But each of these would be just the result of another convention,

another discourse.

For Roland Barthes the ideal postmodernist work of art recognizes

these strategies and playful limitations on human identity and
discourse, precisely because this play and division has desirable
moral consequences. It disposes of precisely that Kantian unity of
the person which makes for social order and moral orthodoxy.

The pleasure of the text does not prefer one ideology to another.
However this impertinence does not proceed from liberalism but
from perversion: the text, its reading, are split. What is overcome,
split, is the moral unity that society demands of every human
product.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1975)

Politics and identity

Barthes exemplifies his own remarkably evasive doctrine in his
‘autobiographical’ works, notably through the novelistic conception
of himself in A Lover’s Discourse (1977) in which the grammar of
French in the original adroitly keeps the sexual orientation of the
protagonist ambiguous (as does the language of Auden’s love
poetry). And Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), an
autobiography, begins by announcing in an epigraph that ‘All of this
must be thought of as being said by a character in a novel’ [‘Tout
ceci doit être consideré comme dit par un personnage de roman’].
So there are two voices in the book, Barthes’s ‘own’ (or that of the
author) which we might infer, and that of Barthes as a fictional
character. Barthes also reviewed his own book: this time with a
reviewer persona.

Such deconstructions of the moral unity of the subject, and the

(classically liberal) desire to help the self to evade some of the
repressive ideological boundaries it encounters, are very different
things. Indeed, the justification for our desire to evade or redraw
such boundaries (such as those which confer sexual identity)
already depends on a notion of the new moral unity or integrity or

55
 autonomy we can achieve, once the restrictive boundary is removed.
This becomes obvious when, for example, we are urged to recognize
the different but non-fractured identities of the homosexual and the
heterosexual (or of male and female) by refusing to fall into the
ideological trap analysed by Derrida of seeing the one as an inferior
version of the other. What postmodern theory helps us to see is that
we are all constituted in a broad range of subject positions, through
which we move with more or less ease, so that all of us are
combinations of class, race, ethnic, regional, generational, sexual,
and gender positions.

Many postmodernists make this rather pessimistic analysis in the

hope of liberating us from it. Once we have been made aware of the
dire effects of contradictory discourses upon us, we are expected to
be able to find some kind of way out.
Postmodernism

The politics of difference

Postmodernists may not give a particularly convincing account of
the nature of the self as it might appear in a moral philosophy
concerned with responsibility, but they do very successfully adapt
Foucauldian arguments to show the ways in which discourses of
power are used in all societies to marginalize subordinate groups.
For such discourses of power do not just contribute to the
decentring and deconstruction of the self; they also serve to
marginalize those people who do not partake in them. Again, there
are plenty of these eccentric marginalized figures to be encountered
within postmodernist fiction, such as Coalhouse Walker in
Doctorow’s Ragtime, Fevvers in Angela Carter’s Nights at the
Circus, and Saleem Sinai in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Saleem
is not of any great social importance, and yet his crisis of identity
(along with his magical telepathic relationship to those who were
also born at the moment of India’s independence) is metaphorically
seen as parallel to the crisis of the nation as a whole. He indeed tells
us: ‘I was linked to history both literally and metaphorically, both
actively and passively.’ But the political history of India is

56
deconstructed to show that the marginal can be seen as the central,
indeed Sinai is diffused (like the reader following his text) into all
sorts of surrounding fragmentary narratives. The novel does not try
to make any sense of the emotional logic of an individual’s life (as is
typical of realist fiction) but uses its magic realist techniques to
show the self as constituted by the conflicts and contradictions of
the historical event, to the point of an absurdist hyperbole, as when
Saleem remarks ‘Nehru’s death . . . too, was all my fault’. Even his
face is ‘the whole map of India’, but by the end of the novel, he is no
more than a ‘big headed top-heavy dwarf.’ (The novel owes a great
deal to Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum.)

Postmodernist thought, in attacking the idea of a notional centre or

dominant ideology, facilitated the promotion of a politics of
difference. Under postmodern conditions, the ordered class politics
preferred by socialists has given way to a far more diffuse and

Politics and identity

pluralistic identity politics, which often involves the self-conscious
assertion of a marginalized identity against the dominant discourse.

An example of this, which is undoubtedly central to the politics of

the period since the late 1960s, is the relationship between
postmodernism and feminism. The argument here is that women
are excluded from the patriarchal symbolic order, or from the
dominant male discourse, and indeed that they have been defined
or ‘othered’ as inferior with respect to it. They are subjected to a
Derridean ‘false hierarchy’ by being assigned weak values, opposite
to the strong ones invested in masculinity. We saw a bit of this in
looking at the egg and sperm controversy.

Much feminist thought therefore has in common with

postmodernism that it attacks the legitimating metadiscourse used
by males, designed to keep them in power, and it seeks an individual
empowerment against this. But I agree with critics of this position,
like Benhabib, that the woman who does this shouldn’t be seen as
occupying ‘merely another position in language’. For the
postmodernist view of this ‘socially constructed’ self ignores the way

57
 the self is constituted by an individual’s maintenance of an original,
often idiosyncratic narrative of him or herself. This is the key to
creativity in the individual. This evidence for the growth of an
individual through the socialization process is neglected by ‘social
construction’ theorists of the self. We can, of course, discern the
conventional codes, and the allegiances to socially constructed
kinds of discourse in anyone’s autobiography – but with respect to
our own, we are (like Roland Barthes) author and character at once.
That is how, although we are made up of heteronomous codes, we
can still strive for an autonomy of a classically liberal kind. This
sense of autonomy is particularly needed by women, says Benhabib,
whose conclusion is that the strong constructivist positions derived
from Derrida and Foucault would actually ‘undermine . . . the
theoretical articulation of the emancipatory aspirations of women.’
In undermining women’s sense of their own agency and sense of
selfhood, they deny any reappropriation of women’s own history,
Postmodernism

and the possibility of a radical social criticism. But then the

incompatibility of postmodernist attitudes to a commitment to any
settled philosophical position (which a good Derridean would then
deconstruct) is a grave problem for them. It may indeed be better to
follow a rationalist (Enlightenment) egalitarian project of
progressive emancipation, as opposed to a postmodernist route,
which so often ends up in a radical separatism. For although
postmodernist arguments have helped many to define the roots of
their difference from the majority, or ‘those in power’, effective
political action needs something more than this rather preliminary
sense of a dissentient identity.

The liberal would join with the postmodernist in seeing the need for
an ability to question the boundaries of our social roles, and the
validity and dominance of the conceptual frameworks they
presuppose; and the postmodernist deconstructive attitude has
been extraordinarily effective in combating restrictive ideologies in
this way. They often attempt a transgressive-deconstructive
loosening of the conceptual boundaries of our thoughts about
gender, race, sexual orientation, and ethnicity, and make an

58
essentially liberal demand for the recognition of difference, an
acceptance of the ‘other’ within the community. In such a pluralistic
universe (of discourse) no one framework is likely to gain assent.
Where epistemological domination is deemed to be impossible, the
competition between these conceptual frameworks becomes a
political matter, part of a contest for power.

The postmodernist self, then, is very differently conceived from the

self at the centre of liberal humanist thought, which is supposed to
be capable of being autonomous, rational, and centred, and
somehow free of any particular cultural, ethnic, or gendered
characteristics. Postmodernist analysis has turned away from such
optimistically universalizable Kantian assumptions to see the self as
constituted by language systems, which, although they may most
obviously dominate the proletarian, the female, the black, and the
colonized, have us all, more or less, in their grip. This general move

Politics and identity

from a liberal emphasis on self-determination to a Marx-inspired
emphasis on other-determination is of immense importance. It is a
sharp challenge to established post-Enlightenment, Anglo-
American philosophical views, and it points to the irreconcilable
differences of identity between individuals. As Robert Hughes has
put it in his The Culture of Complaint, and admittedly very
polemically, it has created a culture in which many were encouraged
to see themselves as victims. We will look more closely at this
culture in the next section.

The result is that although much postmodernist thinking and

writing and visual art can be seen as attacking stereotypical
categories, defending difference, and so on, it left all these separate
groupings to demand recognition as ‘authentic’ but isolated
communities, once they were freed, in and by theory, from the
dominant categories of the majority. The beneficiaries of this
analysis were both separatist (alienated from and resenting
orthodoxy) and partially communitarian (as they identified with
others who had similarly defined a dissenting identity). But then
how could such differentially defined groups, the result of a

59