Terry Eagleton, After Theory
Allan Lane, 2003
Postmodern cultural theorists are much in the habit of declaring the end or, more ominously, the death of things — man, the author, even theory itself. Now one of their most trenchant critics is getting into the act. In the opening line of After Theory, Terry Eagleton announces the end of the golden age of cultural theory. No one, he argues, has come along to rival the theoretical innovations and insights of cultural theorists such as Raymond Williams, Jurgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigray, Frederic Jameson and Julie Kristeva.
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In the hands of a lesser writer and critic, Eagleton’s declaration would run the risk of appearing that of a crusty curmudgeon bemoaning the rise of a new generation wilfully ignorant of matters of exploitation, poverty and violence; a kind of left-wing counterpart to the standard right-wing reactionary grumble about how everything and everyone was better off before the Rolling Stones and their ilk came along and spoiled everything. The characteristic intelligence, wit and verve of Eagleton’s writing saves After Theory from this fate.
His chief objection to much of contemporary cultural studies, particularly throughout the 1980s and 1990s, is that it became obsessed with the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary culture, mistaking the minutiae of culture for the earth shattering. This is in contrast to much of the early cultural studies which, in Eagleton’s account, were engaged in an often fraught but nevertheless fruitful discussion with Marxism.
Eagleton is not so insensitive a critic as to be unaware of the reasons behind leaving Marxism behind. In the booming post-war economy, major social problems did not seem to spring from poverty or exploitation but from affluence. Combined with the horrors of Stalinism, Marxism appeared not simply dangerously ill-equipped to deal with contemporary social problems, but just plain dangerous.
Nor is he so blinded by dogmatism that he’s unable to see the contribution made by cultural theorists, particularly when it comes to bringing to the fore what was excluded from and/or censored within mainstream culture. Equally, though, he’s scathing about the fetishisation within much cultural studies of the marginal and what Eagleton refers to as the ‘cult of the Other’: the tendency to exoticise and uncritically accept the statements of pretty much anyone who isn’t you, or is outside of your own culture. While conceding that Marxism neglected many of the topics and issues with which cultural studies has become centrally concerned — gender, sexuality and colonialism, for example — he rightly notes that neither did it completely ignore them.
The price of leaving Marxism behind, according to Eagleton, is a situation in which much contemporary cultural studies spends far too much time attacking ideas — immutable truths, absolute objectivity, timeless moral values, an uncritical belief in progress, for example — whose grip on the culture is slipping anyhow.
Cultural studies’ preoccupation with such matters has been to the
detriment of other issues which in the
contemporary era, and particularly given the events of 9/11 and the continuing
‘War on Terrorism’, demand an urgent response. In Eagleton’s
eyes, the lesson to be learnt from this is that:
...cultural theory must start to think ambitiously once again — not so that it can hand the West its legitimation, but so that it can seek to make sense of the grand narratives in which it is embroiled.
Eagleton’s case would have been strengthened immeasurably if he had included more substantive examples of the kinds of cultural studies he is criticising. While Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Francoise Lyotard, Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, among others, are mentioned, he never offers a sustained treatment of their ideas. Thus, while it’s clear that Eagleton has strong reservations about the kind of cultural theorist who insists on calling a spade a discursively constructed (man)ual technology used in historically specific practices of soil extraction, his failure to develop their ideas leaves him open to the charge of setting up his own straw man every bit as fragile as the postmodernists he takes to task.
This weakness is, to some degree, made up for in the later sections of After Theory in which Eagleton embarks on an attempt to engage with a range of topics around which cultural studies theorists have tended to tread lightly, including morality, faith and religion, objectivity and truth.
Wittgenstein’s influence is in evidence here. Just as Wittgenstein, in his later philosophy at least, held that most philosophical problems were non-problems arising from the misuse of language, Eagleton’s approach is founded on the view that many of the criticisms made by postmodern cultural theorists are non-problems created by confusion about the ideas under criticism, or else stem from a preoccupation with language itself.
Thus, the relativist critique of ‘absolute truth’ arises out of a misguided insistence that truth must be immutable or that it requires the truth teller to assume a position outside of any particular context. For Eagleton, if something is defined as true, then it is so. While such matters might be arrived at from a particular point of view or social context, this does not invalidate their status as true. It simply means that one point of view is right and the other wrong. The existence of truth is also quite compatible with historical and social change; something can be true at one point in time and false at another, without the whole edifice of truth crumbling around our ears. For Eagleton this goes for statements like ‘The tiger is in the bathroom’ as much as for ‘Racism is an evil’ — such statements are not, in Eagleton’s view, matters of opinion, but are absolutely true.
Similarly, one does not need to clamber to some Archimedean vantage point
in order to talk about the world in objective terms, as some critics of objectivity
hold. In Eagleton’s view, this belief arises out of the mistaken idea
that taking an objective viewpoint and having a partial one are polar opposites,
and that since all viewpoints are partial, so much the worse for objectivity.
But objectivity is not the same as taking a non-partisan or balanced viewpoint
— a point frequently lost on apologists for the stolen generations,
for instance, who seek to justify the evil of forcibly removing Aboriginal
children from their parents by pointing to the benefits that settlement has
brought. The effect of such ‘balance’ is to distort reality to
better serve the needs of non-Aboriginals. For Eagleton, in such cases taking
sides is the only path to objectivity.
The same approach is applied to the search for stable foundations on which
to make claims about the world. For Eagleton, believing that everything is
a matter of contingency and therefore open to radical revision is false. The
fact that people have basic beliefs that they see as more important than others
is integral to being human. To behave otherwise, for Eagleton, would require
that we be other than human.
While Eagleton’s arguments are clear and clear-headed, there is nevertheless something unsatisfying in this approach. For the most part, his approach is to demonstrate the flaws in the views he criticises and to draw out the undesirable consequences that would follow were one to stick to them. While showing up bad arguments is a first step in defending ideas, without a more substantive argument in favour of the ideas he seeks to defend, Eagleton’s claims are unlikely to sway sceptics who harbour more deep-seated misgivings towards matters of truth, objectivity or the search for stable foundations. This is not to say that a positive case is entirely lacking in Eagleton’s writing, simply that it often gets pushed to the back by his desire to show up the poor arguments mounted by postmodern cultural theorists. Eagleton’s case would be bolstered by a more substantial argument to flesh out what he seeks to defend, such as the notion of what it means to be human or what truth entails.
Of course, this is far easier said than done. And there are only so many ways to explain matters such as truth and objectivity; there comes a point at which it’s difficult to know what else one might say to persuade someone who’s determined to reject them. Clear as they are, there’s no doubt many of Eagleton’s arguments will fall on deaf ears in any case.
