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Friday, April 01, 2005
Terry Eagleton’s After Theory: A Mini-Review
We recently had a seminar at Lehigh to discuss Terry Eagleton’s After Theory. I think the plan was to have a soul-searching discussion about the role of Theory in Our Scholarly Endeavor, its possibilities but also its limitations. Something like that. Perhaps, if someone was feeling grouchy, there might have been a “culture wars” type of showdown. Or, on a better day, perhaps people who ordindarily hold rather polarized views would have reached some kind of new understanding of what their nemeses are up to, and we would all have benefited from having Talked It Out.
But all this might have happened only if the substantial argument of Eagleton’s book had anything to do with its title. It does not.
Eagleton’s book is only “after theory” in the sense that Bjork’s second solo album was called Post, that is to say, it is after a book that came before, which was called Literary Theory. (Bjork’s first solo album was called Debut, in case you were wondering.) Though Eagleton comes out rather strongly against Theory-with-a-captial-T at moments, he is not against theorizing, but is rather forcefully arguing a theory of his own: an ethical, Aristotelian kind of socialism.
Admittedly, the first half of the book does have something to do with the culture wars and the theory wars. There are many good zingers, and some not so good. My favorite right now is:
“‘Act locally, think globally’ has become a familiar leftist slogan; but we live in a world where the political right acts globally and the postmodern left thinks locally.
To which my reaction is: ouch. Or maybe just, mini-ouch.
Eagleton is very hard on the postmodern left in the first half of the book, only unlike conservative-leaning critics of postmodernism he continues to share their basic view of the world. Thus he is annoyed by the cultural turn in feminist theory, but doggedly supportive of feminism as a philosophical and political principle. And he has a similar ambivalence for many other sub-fields and thematic interests, including post-colonial theory. The latter was once directly associated with Marxism and a militantly anti-colonial world-view, but it now seems to Eagleton to have turned into another form of identity politics studies, fetishizing “difference” in such a way as to make it essentially cooperative with Capitalism. Many of his arguments here will be familiar to people who’ve read other books critical of theory: the postmodernist take on Enlightenment rationality is foolish; the attack on “essentialism” is misdirected; the whole enterprise is remarkably pliable to the interests of corporate culture, and so on.
But in fact, if you are a practicioner of what Eagleton calls “cultural theory” (includes postmodernism and various schools of identity politics), you will likely be only mildly annoyed by most of what he has to say. He’s fairly gentle, because attacking Theory isn’t really the point of this book.
That point manifests itself in the second half, and is, for me, somewhat of a surprise. What Eagleton is after is a vision of socialism underpinned by a concept of ethics that is sometimes Aristotelian and sometimes actively theological. Gone are the little rants about Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish, whom he at one point early on accuses of the “heresy of fideism” ("Your life is based on certain beliefs which are immune to rational scrutiny"). In the place of the zingers come long disquisitions on the true meaning of the Pauline position on Mosaic Law (Adam Kotsko, are you out there?), Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and passages like this one:
It is because of the body, not in the first place because of Enlightenment abstraction, that we can speak of morality as universal. The material body is what we share is what we share most significantly with the whole of the rest of our species, extended both in time and space. Of course it is true that our needs, desires, and sufferings are always culturally specific. But our material bodies are such that they are, indeed must be, in principle capable of feeling compasion for any others of their kind. It is on this capacity for fellow-feeling that moral values are founded; and this is based in turn on our material dependency on each other. Angels, if they existed, would not be moral beings in anything like our sense. (155-156)
Sometimes Eagleton crosses the line in passages like these, becoming actively preachy. I’m trying to give him the benefit of the doubt: isn’t it true that the materiality of the body—not desiring, but needing—might be the basis for a kind of universal ethics? What might that mean?
(There are other intriguing passages, but unfortunately I cannot be Holbonically long this morning; life intrudes.)
To wrap up, what ties the academic/culture wars part of the book together with the latter chapters on issues of truth, morality, ethics, fundamentalism and evil, is a pervading sense that capitalism is to blame. It is Capitalism that fetishizes difference, hybridity, plasticity, and the bad kind of Individualism. It is Capitalism that separates compassionate human beings from their natural tendency to express compassion and selfless action. Liberals may have good hearts, but their philosophy has no ethical core comparable to that articulated by Aristotle or Kant. Postmodernists have shaken things up in a way that Eagleton appreciates; he is amused, rather than chagrined, at the sudden preponderance of people seriously studying such weighty stuff as Mel Gibson’s Mad Max movies. But ultimately their thinking is driven by the logic of Capital, and their books, sitting pretty in the “Cultural Studies” section at Barnes & Noble, have their concerns dictated by marketing rather than true, human ethics.
I must confess that I don’t share Eagleton’s politics, or at least, don’t lean as far that way as I might—I’ve felt too much disillusionment with India’s experiments with state socialism to be very enthusiastic at this point in the game. And I must say that this is a confusing, bizarrely organized book on the whole (one of my colleagues referred to it as “undisciplined,” which seems apt). But there is nevertheless a reaching here towards something to which I am sympathetic, namely the simple, unadorned truth about what is happening in the world. Eagleton might be right when he argues that the distractions associated with today’s media environment weaken the possibility of ideological clarity one way or another. And without that kind of clarity, truly original thinking in the humanities has become an extremely rare phenomenon.
Comments
Hi Amardeep. I’m just testing your comment box because the one for my first post seems to have stopped showing new ones.
I haven’t read the book yet, Armadeep, but I will with your post in mind.
In the meantime, I’ll beat Dan Green to the punch by posing the question: what do ethics, socialism and even capitalism have to do with the study of literature, except as manifest in the story itself (e.g., a character in an ethical dilemma), or, trivally in the sense that all art is created within human culture so therefore affected by culture (politics, identity, et al.)? I say trivally because it is also true that “everything” is affected by biology, psychology, physics, neuron activity in the brain, etc., but it doesn’t follow that culture or biology (etc) necessarily represent the best or most proximate ways of understanding or describing specific aspects of human behavior or endeavors.
Perhaps Eagleton would readily admit this, but his book doesn’t seem to be about “literary” theory at all, but rather theories of sociology, economics, and history.
BTW, I’m very excited about this blog, its potential, and the excellent people who are contributing to it--both contributors such as Armadeep, Dan, John, and Miriam B., but also those who will likely frequently add to the discussion like Tim Burke.
I’m really glad that those involved took the initiative to put this together!
Apologies: Amardeep!!
(sometimes my fingers move faster than my brain...)
Disclaimer: I haven’t yet read _After Theory_ (still chewing my way through Eagleton’s _Literary Theory: An Introduction_ during the one hour a week I can spare for that subject).
James, this kind of thing seems to me to be a kind of unexamined remnant of public intellectualism. It used to be that you’d get Galbraith, say, writing about economics, or perhaps Eco about aesthetics, for public edification and you’d read it and think that this person happily combined theoretical knowledge of the subject, a strong personal point of view, and an ability to write. And those people would have some degree of influence because of their writing, even if areas that weren’t “their field”.
Well, why should we be interested in Eagleton writing about politics, ethics, sociology, or history? He’s not a political scientist or philosopher or historian; he hasn’t been particularly politically active in real-world politics except as a writer. It appears that he’s drawing on an implicit form of authority that he would likely explicitly deny; the idea that studying literature provides one with insights about life. In the current version of this age-old formulation, the Theorist or cultural critic, by analyzing our cultural products, arrives at truths about our society that are inaccessible to the sociologist, historian, economist etc. I find this to be unconvincing: I don’t see why a great understanding of our writing or our movies should give people any understanding of what our political arrangments should be. There’s a reason that the only Marxist economists left are not economists.
The other form of authority used by public intellectuals was the strength and clarity of their writing. There is a sense in which anyone who writes both well and clearly makes you listen to them; it’s one of the reasons Orwell is convincing even when he occasionally writes nonsense (off the top of my head, I’m thinking of the bit about pacifists being objectively pro-fascist, which he later disavowed). But here Eagleton runs into another problem. He’s a good writer—but the language of cultural criticism prevents him from being a great one. No great public intellectual writing in English that I know of has written prose that could not be understood by ordinary people. People like to joke about “interrogating the boundaries” and other such buzzword phrases, but their usage has serious effects. There is something wrong with them. Otherwise, they would either have been replaced by now, or everyone would understand what they meant and you’d be hearing people casually using them, just like you hear people casually talking about “peer groups”.
So I’m back to the ideas that John Holbo has written about much more skillfully and knowledgeably than I could. In this case, I think that Eagleton’s desire to shore up his position by an implicit appeal to his expert authority as a cultural critic isn’t just rather dubious once you examine it, it also works directly against his ability to communicate with the public and to really achieve his political goals.
James,
This question of what is properly literary never goes away. I don’t think I can thoroughly defend a conception of literature oriented to politics adequately here, but I’ll take a couple of stabs at it.
First, in my mini-review, I should probably have referenced Eagleton’s opening chapter, where he gives a historical account of the changes in literary theory since the 1960s. For him, poststructuralism and postmodernism (esp. Foucault and Derrida) were always in some way associated with Marxism at the moment of their conception. More recent work in that vein has been lost its political mooring, and is also less original. For Eagleton, the two are linked; it was better before—with Tel Quel.
For Eagleton, the problem isn’t that the New Stuff is somehow all wrong because it’s too political, it’s that the developments in literary theory since 1965 may be increasingly irrelevant to our current social and political landscape. There was never a time when the literary was completely blocked off from other concerns, and I have a feeling Eagleton would say that it never will be.
Eagleton’s goal is not to posit an interpretive methodology (or a methodology against Theory), but rather to suggest his own conception of the value of art and literature in a world where instrumentalist (or for Eagleton, capitalist) thinking is increasingly the only acceptable kind.
But his emphasis on ethics-politics does lead him back to aesthetic concerns at times. His turn to moral universals (in passages like the one I quoted) leads him to talk at times about aesthetic universals. Through a perhaps strange logical chain, he goes from his Quasi-Christian socialism to a version of “art for art’s sake.”
That’s Eagleton. Here’s what I myself think: while the literary isn’t always political, a serious approach to literature can’t absolutely exclude politics. Politics informs what we read, how we read, and what we do with it. Literature is for me a thing of the world and in it, though I feel strongly writers and readers should have the right not to always be governed by its rules. So I don’t think Eagleton’s work here can be construed as irrelevant to what goes on in English departments. As for whether it is is relevant to non-academic intellectuals, critics, and readers—the many, many people who are reading this who don’t care at all about what happens in English departments—I would say: read the second half, maybe.
And just quickly, to Rich: the point you make about meaningless buzzwords like “transgressing boundaries” is one Eagleton makes in his book as well, in a series of zingers. I also don’t think Eagleton in this book is even remotely trying to claim authoritative status on anything.
Amardeep, I know that Eagleton likes those zingers, speaks out against certain kinds of cultural theory, and so on, but the problem is that his style has been changed. Here’s a random quote from the first relatively recent (November 1998) bit of Eagleton-text that Google has to offer ( at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n22/eagl01_.html): “Of all historical periods, modernity is the only one to designate itself, vacuously, in terms of its up-to-dateness.” Designate itself? The theorist can leave Theory, but its imprint remains.
I also don’t think that I communicated well what I mean by authoritative status. Why does Eagleton expect anyone to care about his vision of socialism? Take the paragraph that you labelled preachy, for instance. I would guess that you could go to any reasonably populated livejournal, post “Hey people, what do you think of universal morality?” and get a comment thread full of similar through less grammatical disquisitions. Why does Eagleton think that what for others is comment-box material is for him something to be appreciated and read as part of a discussion of the direction of an academic field? Because of authority. He might not phrase it that way, but I would.
Hi Amardeep,
First, let me say that I read your blog frequently and find it very insightful (even when I don’t agree).
I don’t think anyone would seriously argue that politics, social relations, culture, religion, human psychology and really everything else under the sun aren’t relevant to literature. Literature is always a story about something and is, as you say, “a thing of the world and in it.” From my interest in film, for example, one would be hard pressed to teach Rossellini’s _Rome, Open City_ without discussing the war and political situation of Italy at the time. But again, I don’t think this is what Eagleton has in mind.
My issue is that the political and cultural in literary studies tends to take the form of “I have a cultural/political ideology and theory which I will support by selectively picking bits of this or that novel or film, or by somewhat willfully misreading a text to prove my theory about culture.” Instead of the correlate where thinking about politics, culture, identity, etc. helps one form a more nuanced understanding of the story being told.
“But his emphasis on ethics-politics does lead him back to aesthetic concerns at times.”
To me, this equation is precisely backwards. Aesthetic concerns should lead one to ethics-politics at times, not the other way around. Of course, I am an admirer of Kenneth Burke and tend to agree with his discussion of art vs. information. I don’t have the texts handy so I’m going on memory, but in a nutshell we don’t admire, say, a Monet painting because we want to learn factual information about waterlilies (a botany text would likely work better for that). We admire the painting because of its form, composition, history, etc. Of course, we may ALSO learn something about waterlilies, but that is not its primary purpose.
I’m very much a leftist Democrat (with some libertarian leanings) in my personal politics, but I just don’t quite understand the desire to dismantle or “interrogate” literature and literary history in a misplaced effort to promote social justice in our contemporary society. I can’t see how it can even hope to be an efficacious strategy.
Wouldn’t becoming a sociologist or historian or economist be a better avenue if those are ones goals?
James, to butt in here: no, I don’t think it would necessarily be a better avenue to become a sociologist, historian or economist if one wanted to promote social justice. Not unless one was a sociologist, historian or economist who had a particularly nuanced understanding of the ways in which language shapes culture.
Are you saying that literary scholars have a nuanced understanding of the ways in which language shapes culture in ways that a sociologist, historian or say a sociolinguist don’t?
I’m not really convinced that that is the case. But I willing to believe that it’s possible (I am training to be a literary/film scholar after all so I don’t want to undercut the abilities of my own field!).
How or why do you think that is the case (if in fact you do)?
James, I’m saying that we are trained to work with language, with texts, and that those with the interest to do so, like Eagleton, apply that understanding to texts within culture. I am not saying that literary scholars should be privileged over others, but rather, that we can provide one crucial piece of the puzzle.
I want to know what he says about the Mad Max movies!?!? I think I could have a very interesting discussion with him…
Well… I’d just like to say that in general, I agree with James. I study Classics, and I ran into Eagleton via a book of his on the Tragic. I suppose I can be explosive and indignant, and argufy against his positions; but it is easier to say, with James: I come from the field of literature, and I don’t like what Eagleton does to it. Just as I wouldn’t like to open a book about chess, only to find in it a long communist (or capitalist) manifesto with little snippets of chess games used as pseudo-evidence to enforce the author’s sense of the justice of his claims, in the same way I don’t appreciate Eagleton’s ‘exploitation’ of literature, and his position as a ‘teacher’ of it, for his political agenda.
I must add that I got to this site after reading a witty piece by John Holbo (hence ‘argufy’) contra Eagleton, which helped me think things out; and that I’m aware that the whole ‘if you think you don’t have an agenda [/big Theory/etc.], that only proves you have a hidden one’ charge may be brought against me.
But that’s a long comment for a comment thread that may have died out already, so far as I know.