Postmodernism and Its Discontents

Towards the end of the 1980s, the decade in which postmodernist modes of thinking asserted themselves, and in so doing laid siege to a whole range of positions in theory which had grounded a socialist politics, 'actual existing socialism' collapsed under the pressure of popular revolution in Central and Eastern Europe. The net effect of this combined intellectual and political convulsion has been severely to disturb the equanimity with which many of us on the Left have in the past defined ourselves as socialists. In one sense this is paradoxical given that throughout the same decade many of us were also being extremely vocal in our denunciations of Soviet 'socialism' and working for an end to the old order in Eastern Europe; and given, too, that included among us were a number who were influenced by, and were themselves employing, insights derived from postmodernist theory. But if there is rather more sensitivity than previously now about the vocabulary of socialism, I think this is because theoretical and political developments have brought home more forcefully than ever before how difficult it is going to be to dissociate the socialist idea from what has been implemented in the name of it within the Soviet bloc. These developments have also made us more self-critical of the confidence, even at times complacency, with which we were wont to invoke the notion of an 'authentic socialism', as if this directed to us to a clearly desirable and obviously workable alternative to Communist orthodoxy. However, then, we view the relationship between the postmodernist turn in theory, on the one hand, and the recent events in Central and Eastern Europe, on the other (and it is arguable that although the former was tending to a rethinking and undermining of socialist commitments in the West, it had little direct influence on the rebellion against socialism in the East), it is clear that their overall effect has been a dramatic alteration of the context which any form of socialist argument is now addressing. Indeed, so much has this