One of the ironies of postmodernism is that, while embracing—or at least surrendering to—capitalism, it rejects the “Enlightenment project,” holding it responsible for crimes that would more justly be laid at the door to capitalism…. Of course it would be foolish to maintain that capitalism has been responsible for all our modern ills or even to deny the material benefits that have often accompanied it. But it would be just as foolish to deny the destructive effects associated with capitalist imperatives of self-expansion, “productivism,” profit-maximation, and competition. It is hard to see how these effects intrinsically belong to the Enlightenment. At the very least, we have to ask whether an emancipatory universalism amounts to the same thing as capitalist expansionism or imperialism, and whether the fruits of “Western” science and technology must by definition serve the needs of capitalist accumulation, and the destruction of nature that inevitably accompanies them.1
At any rate, we are living in a historical moment that more than any other demands a universalistic project. This is a historical moment dominated by capitalism, the most universal system the world has ever known—both in the sense that it is global and in the sense that it penetrates every aspect of social life and the natural environment. In dealing with capitalism, the postmodernist insistence that reality is fragmentary and therefore accessible only to fragmentary “knowledges” is especially perverse and disabling. The social reality of capitalism is “totalizing” in unprecedented ways and degrees. Its logic of commodification, accumulation, profit-maximization, and competition permeates the whole social order; and an understanding of this “totalizing” system requires just the kind of “totalizing knowledge” that Marxism offers and postmodernists reject.
Opposition to the capitalist system also requires us to call upon interests and resources that unify, instead of fragmenting, the anticapitalist struggle. In the first instance, these are the interests and resources of class, the single most universal force capable of uniting diverse emancipatory struggles; but, in the final analysis, we are talking about the interests and resources of our common humanity, in the conviction that, for all our manifest differences, there are certain fundamentally and irreducibly common conditions of human well-being and self-fulfillment which capitalism cannot satisfy and socialism can.
For people on the left, and especially for a younger generation of intellectuals and students, the greatest appeal of postmodernism is its apparent openness, as against the alleged “closures” of a “totalizing” system like Marxism. But this claim to openness is largely spurious. The problem is not just that postmodernism represents an intellectual kind of pluralism that has undermined its own foundations. Nor is it simply an uncritical but harmless eclecticism. There is something more serious at stake. The “openness” of postmodernism’s fragmentary knowledges and its emphasis on “difference” are purchased at the price of much more fundamental closures. Postmodernism is, in its negative way, a ruthlessly “totalizing” system, which forecloses a vast range of critical thought and emancipatory politics—and its closures are final and decisive. Its epistemological assumptions make it unavailable to criticism, as immune to critique as the most rigid kind of dogma (how do you criticize a body of ideas that a priori rules out the very practice of “rational” argument?). And they preclude—not just by dogmatically rejecting but also by rendering impossible—a systematic understanding of our historical moment, a wholesale critique of capitalism, and just about any effective action.
If postmodernism does tell us something, in a distorted way, about the conditions of contemporary capitalism, the real trick is to figure out exactly what those conditions are, and where we go from here. The trick, in other words, is to suggest historical explanations for these conditions instead of just submitting to them and indulging in ideological adaptations. The trick is to identify the real problems to which the current intellectual fashions offer false—or no—solutions, and in so doing to challenge the limits they impose on action and resistance. The trick is to respond to the conditions of today not as cheerful (or even miserable) robots but as critics….2
The world is increasingly populated not by cheerful robots but by some very angry human beings. As things stand, there are very few intellectual resources available to understand that anger, and hardly any political ones (at least on the left) to organize it. Today’s postmodernism, for all of its apparently defeatist pessimism, is still rooted in the “Golden Age of Capitalism.”3 It’s time to leave that legacy behind and face today’s realities.
Notes
- ↩ This also raises large questions about the relation of capitalism and the Enlightenment, which there is no room to discuss here. In “Modernity, Postmodernity, or Capitalism?” [Monthly Review, July–August 1996], I try to sketch out some distinctions between the historical conditions that gave rise to the Enlightenment and those that gave rise to the process of capitalist development.
- ↩ [On “cheerful robots” see C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 175.—Ed.]
- ↩ In Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (New York: Pantheon, 1995), 165–67. The “Golden Age” (roughly 1947 to 1973) is sandwiched between the “Age of Catastrophe” and the “Landslide.” [This note has been moved from another point in Wood’s original text.—Ed.]
Comments are closed.