology.

2. Despite the Christian imagery in the first third of this final section (Christ, his resurrection, the journey to Emmaus), the Christian savior does not seem to offer a viable solution for Eliot.  The poem does not appear to be an anticipation of Eliot’s conversion to the Anglican Church in 1927, as some critics have suggested.

3. Instead, it is the poetic “I” who breaks out of his prison at the end, assumes both the role of the Fisher King and the madman (Hieronymo), both of which seem appropriate to Eliot’s themes.  Hieronymo is, after all, the man who uses his “madness” to create an art (a play) that will revenge him on a world that has betrayed him (and murdered his son).  Hieronymo seems another version of Philomel, both of whom become versions of the Poet taking “revenge” on the world for its failure to respect Myth-Religion-Poetry.

  

Textual Notes   

1. The thunder’s message, “Datta, dayadhvam, damyata” is from the Upanishads, the Hindu Sacred Texts, and means: “Give, sympathize, control.”  As a “moral,” these bits of wisdom are disappointing, but when read in terms of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” make considerably more sense. 

2. l. 412: “I have heard the key.”  Eliot refers the reader to Dante’s Inferno, where Ugolino recalls his imprisonment in the tower with his children, where they starved to death.  Clearly, the themes of “imprisonment” and imagery of “towers” refers to our narrow egotism, our self-entrapment within our own desires, and our failures to connect our lives with what the very references in these passages are attempting to revive: the rich cultural traditions that give our individual lives meaning and continuity.

3. l. 428: the Italian is from Dante’s Purgatorio, where Arnaut Daniel, the Provençal poet, addresses Dante: “No I pray you, by that virtue which guides you to the summit  of the stairway, be mindful in due time of my pain.”  Eliot quotes the conclusion from this appeal, “he hid himself in the fire which refines them.”  The purgatorial vision of refining fire, rather than infernal flames, is invoked here. 

4. l. 429: the Latin phrase means, “When shall I Be as the swallow?”  It comes from the Pervigilim Veneris (“Vigil of Venus”), an anonymous late Latin poem combining a hymn to Venus with a description of Spring.  The poem marks the crossing of pagan and Christian traditions.  In the rest of the poem, there is another telling of the Tereus-Procne-Philomel story, except that Philomel has been turned into a swallow, rather than a nightingale. 

5. l. 430: the French reference to Gerard de Nerval (see Eliot’s note) reads: “The Prince of Aquitaine at the ruined tower.”  One of the cards in the Tarot pack is the “tower struck by lightning.”  The “ruined tower” is also the ruined Chapel Perilous, and, of course, the “fragments” of the entire cultural-literary-religious-mythic tradition of the West that Eliot has at once called attention to and attempted to reintegrate into a poetic  work. 

6. Hieronymo is from Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (1594), in which he creates a court entertainment that casts his son’s murderers in roles that cause them to be killed as the play turns real.  Obviously, the revenge of Hieronymo is comparable to Eliot’s own, as he forces the reader to “act out” just what the reader has helped produce: the fragmentation of the mythic-religious-poetic tradition/heritage.

7. Final line: “Shantih, Shantih, Shantih.”  See Eliot’s note.  Eliot is attempting here to invoke a “conclusion” that cannot be translated, that is beyond formulated language, in order to discourage the reader from assuming that this “conclusion” resolves the issues in the poem.  It is also a magical incantation to the poetic act itself. 

 from- http://www.elcamino.edu/faculty/sdonnell/waste_land.htm