After Theory Read online

  Something of the same fate afflicted many of those nations who managed in the twentieth century to free themselves from Western colonial rule. In a tragic irony, socialism proved least possible where it was most necessary. Indeed, post-colonial theory first emerged in the wake of the failure of Third World nations to go it alone. It marked the end of the era of Third World revolutions, and the first glimmerings of what we now know as globalization. In the 1950s and 60s, a series of liberation movements, led by the nationalist middle classes, had thrown off their colonial masters in the name of political sovereignty and economic independence. By harnessing the demands of an impoverished people to these goals, the Third World elites could install themselves in power on the back of popular discontent. Once ensconced there, they would need to engage in an ungainly balancing act between radical pressures from below and global market forces from outside.

  Marxism, an internationalist current to its core, lent its support to these movements, respecting their demand for political autonomy and seeing in them a grievous setback to world capitalism. But many Marxists harboured few illusions about the aspiring middle-class elites who spearheaded these nationalist currents. Unlike the more sentimental brands of post-colonialism, most Marxism did not assume that ‘Third World’ meant good and ‘First World’ bad. They insisted rather on a class-analysis of colonial and post-colonial politics themselves.

  Isolated, poverty-stricken and poor in civic, liberal or democratic traditions, some of these regimes found themselves taking the Stalinist path into crippling isolation. Others had to acknowledge that they could not go it alone – that political sovereignty had brought with it no authentic economic self-government, and could never do so in a West-dominated world. As the world capitalist crisis deepened from the early 1970s onwards, and as a number of Third World nations sank further into stagnation and corruption, the aggressive restructurings of a Western capitalism fallen upon hard times finally put paid to illusions of national-revolutionary independence. ‘Third Worldism’ accordingly gave way to ‘post-colonialism’. Edward Said’s magisterial Orientalism, published in 1978, marked this transition in intellectual terms, despite its author’s understandable reservations about much of the post-colonial theory which was to follow in its wake. The book appeared at the turning-point of the fortunes of the international left.

  Given the partial failure of national revolution in the so-called Third World, post-colonial theory was wary of all talk of nationhood. Theorists who were either too young or too obtuse to recall that nationalism had been in its time an astonishingly effective anti-colonial force could find in it nothing but a benighted chauvinism or ethnic supremacism. Instead, much post-colonial thought focused on the cosmopolitan dimensions of a world in which post-colonial states were being sucked inexorably into the orbit of global capital. In doing so, it reflected a genuine reality. But in rejecting the idea of nationhood, it also tended to jettison the notion of class, which had been so closely bound up with the revolutionary nation. Most of the new theorists were not only ‘post’ colonialism, but ‘post’ the revolutionary impetus which had given birth to the new nations in the first place. If those nation-states had partly failed, unable to get on terms with the affluent capitalist world, then to look beyond the nation seeemed to mean looking beyond class as well – and this at a time when capitalism was more powerful and predatory than ever.

  It is true that the revolutionary nationalists had in a sense looked beyond class themselves. By rallying the national people, they could forge a spurious unity out of conflicting class interests. The middle classes had rather more to gain from national independence than hard-pressed workers and peasants, who would simply find themselves presented with a native rather than a foreign set of exploiters. Even so, this unity was not entirely bogus. If the idea of the nation was a displacement of class conflict, it also served to give it shape. If it fostered some dangerous illusions, it also helped to turn the world upside down. Indeed, revolutionary nationalism was by far the most successful radical tide of the twentieth century. In one sense, different groups and classes in the Third World indeed faced a common Western antagonist. The nation had become the major form which the class struggle against this antagonist had assumed. It was, to be sure, a narrow, distorting form, and in the end would prove woefully inadequate. The Communist Manifesto observes that the class struggle first of all takes a national form, but goes well beyond this form in its content. Even so, the nation was a way of rallying different social classes – peasants, workers, students, intellectuals – against the colonial powers which stood in the way of their independence. And it had a powerful argument in its favour: success, at least to begin with.

  Some of the new theory, by contrast, saw itself as shifting attention from class to colonialism – as though colonialism and post-colonialism were not themselves matters of class! In its Eurocentric way, it identified class conflict with the West alone, or saw it only in national terms. For socialists, by contrast, anti-colonial struggle was class struggle too: it represented a strike against the power of international capital, which had not been slow to respond to that challenge with sustained military violence. It was a battle between Western capital and the sweated labourers of the world. But because this class conflict had been framed in national terms, it helped to pave the way for the dwindling of the very idea of class in later post-colonial writing. This is one sense in which, as we shall see later, the highpoint of radical ideas in the mid-twentieth century was also the beginning of their downward curve.

  Much post-colonial theory shifted the focus from class and nation to ethnicity. This meant among other things that the distinctive problems of post-colonial culture were often falsely assimilated to the very different question of Western ‘identity polities’. Since ethnicity is largely a cultural affair, this shift of focus was also one from politics to culture. In some ways, this reflected real changes in the world. But it also helped to depoliticize the question of post-colonialism, and inflate the role of culture within it, in ways which chimed with the new, post-revolutionary climate in the West itself. ‘Liberation’ was no longer in the air, and by the end of the 1970s ‘emancipation’ had a quaintly antiquated ring to it. It seemed, then, that having drawn a blank at home, the Western left was now hunting for its stomping ground abroad. In travelling abroad, however, it brought with it in its luggage the burgeoning Western obsession with culture.

  Even so, Third World revolutions had testified in their own way to the power of collective action. So in a different way did the militant actions of the Western labour movements, which in the 1970s helped to bring down a British government. So, too, did the peace and student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which played a central part in ending the Vietnam war. Much recent cultural theory, however, has little recollection of all this. From its viewpoint, collective action means launching wars against weaker nations rather than bringing such adventures to a merciful end. In a world which has witnessed the rise and fall of various brutally totalitarian regimes, the whole idea of collective life comes to seem vaguely discredited.

  For some postmodern thought, consensus is tyrannical and solidarity nothing but soulless uniformity.1 But whereas liberals oppose this conformity with the individual, postmodernists, some of whom doubt the very reality of the individual, counter it instead with margins and minorities. It is what stands askew to society as a whole – the marginal, mad, deviant, perverse, transgressive – which is most politically fertile. There can be little value in mainstream social life. And this, ironically, is just the kind of elitist, monolithic viewpoint which postmodernists find most disagreeable in their conservative opponents.

  In retrieving what orthodox culture has pushed to the margins, cultural studies has done vital work. Margins can be unspeakably painful places to be, and there are few more honourable tasks for students of culture than to help create a space in which the dumped and disregarded can find a tongue. It is no longer quite so easy to claim that there is nothi
ng to ethnic art but pounding on oil drums or knocking a couple of bones together. Feminism has not only transformed the cultural landscape but, as we shall see later, has become the very model of morality for our time. Meanwhile, those white males who, unfortunately for themselves, are not quite dead have been metaphorically strung upside down from the lamp-posts, while the ill-gotten coins cascading from their pockets have been used to finance community arts projects.

  What is under assault here is the normative. Majority social life on this view is a matter of norms and conventions, and therefore inherently oppressive. Only the marginal, perverse and aberrant can escape this dreary regimenting. Norms are oppressive because they mould uniquely different individuals to the same shape. As the poet William Blake writes, ‘One Law for the Lion & Ox is oppression.’ Liberals accept this normalizing as necessary if everyone is to be granted the same life-chances to fulfil their unique personalities. It will, in short, lead to consequences which undercut it. Libertarians, however, are less resigned to this levelling. In this, they are ironically close to conservatives. Sanguine libertarians like Oscar Wilde dream of a future society in which everyone will be free to be their incomparable selves. For them, there can be no question of weighing and measuring individuals, any more than you could compare the concept of envy with a parrot.

  By contrast, pessimistic or shamefaced libertarians like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault see that norms are inescapable as soon as we open our mouths. The word ‘ketch’, which as the reader will know means a two-masted fore-and-aft rigged sailing boat with a mizzen mast stepped forward of the rudder and smaller than its foremast, sounds precise enough, but it has to stretch to cover all sorts of individual crafts of this general kind, each with its own peculiarities. Language levels things down. It is normative all the way down. To say ‘leaf’ implies that two incomparably different bits of vegetable matter are one and the same. To say ‘here’ homogenizes all sorts of richly diverse places.

  Thinkers like Foucault and Derrida chafe against these equivalences, even if they accept them as unavoidable. They would like a world made entirely out of differences. Indeed, like their great mentor Nietzsche, they think the world is made entirely out of differences, but that we need to fashion identities in order to get by. It is true that nobody in a world of pure differences would be able to say anything intelligible – that there could be no poetry, road signs, love letters or log sheets, as well as no statements that everything is uniquely different from everything else. But this is simply the price one would have to pay for not being constrained by the behaviour of others, like paying that little bit extra for a first-class rail ticket.

  It is a mistake, however, to believe that norms are always restrictive. In fact it is a crass Romantic delusion. It is normative in our kind of society that people do not throw themselves with a hoarse cry on total strangers and amputate their legs. It is conventional that child murderers are punished, that working men and women may withdraw their labour, and that ambulances speeding to a traffic accident should not be impeded just for the hell of it. Anyone who feels oppressed by all this must be seriously oversensitive. Only an intellectual who has overdosed on abstraction could be dim enough to imagine that whatever bends a norm is politically radical.

  Those who believe that normativity is always negative are also likely to hold that authority is always suspect. In this, they differ from radicals, who respect the authority of those with long experience of fighting injustice, or of laws which safeguard people’s physical integrity or working conditions. Similarly, some modern-day cultural thinkers seem to believe that minorities are always more vibrant than majorities. It is not the most popular of beliefs among the disfigured victims of Basque separatism. Some fascist groups, however, may be flattered to hear it, along with UFO buffs and Seventh Day Adventists. It was majorities, not minorities, which confounded imperial power in India and brought down apartheid. Those who oppose norms, authority and majorities as such are abstract universalists, even though most of them oppose abstract universalism as well.

  The postmodern prejudice against norms, unities and consensuses is a politically catastrophic one. It is also remarkably dim-witted. But it does not only spring from having precious few examples of political solidarity to remember. It also reflects a real social change. It is one result of the apparent disintegration of old-fashioned bourgeois society into a host of sub-cultures. One of the historic developments of our age has been the decline of the traditional middle class. As Perry Anderson has argued, the solid, civilized, morally upright bourgeoisie which managed to survive the Second World War has given way in our time to ‘starlet princesses and sleazeball presidents, beds for rent in the official residence and bribes for killer ads, disneyfication of protocols and tarantinization of practices’. The ‘solid (bourgeois) amphitheatre’, Anderson writes with colourful contempt, has yielded to ‘an aquarium of floating, evanescent forms – the projectors and managers, auditors and janitors, administrators and speculators of contemporary capital: functions of a monetary universe that knows no social fixities and stable identities’.2 It is this lack of stable identities which for some cultural theory today is the last word in radicalism. Instability of identity is ‘subversive’ – a claim which it would be interesting to test out among the socially dumped and disregarded.

  In this social order, then, you can no longer have bohemian rebels or revolutionary avant-gardes because they no longer have anything to blow up. Their top-hatted, frock-coated, easily outraged enemy has evaporated. Instead, the non-normative has become the norm. Nowadays, it is not just anarchists for whom anything goes, but starlets, newspaper editors, stockbrokers and corporation executives. The norm now is money; but since money has absolutely no principles or identity of its own, it is no kind of norm at all. It is utterly promiscuous, and will happily tag along with the highest bidder. It is infinitely adaptive to the most bizarre or extremist of situations, and like the Queen has no opinions of its own about anything.

  It seems, then, as though we have moved from the high-minded hypocrisy of the old middle classes to the low-minded effrontery of the new ones. We have shifted from a national culture with a single set of rules to a motley assortment of sub-cultures, each one at an angle to the others. This, of course, is an exaggeration. The old regime was never as unified as that, nor the new one as fragmented. There are still some powerful collective norms at work in it. But it is true, by and large, that our new ruling elite consists increasingly of people who snort cocaine rather than people who look like Herbert Asquith or Marcel Proust.

  The current of cultural experiment we know as modernism was fortunate in this respect. Rimbaud, Picasso and Bertolt Brecht still had a classical bourgeoisie to be rude about. But its offspring, postmodernism, has not. It is just that it seems not to have noticed the fact, perhaps because it is too embarrassing to acknowledge. Postmodernism seems at times to behave as though the classical bourgeoisie is alive and well, and thus finds itself living in the past. It spends much of its time assailing absolute truth, objectivity, timeless moral values, scientific inquiry and a belief in historical progress. It calls into question the autonomy of the individual, inflexible social and sexual norms, and the belief that there are firm foundations to the world. Since all of these values belong to a bourgeois world on the wane, this is rather like firing off irascible letters to the press about the horse-riding Huns or marauding Carthaginians who have taken over the Home Counties.

  This is not to say that these beliefs do not still have force. In places like Ulster and Utah, they are riding high. But nobody on Wall Street and few in Fleet Street believe in absolute truth and unimpeachable foundations. A lot of scientists are fairly sceptical about science, seeing it as much more of a hit-and-miss, rule-of-thumb affair than the gullible layperson imagines. It is people in the humanities who still naively think that scientists consider themselves the white-coated custodians of absolute truth, and so waste a lot of time trying to discredit them. Humanists have a
lways been sniffy about scientists. It is just that they used to despise them for snobbish reasons, and now do so for sceptical ones. Few of the people who believe in absolute moral values in theory do so in practice. They are known mainly as politicians and business executives. Conversely, some of the people who might be expected to believe in absolute values believe in nothing of the kind, like moral philosophers and clap-happy clerics. And though some genetically upbeat Americans may still have faith in progress, a huge number of constitutionally downbeat Europeans do not.

  But it is not only the traditional middle class which has faded from view. It is also the traditional working class. And since the working class stood for political solidarity, it is scarcely surprising that we should now have a form of radicalism which is deeply distrustful of all that. Postmodernism does not believe in individualism, since it does not believe in individuals; but it does not pin much faith in working-class community either. Instead, it puts its trust in pluralism – in a social order which is as diverse and inclusive as possible. The problem with this as a radical case is that there is not much in it with which Prince Charles would disagree. It is true that capitalism quite often creates divisions and exclusions for its own purposes. Either that, or it draws upon ones which already exist. And these exclusions can be profoundly hurtful for a great many people. Whole masses of men and women have suffered the misery and indignity of second-class citizenship. In principle, however, capitalism is an impeccably inclusive creed: it really doesn’t care who it exploits. It is admirably egalitarian in its readiness to do down just about anyone. It is prepared to rub shoulders with any old victim, however unappetizing. Most of the time, at least, it is eager to mix together as many diverse cultures as possible, so that it can peddle its commodities to them all.