The Illusions of Postmodernism by Terry Eagleton

Author:Terry Eagleton [Eagleton, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

5

Fallacies

Speaking as a hierarchical, essentialistic, teleological, metahistorical, universalist humanist, I imagine I have some explaining to do. What I mean, I suppose, is that one could surely find meanings for all of those terms which were more radical than the current postmodern canards would have it. Let us take the easier ones first.

It is a mistake to confuse hierarchy with elitism. The term ‘elite’ is itself nebulous enough, and is sometimes conflated with Vanguard’, which (whether one approves of vanguards or not) is quite a different matter. Elitism is a belief in the authority of a select few, which in cultural terms usually suggests that values either are or should be the preserve of a privileged group, self-elected or otherwise, one which derives its authority either from some status other than its cultural standing (its social or religious background, for example), or from its cultural clout alone. Such elitism is not at all incompatible with a certain vein of populism, as the thought of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Benito Mussolini amply demonstrates. It may be that the definition of values is monopolized by this coterie, but that these values are then disseminated by it downwards, to end up in the popular consciousness either self-intact or suitably modified. All the most effective forms of elitism are also populist to their core. ‘Hierarchy’, a term which originally denoted the three categories of angels, has come to mean any kind of gradated structure, not necessarily a social one. In its broadest sense, it refers to something like an order of priorities.

In this broad sense of the word, everyone is a hierarchist, whereas not everyone is an elitist. Indeed you may object to elites because they offend your order of priorities. Democracy is not the absence of ranking: on the contrary, it involves privileging the interests of the people as a whole over the interests of anti-social power-groups. Everyone subscribes to some hierarchy of values, a commitment which is arguably constitutive of the self. As Charles Taylor puts it: ‘To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what not, what has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary’.1 Valuing belongs with social identity, and social life would grind to a halt without it. A subject which really didn’t discriminate would not be a human subject at all, which is perhaps why some postmodern subjects who view valuing as ‘elitist’ can exist only on paper. It is also hard to know from where they derive the value judgement that value is an irrelevance. Cultural theorists sometimes like to feign that value is unimportant, and there was certainly an almighty fetishizing of it in the old-style literary academy; but while the popular-minded intelligentsia deny that George Eliot is superior to Beavis and Butthead, the stubbornly evaluative populace continue to prefer one television programme to another.

What is under postmodern

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