The Dialogic of Postmodernity
Jun 21st, 2007 by Donagh
In an excellent article (sub req) on the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in the latest edition of the London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton explains why the ‘once obscure Soviet philologist is now a star of the postmodern West’ and, in doing so, provides a very handy critique of postmodernism.
Just as Bakhtin’s work is among other things a coded critique of Soviet autocracy, so postmodernism springs in large part from the rout of modern Marxism. In the work of Baudrillard, Lyotard and others, it began as an alternative creed for disenchanted leftists. Its obsession with discourse makes sense in an age short on political action.
Instead of setting fire to campuses, American students now cleanse their speech of incorrectness. If Marxism had been shamefully coy about sexuality, postmodernism makes a fetish of it. The warm, desiring, palpable body is a living rebuke to all those bloodless abstractions about the Asiatic mode of production. Instead of grand narratives that lead to the gulag, we have a plurality of mini-narratives. Since doctrinal absolutes dismember bodies, relativism is the order of the day. If castrating homosexuals is part of your culture, it would be ethnocentric of me to object.
Revolution is no longer on the agenda, but sporadic subversions may stand in for it. Class politics yields to identity politics. The system cannot be overthrown, but at least it can be deconstructed. And since there is no political hope in the heartlands of capitalism, where the proletariat has upped sticks without leaving a forwarding address, the postmodern gaze turns mesmerically to the Other, whatever passport (woman, gay, ethnic minority) it happens to be travelling on.
Hmnn
I see your hmmm, and I raise you an errrr. But I get your point.
I should have explained the context of Eagleton’s argument. At the beginning of the essay he asks why Bakhtin, who died in relative obscurity in Russia in 1975, should now be so popular in the Academy:
“For the past three decades, Mikhail Bakhtin has been more of an industry than an individual. Not only an industry, in fact, but a flourishing transnational corporation, complete with jet-setting chief executives, global conventions and its own in-house journal. In the field of cultural theory, this victim of Stalinism is now big business. Most of the mouth-filling terms he coined – dialogism, double-voicedness, chronotope, heteroglossia, multi-accentuality – have passed into the lexicon of contemporary criticism. A cosmopolitan coterie of scholars, some of whom have devoted a lifetime to his texts, have long since struggled to appropriate him for their own agendas.”
His point, ultimately, I think, is that post modernism with its pluralities and dialogic tendencies is very much part and parcel of late capitalism. If Bakhtin’s work and his theory of dialogic discourse was an attempt to work against the monologic loudhailer of Stalinism, it is now being used to feed into the regime (long working hours, long commute) of late capitalism. Or as Terry puts it: “No regime is more in love with the multiple and dynamic than late capitalism.”
It’s a snazzy article
Ahh
Arghhh!*
*throws his printed notes in the air
What exactly is post moderniism
Read Fredric Jameson
[…] this - coincidentally - feeds into Donaghs post on Dublin Opinion about post-modernism. The critique quoted makes a point which links directly to […]
Maurice, the question should really be ‘what isn’t postmodernism?’ although I like to define it as the term used by earnest undergraduate to explain to their granny why the world isn’t going to hell in a handbasket.
Rachel, is that directed towards me, or as a help to Maurice? Or maybe its a declarative statement that everyone should read Fredric Jameson. If the latter I’ll consider it post-Marxist spam. You’re comment however, led to me finding out about a recent Jameson text, Archaeologies
of the Future, which investigates the “relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness—alien life and alien worlds—and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more.” Yummy for left leaning fans of Sci-fi and literary theory.
Cedar’s link: Oh jinkies
If this is all true, I’m really rather pleased to find that Bakhtin has a (new) audience at last. When I was studying for a Cultural Studies M.A. back in the mists of time, hardly anyone had heard of him; it was all Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva and co. in those days. Yet he was the only theorist who seemed to me to be saying something worthwhile, accurate, and useful, although I expect that his arguments have now mutated into something grotesque and unrecognisable in the hands of the self-justifying obscurantist pseudo-sociologists that make up some Literature Departments (only some!) in academia these days.
As for postmodernism: Is it still going? I thought we were all past that now.
It was starting to become in vogue when I was an undergrad in UCD [many many years ago], although there was still plenty about the post-structuralists too. I suppose I picked up on the Bakhtin article because I filleted his books for my Master’s Thesis, particularly Rabelais and His World, but it fitted perfectly with the period I was studying, Satire in the Mid Tudor period, so I didn’t have to appropriate his theory and slap it on to whatever passing text I happened to be studying.
The Eagleton article suggests that the self-justifying obscurantist pseudo-sociologists
have indeed made mince meat of his work for the purposes of God knows what. Its a long time since I’ve been anywhere near that sort, so I’m taking his word for it.
Postmodernism still going? Yea, I thought it was as long gone as the Bell bottom trousers that Conor’s brother wore on his confirmation day.