Page 210 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Postmodernism and cultural theory

Eagleton on postmodernism
These and related themes have been taken up in Eagleton’s more
recent work on postmodern culture and politics, especially The
Illusions of Postmodernism. Here he gives rather more credence to
postmodernism’s radical credentials than did Williams in Against
the New Conformists. But the conclusions remain remarkably
similar: ‘Postmodern end-of-history thinking does not envisage
a future . . . much different from the present’, Eagleton writes, ‘a
prospect it oddly views as a cause for celebration’. What if the
future turns out to be different, he continued, what if it
witnessed a revival of fascism, for example? The answers are as
damning as anything in Williams:

its cultural relativism and moral conventionalism, its
scepticism, pragmatism, and localism, its distaste for ideas
of solidarity and disciplined organization, its lack of any
adequate theory of political agency: all these would tell
heavily against it... the left... has need of strong ethical
and anthropological foundations... And on this score,
postmodernism is... part of the problem rather than of
the solution (Eagleton, 1996b, pp. 134–5).

He also identified Williams’s notion of a common culture as
one possible source of these strong foundations (pp. 84–5). But
as we noted in chapter 2, the idea is even more explicitly fore-
grounded in Eagleton’s recent The Idea of Culture. Here, he again
takes postmodernism as his target; he again argues for the theo-
retical superiority of Williams’ notion of commonality over more
recent theories of difference (Eagleton, 2000, pp. 122–3).
To speak or to write of actually lived and desired relationships
among real human beings, as Williams did and Eagleton does,
is necessarily to appeal to some kind of ‘solidarity effect’. For the
vast majority of human beings still live out considerable portions
of their lives through face-to-face networks of kinship and
community, identity and obligation, friendship and love. Indeed,
this is what most of us mean by ‘life’. Williams’ own under-
standing of the common culture was neither inherently
reactionary nor inherently utopian. Rather, it represented the only

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