This, in fact, is one important way in which we do indeed diverge from our fellow animals, whatever may usefully be said about our mutual affinities. It is not that human beings interpret the world whereas other animals do not. All sensuous response to reality is an interpretation of it. Beetles and monkeys clearly interpret their world, and act on the basis of what they see. Our physical senses are themselves organs of interpretation. What distinguishes us from our fellow animals is that we are able in turn to interpret these interpretations. In that sense, all human language is meta-language. It is a second-order reflection on the ‘language’ of our bodies – of our sensory apparatus.
It is this which cultural theory’s inflation of the role of language (an error native to intellectuals, as melancholia is endemic among clowns) has tended to play down. At its crudest, this slides towards the case that language and experience are indissociable, as though no baby ever cried because it was hungry. What the baby lacks is not the experience of hunger, but the ability to identify this experience for what it is through an act of symbolization, placing it within a wider context. And this can come to it only from culture. It is this culture which language brings with it. Even when I have language, however, my sensory experience still represents a kind of surplus over it. The body is not reducible to signification, as linguistic reductionists tend to imagine. Some of this overestimating of the role of language in human affairs may spring from the fact that philosophers were traditionally bachelor dons who had no experience of small children. English aristocrats, who on the whole prefer hounds and horses to human beings, have never bulked large in the ranks of linguistic inflationists.
One can reasonably claim that pre-linguistic infants can have beliefs and act on the basis of reasons.4 What they cannot do is ask themselves moral questions such as whether their beliefs are sound or whether their reasons are good ones. Only a linguistic animal can be a moral one. Infants and aardvarks can desire what they think is good, but they cannot want to desire what is good. Even so, infants appear to recognize, discriminate, investigate, re-identify and classify, and all this without the aid of language. So also, it can be claimed, do non-human animals. Non-human animals behave as though they have beliefs, which is not to say that they are social democrats or orthodox Jews. Some dolphins can distinguish the sentence ‘Take the surfboard to the frisbee’ from ‘Take the frisbee to the surfboard’, an operation which even some world leaders might find difficulty with.
Self-reflection, then – interpreting our sensory interpretations – is part of what we are. And this may be conducted in full-blooded critical spirit. There is no need to struggle out of your skin in order to make fundamental criticisms of your situation. You do not have to be standing in metaphysical outer space to recognize the injustice of racial discrimination. This is exactly where you would not recognize it. On the contrary, there is a good deal within our culture which we can draw on to do so. Anti-theorists make the mistake of seeing cultures as more or less coherent. So criticism of them comes either from the outside, in which case it is irrelevant or unintelligible, or from the inside, in which case it is not really radical. But there are many different, contradictory strands to a culture, some of which allow us to be critical of others. To act according to the Western way of life may mean to throw up barricades in Piccadilly just as much as to tear them down. If scones and cream represent one English cultural tradition, the suffragettes represent another. It is good news that we cannot entirely escape our culture – for if we could, we would not be able to submit it to critical judgement.
In a similar way, comparing two cultures does not mean having no cultural vantage-point of your own. The fact that cultures can look beyond themselves is part of what they are. It is a fact about cultures that their boundaries are porous and ambiguous, more like horizons than electrified fences. Our cultural identity leaks beyond itself just by virtue of what it is, not as an agreeable bonus or disagreeable haemorrhage. There may, of course, be serious difficulties in translating from one culture to another. But you do not need to be standing at some imaginary Omega point in order to do this, any more than you need to resort to some third language in order to translate from Swedish into Swahili. Being inside a culture is not like being inside a prison-house. It is more like being inside a language. Languages open on to the world from the inside. To be inside a language is to be pitched into the world, not to be quarantined from it.
The point for the anti-theorists, then, is just to get on with what we do, without all this distracting fuss about theory. We should forget about ‘deep’ legitimations: depth is just what we put there ourselves, and then find ourselves predictably awestruck by. It is true that we can no longer justify our practices in some full-blooded metaphysical way; but this does not leave them vulnerable, since neither can those who take us to task. So as far as such deep talk goes, we might as well call a truce. Philosophy becomes anti-philosophy. For some modern thinkers, thinking about what you are doing will seriously disable it, just as it is inadvisable to think about the physiology of your thighs during a hurdle race. Reflecting on what you are doing may well prove dangerous for hurdlers, but it seems a strange conclusion for those who are highly paid for thinking.
For Nietzsche and Freud, however, we can operate as human beings only by repressing much of what goes into our making. It is our nature to be anti-theoretical, even if we need theory to uncover the fact. Too much repression, to be sure, will make us fall ill; but for this deeply anti-Romantic view, repression is not an evil in itself. We could not speak, think or act without it. Only by self-oblivion can we be ourselves. Amnesia, not remembrance, is what is natural to us. The ego is what it is only by a necessary blindness to much of what constitutes it. To make history, we need first to blot out the squalid, blood-stained genealogy which went into our manufacture. In another sense, this idea is Romantic enough: the intellect is the death of spontaneity. Reflecting too sensitively on the world around you paralyses action, as Hamlet discovered. Or, to translate the sentiment into part of what lurks behind the anti-theory case: If we raise questions about the foundations of our way of life, in the sense of thinking too much about the barbarism on which our civilization is founded, we might fail to do the things that all good citizens should spontaneously do.
The period from 1965 to 1980 was by no means the first outbreak of revolutionary cultural ideas in twentieth-century Europe. For all its excitement, it pales to a shadow before the great current of modernism which swept the continent earlier in the century. If one wanted to select another, more distinguished decade-and-a-half which transformed European culture, one could do worse than choose 1910 to 1925. In this brief span of years, that culture was shattered and remade. It was the age of Proust, Joyce, Pound, Kafka, Rilke, Mann, Eliot, Futurism, Surrealism and a good deal more. As with the 1960s, it was also a time of tumultuous social change – though nothing in the later period compares in scale to the wars, revolutions and social upheavals of the earlier. If the 1960s and 70s witnessed bouts of left-wing insurgency, the earlier period saw the birth of the first workers’ state in history. If the 1960s and 70s were an age of colonial revolutions, the years from 1910 to 192.5 had at their centre the greatest imperialist conflagration which history had ever witnessed.
Modernism reflected the crack-up of a whole civilization. All the beliefs which had served nineteenth-century middle-class society so splendidly – liberalism, democracy, individualism, scientific inquiry, historical progress, the sovereignty of reason -were now in crisis. There was a dramatic speed-up in technology, along with widespread political instability. It was becoming hard to believe that there was any innate order in the world. Instead, what order we discovered in the world was one we had put there ourselves. Realism in art, which had taken such an order for granted, began to buckle and implode. A cultural form which had been riding high since the Renaissance now seemed to be approaching exhaustion.
In all these ways, modernism anticipated the later outbreak of cultural theo
ry. In fact, cultural theory was among other things the continuation of modernism by other means. By about 1960, the great works of modernism had begun to lose much of their disturbing force. Joyce and Kafka were welcomed on to the university syllabuses, while modernist works of painting proved to be lucrative commodities with which no self-respecting corporation could dispense. The middle classes flocked to the concert halls to be archly scandalized by Schoenberg, while the stark, wasted figures of Beckett stalked the London stage. Brecht was de-alienated and a whole raft of fascist fellow-travellers politically sanitized. The outrageously experimental T. S. Eliot was awarded the prestigious Order of Merit. The dissident impulse behind the modernist movement still survived here and there, lingering on in late Surrealism and Situationism. But the movement as a whole had run out of subversive steam.
That dissident impulse needed to migrate elsewhere; and cultural theory was one place where it set up home. Writers like Barthes, Foucault, Kristeva and Derrida were really late modernist artists who had taken to philosophy rather than to sculpture or the novel. They had a touch of the flair and iconoclastic force of the great modernist artists, as well as inheriting their intimidatory aura. The boundaries between the conceptual and the creative began to blur. This was one reason why less imaginatively endowed philosophers did not only denounce these thinkers; they failed to recognize what they were doing as philosophy at all. This was curious, since philosophy – to give the subject as rigorous a definition as possible – means speaking about certain things in certain ways. Time is a legitimate topic of philosophy, but Proust does not talk about it in the right way. Death is not in everyone’s view a valid philosophical concept, but if you discussed it in the language of Donald Davidson rather than Martin Heidegger, it might become so. Personal identity happens to be a pukka philosophical topic at present, but suffering is not quite so kosher. Besides, these French thinkers were clearly on the political left, whereas orthodox philosophers were not political at all. They were, in other words, conservative.
Why, then, had cultural theory ousted cultural practice? One answer is simply because that cultural practice, in the shape of high-modernist art, already existed. Nothing ever happens twice, precisely because it has happened once already. The major art of twentieth-century Europe was the fruit of the first, traumatic impact on cultural life of the crisis of modern Western civilization. Once that impact had occurred, it was hard to feel it again in all its shocking immediacy. It is not easy to have the ground cut a second time from beneath one’s feet, unless one lives on the San Andreas fault. We became used to living with the loss of absolute value, along with the belief that progress was a myth, human reason an illusion and our existence a futile passion. We had grown accustomed to our angst, and had begun to hug our lack of chains.
In any case, the full scandalousness of these ideas shows up only against the background of a traditional, relatively stable culture. That was a background which was still perceptible in 1920, but fading rapidly by 1970. By the time postmodernism heaved over the horizon, there was little memory of such a context at all. As the pace of capitalist enterprise quickened, instability, disruption, perversity and sensationalism were now the order of the day. They were not particularly offensive, since there was no norm to measure them against. It was not as though they could be contrasted with the values of the family hearth. The hearth was the place where the family soaked up perversity, disruption and sensationalism on television.
Modernism, like the culture of the 1960s and 70s, could take it for granted that when it came to the cultural establishment, realism was still dominant. Indeed, it has proved perhaps the most resilient cultural form in Western history, beating off all contenders. And this suggests that it has at least some of its roots deep in the Western psyche. What was valuable was the kind of art which mirrored a world in which you could recognize yourself. Quite why this is thought valuable is extremely hard to say. The answer probably has more to do with magic than aesthetics. It is not easy to say why we take such an infantile pleasure in gazing at an image of a banana which looks for all the world like a banana.
Realism, then, was what the new movements were out to disrupt. But their experiments in art and thought were to that extent still dependent on it. We would not find a Cubist painting arresting unless we were accustomed to non-Cubist canvases. Dissonance is reliant on a sense of harmony. In some ways, the modernist assault on realism had failed. By the 1930s, realism was firmly back in the saddle. In the 1960s and 70s, the new cultural theory made another valiant effort to dislodge it, summoning modernist art to its aid. This incursion, too, however, was largely routed. Yet what nobody could have predicted was that Western civilization was just on the brink of going non-realist itself. Reality itself had now embraced the non-realist, as capitalist society became increasingly dependent in its everyday operations on myth and fantasy, fictional wealth, exoticism and hyperbole, rhetoric, virtual reality and sheer appearance.
This, then, was one of the roots of postmodernism. Postmodernism gets off the ground when it is no longer a matter of having information about the world, but a matter of the world as information. Suddenly, anti-realism was no longer just a question of theory. How could you conceivably represent in realist terms the great invisible criss-crossing circuits of communication, the incessant buzzing to and fro of signs, which was contemporary society? How could you represent Star Wars, or the prospect of millions dead in a biological attack? Perhaps the end of representation would come when there was nobody left to represent, or to be represented. The radical modernists had tried to dismantle the distinction between art and life. Now, it seemed that life had done it for them. But whereas the radical modernists had in mind such things as reading your poetry through megaphones in factory yards, postmodernism had in mind for the most part such things as advertising and public relations. A left-wing subcurrent of it tried to reinvent more dissident ways of integrating culture into social life, but could scarcely compete with the manufacture of political spectaculars or reality TV shows. A radical assault on fixed hierarchies of value merged effortlessly with that revolutionary levelling of all values known as the marketplace.
The emotional climates of modernism and the 1960s were very diffferent. Both were wreathed in the euphoria and effervescence one associates with a sudden outbreak of modernization. Modernism as a cultural movement is among other things a response to the alarming, exhilarating impact of large-scale modernization on previously traditional societies. This is one reason why the only major home-grown (as opposed to imported) modernism in the United Kingdom was in culturally traditionalist, politically turbulent, newly modernizing Ireland. Even if a good deal of modernism is fiercely critical of those innovatory forces, it still catches up something of their buoyancy and exuberance. In general, however, the tone of the modernist period was anxious and agonized, whereas the tone of the 1960s was cool and casual. Modernism was haunted by apocalyptic visions of the collapse of civilization, whereas the 1960s tended to greet the prospect with acclaim. Only some of its dreams of apocalypse were drug-induced.
Modernism and cultural theory were both international movements. Both were disdainful of parochialism, of either mental or physical space. The typical modernist artists were exiles and émigrés, and so were some of the foremost cultural thinkers of the later age. Like the revolutionary working class, the modernist artists acknowledged no homeland, crossing national frontiers as easily as they glided from one art-form or coterie or manifesto to another. Huddled together in some polyglot metropolis, they set up home in art rather than in nation-states. In that way, they could compensate among other things for the loss of a genuine homeland and a national tradition. Modernism was a hybrid affair, mixing together fragments of various national cultures. If the traditional world was now in pieces, if every human identity was now a collage, the modernists would pluck an artistic virtue from that historical necessity, scavenging resourcefully among the rubble of clapped-out ideologies in the manner of Baudelaire’
s ragpickers to fashion some wondrous new creations.
In a similar way, cultural theory was later to roll across linguistics, philosophy, literature, politics, art, anthropology and so on, breaching traditional academic barriers as it went. It was a library cataloguer’s nightmare. The names ‘structuralism’, ‘theory’, ‘cultural studies’ were merely provisional signposts, rather as ‘existentialism’ had been for a previous generation. As with existentialism, the new cultural ideas concerned profound changes in everyday life as well as academia, in tastes, sensibilities, social values and moral agendas. At the same time, theory burst the dam between popular and minority culture: you could try on a structuralist reading of Popeye the Sailorman just as readily as you could of Paradise Lost. Like high-modernist art, however, theory’s treatment of popular culture was at first something of a de haut en has affair. Whether with T. S. Eliot on music hall or Roland Barthes on wrestling, both movements stooped to the demotic without detriment to their aura. It was postmodernism which marked the break here, as both theory and art became conspicuously classless and consumer-friendly. Those left-wing theorists who had dreamed of a classless social order had only to open their eyes to see that it had already arrived and was known as the shopping mall.
Both periods, too, were times of spiritual extremism. Like language and artistic form, men and women would reveal the truth about themselves only when pressed to a limit. In demanding your rights, why not ask for everything while you were about it? Why compromise with outmoded forms, pouring new wine into old bottles? It was not just a matter of thinking new thoughts; the very frames of our thinking needed to be broken and refashioned. Neither was it just a question of producing new literature or philosophy, but of inventing a whole new way of writing. Philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida could say what they meant only by forging new literary styles, bursting the bounds between poetry and philosophy. You had to use concepts but at the same time point to their limits, highlight their boundaries, implode them from the inside; and this was a kind of equivalent of modernist irony. Politically speaking, you needed to construct a new type of human being who would not just refrain from violence and exploitation, but who would be physically and morally incapable of it. The entire world was trembling on the brink of apocalypse, and keeping faith with your impossible desire would carry you over the edge. The past was a write-off, eternity was now, and the future had just landed.
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