So in Salon today we have his new essay stretched to book length proportions and an eager reviewer ready to give him the benefit of the doubt. The most annoying part of the review come when the reviewer takes on his strawman version of the postmodernist as an ultra-constructivist:
This "constructivism" is a form of the "relativism" that cultural conservatives in this county love to denounce, so some might be surprised to see the left-wing Eagleton condemning it, too. (In fact, Eagleton has been criticizing deconstructionism and its spinoffs for decades.) Eagleton strenuously objects to the constructivist rejection of absolute or inherent meanings. "Nobody actually believes this," he remarks of constructivism, and he's right about that in more ways than he realizes. Outside of academia, hardly anyone even pretends to believe in this stuff, so seeing it eviscerated isn't as important to the civilian reader as Eagleton seems to think. Of course we all realize that, to use Eagleton's example, "it just would not work for us to 'construct' tigers as coy and cuddly"; that's idiotic. Complicated identities like gender roles are another matter; we know they're at least partly configurable because they've changed in the course of history.Yes well, few people pretend to believe this stuff, because no one argues things this way. No one would argue that the "essential nature" of a tiger is constructed in our minds. No one argues for a world conjured out of thin air by language.
But we could argue that the meaning of a tiger is a cultural construct. A killer, a monster, or a big cat? How your culture views them will tell you a lot about whether you are more likely to hunt them to extinction or grant them protected status in a nature preserve. Even the reviewer gets confused between what gender roles are (cultural constructs) and how that's different from whether one is anatomically male or female (your essential nature as it were).
The review then continues with:
Eagleton goes on to cite the scholar Frank Farrell, who has linked the postmodern insistence on an infinitely malleable reality to roots in early Protestantism. The old Catholic idea that things have "essences" or "determinate natures" could not be reconciled philosophically with the doctrine of an all-powerful God; any given thing's inherent nature would limit what God could do with it. "God's arbitrary will," as Eagleton puts it, cannot be constrained, so things can only be what they are "because of his say-so, not because of themselves." In this belief Eagleton sees the seeds of the 20th century's "cult of the will."Which I guess is Eagleton's way of undermining the deconstructionist's argument from Platonism and Logocentrism, but again all it really does is muddy the waters. The idea that deconstruction begins with some obscure branch of Protestantism is absurd. I couldn't even Google Frank Farrell to find out what he actually says. The truth is that deconstruction begins right in the heart of western thought with Derrida's astonishing reading of Plato and the New Testament. The cult of the will, of course, is pure Nietzsche.
It just goes on and on with one bad idea after another:
To Eagleton, postmodernism, with its repudiation of inherent or "deep" meanings, is, for all its revolutionary rhetoric, a variation on the same theme. To get back to the question driving his book, the motto "Life is what you make it" may sound banal, but it reeks of a similar hubris. It "reflects an individualist bias common to the modern age" by insisting that we all find our own meaning of life in a personal, private realm. But if meaning has its own roots in language, then claiming this, Eagleton argues, is like claiming that everyone gets to make up their own personal meanings for words.In terms of postmodernism this paragraph is complete nonsense. You can see the "individualist bias" in the Decadents and in some strains of Modernism, but in postmodernism there is a very clear notion that our own identities are culturally constructed, and that it is very difficult to be the master of one's destiny when your own sense of the world is mediated through your culture.
His real problem with the sort of individualism that he incorrectly extends to postmodernism, is that it rejects generalization and universal values. And without universal values there's no global proletariat, no class struggle, no revolution, and no Marxist utopia. Even if you're sympathetic to his call for social activism and the moral value of working for the sick, the poor, and the imprisoned, this is no way to argue for it.
So fine, "meaning is in fact the product of a transaction between us and reality," as Eagleton is quoted. No one ever said it wasn't. The real issue is what happens in that transaction, and what meaning you come up with. If the world is a text we read for meaning, we lose our ability to make predictions and vice versa. Perhaps philosophers should think less like readers and more like authors.
