To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

one of social transformation and liberation,
with the imagination (and thus the arts)
leading the way. This has not happened.
The despair over the loss of radical hope
among intellectuals has led them to posit a
society (late capitalism) which is
omnipresent and omnipotent. Resistance to
the established order, which had been at the
center of romantic art and thought, is now
seen as impossible—or almost so. Yet the
postmodernists want to keep the idea of liberation
alive. "Postmodern texts thus often
begin their work by making deeper the very
hole out of which they hope to climb."
But the hole maybe self-invented, and
McGowan contributes to its invention. He
claims, for example, that
The suppression of women and of minority
groups within the society and of non-
European races wherever they were
encountered must be read as the outcome
of the West's obsession with identity,
singleness, and purity, with its belief
that only unified, homogeneous entities
(be they selves or states) can act effectively.
The truth is that (almost?) all societies have
suppressed and continue to suppress
women and minorities, and that, if anything,
the Western record is somewhat better
than most (all?) others. The very idea
that women and minorities even deserve
better is a Western invention, though for all
I know others may have invented it too.
The main thrust of Postmodernism and Its
Critics is that postmodernists, despite their
critiques of the free subject, continue to
hold on to the idea of negative freedom, in
which freedom consists in freedom from
social coercion by an autonomous subject,
rather than the realization of goals that are
inescapably social. This belief has led the
postmodernists, and many of their predecessors,
to abandon action in the real social
world, which is seen as a mere prisonhouse,
in favor of the mere dream of a very
different future. For example, Marxism
"involves the complete repudiation of any
notion of legitimate social authority or
political agenda," because "all power and all
goals are the products of interest, with no
claims on others who do share those interests."
Again and again McGowan shows
that the basic assumptions of much postmodernist
thought doom believers to political
impotence even as they claim to be
working toward grand social transformations.
In the second, and weaker, section of
Postmodernism and Its Critics, McGowan
offers his prescription. The weakness is that
his ideas here approach democratic common
sense. For example, "the pluralist
works to construct and preserve a different
identity [than does the conservative], one
built not on ethnic, religious, or racial
grounds, but on the commitment to the
civic virtues required to make democracy
and tolerance work." Democracy is the
standard for McGowan, and he tells us
clearly what it means: "In the ensuing discussion,
the word democracy is used to designate
social arrangements that guarantee
that public decisions are made through
processes that allow for full and equal participation
of each citizen." I heartily agree
with this democratic dogma, but too much
of McGowan's text is devoted to the reassertion
of what many already believe.
McGowan does not argue with objections
to these beliefs, nor does he explore the
problems the complex forms of resistance
to their implementation.
Tocqueville warned us 150 years ago that
it is the pressure toward equality which can
be the basis for deep injustice in democracies,
and since today that pressure is a
source of injustice from the left, McGowan
is most useful in his effort to make the
democratic process itself more important
than any egalitarian outcome. McGowan
neatly sums up this idea in a slogan: "in
democracy the means justifies the ends."
He contrasts his commitment to democ-
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