After Theory

by Terry Eagleton

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  AFTER THEORY

  ‘Remarkable… Terry Eagleton has never been so profound and witty. He tackles pretty well all the great topics of our time… and surpasses the intellectual developments of Literary Theory’ Frank Kermode

  ‘Very readable… a reminder of the fact that postmodernism’s failure to find answers will not stop intelligent minds from mulling over some pretty ancient questions’ A. N. Wilson, Daily Telegraph

  ‘A rare opportunity to enjoy the art of cultural and social diagnosis at its purest! Eagleton offers a unique combination of theoretical stringency and acerbic commonsense witticism, of critical historical reflection and the ability to ask the “big” metaphysical questions. After Theory not only points out what will follow the decline of postmodern cultural studies, it already is a brilliant example of the theory that will lead a long life after the “death of theory” ’ Slavoj Zizek

  ‘He effortlessly encapsulates decades and sums up intellectual movements with droll wisdom… there are plenty of side-swipes at crusty dons’ John Mullan, Guardian

  ‘Showily, and wittily, Eagleton yearns for a species of salvation or transcendence from cultural theories’ Prospect

  ‘An explosive follow-up to Literary Theory, the book that changed the intellectual lives, and curricula, of a generation of undergraduates… Unlike the vast majority of contemporary cultural theorists, Eagleton is not afraid to talk about love and death… He is an original thinker, whose passion and zest for life, and writing, remain undiminished’ Christina Patterson, Independent

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow at Manchester University. His books include Literary Theory, a trilogy on Irish culture, several plays, the screenplay for Derek Jarman’s film Wittgenstein, and an autobiography, The Gatekeeper, (Penguin 2001).

  TERRY EAGLETON

  After Theory

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  Published by Allen Lane 2003

  Published by Penguin Books 2004

  7

  Copyright © Terry Eagleton, 2003

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in hich it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192788-6

  Contents

  Prefactory note

  1 The Politics of Amnesia

  2 The Rise and Fall of Theory

  3 The Path to Postmodernism

  4 Losses and Gains

  5 Truth, Virtue and Objectivity

  6 Morality

  7 Revolution, Foundations and Fundamentalists

  8 Death, Evil and Non-being

  Index

  In memory of my mother

  Rosaleen Riley

  (1913 – 2002)

  Prefatory note

  This book is largely intended for students and general readers who are interested in the current state of cultural theory. But I hope it will also prove useful to specialists in the field, not least because it argues against what I take to be a current orthodoxy. I do not believe that this orthodoxy addresses itself to questions searching enough to meet the demands of our political situation, and I try to spell out why this is so and how it might be remedied.

  I am grateful to Peter Dews for his illuminating comments on part of the manuscript. The influence of the late Herbert McCabe is so pervasive on my argument that it is impossible to localize.

  T.E.

  Dublin

  1

  The Politics of Amnesia

  The golden age of cultural theory is long past. The pioneering works of Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault are several decades behind us. So are the path-breaking early writings of Raymond Williams, Luce Irigaray, Pierre Bourdieu, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Helene Cixous, Jurgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson and Edward Said. Not much that has been written since has matched the ambitiousness and originality of these founding mothers and fathers. Some of them have since been struck down. Fate pushed Roland Barthes under a Parisian laundry van, and afflicted Michel Foucault with Aids. It dispatched Lacan, Williams and Bourdieu, and banished Louis Althusser to a psychiatric hospital for the murder of his wife. It seemed that God was not a structuralist.

  Many of the ideas of these thinkers remain of incomparable value. Some of them are still producing work of major importance. Those to whom the title of this book suggests that ‘theory’ is now over, and that we can all relievedly return to an age of pre-theoretical innocence, are in for a disappointment. There can be no going back to an age when it was enough to pronounce Keats delectable or Milton a doughty spirit. It is not as though the whole project was a ghastly mistake on which some merciful soul has now blown the whistle, so that we can all return to whatever it was we were doing before Ferdinand de Saussure heaved over the horizon. If theory means a reasonably systematic reflection on our guiding assumptions, it remains as indispensable as ever. But we are living now in the aftermath of what one might call high theory, in an age which, having grown rich on the insights of thinkers like Althusser, Barthes and Derrida, has also in some ways moved beyond them.

  The generation which followed after these path-breaking figures did what generations which follow after usually do. They developed the original ideas, added to them, criticized them and applied them. Those who can, think up feminism or structuralism; those who can’t, apply such insights to Moby-Dick or The Cat in the Hat. But the new generation came up with no comparable body of ideas of its own. The older generation had proved a hard act to follow. No doubt the new century will in time give birth to its own clutch of gurus. For the moment, however, we are still trading on the past – and this in a world which has changed dramatically since Foucault and Lacan first settled to their typewriters. What kind of fresh thinking does the new era demand?

  Before we can answer this question, we need to take stock of where we are. Structuralism, Marxism, post-structuralism and the like are no longer the sexy topics they were. What is sexy instead is sex. On the wilder shores of academia, an interest in French philosophy has given way to a fascination with French kissing. In some cultural circles, the politics of masturbation exert far more fascination than the politics of the Middle East. Socialism has lost out to sado-masochism. Among students of culture, the body is an immensely fashionable topic, but it is usually the erotic body, not the famished one. There is a keen interest in coupling bodies, but not in labouring ones. Quietly-spoken middle-class students huddle diligently in libraries, at work on sensationalist subjects like vampirism and eye-gouging, cyborgs and porno movies. />
  Nothing could be more understandable. To work on the literature of latex or the political implications of navel-piercing is to take literally the wise old adage that study should be fun. It is rather like writing your Master’s thesis on the comparative flavour of malt whiskies, or on the phenomenology of lying in bed all day. It creates a seamless continuity between the intellect and everyday life. There are advantages in being able to write your Ph.D. thesis without stirring from in front of the TV set. In the old days, rock music was a distraction from your studies; now it may well be what you are studying. Intellectual matters are no longer an ivory-tower affair, but belong to the world of media and shopping malls, bedrooms and brothels. As such, they re-join everyday life – but only at the risk of losing their ability to subject it to critique.

  Today, the old fogeys who work on classical allusions in Milton look askance on the Young Turks who are deep in incest and cyber-feminism. The bright young things who pen essays on foot fetishism or the history of the codpiece eye with suspicion the scrawny old scholars who dare to maintain that Jane Austen is greater than Jeffrey Archer. One zealous orthodoxy gives way to another. Whereas in the old days you could be drummed out of your student drinking club if you failed to spot a metonym in Robert Herrick, you might today be regarded as an unspeakable nerd for having heard of either metonyms or Herrick in the first place.

  This trivialization of sexuality is especially ironic. For one of the towering achievements of cultural theory has been to establish gender and sexuality as legitimate objects of study, as well as matters of insistent political importance. It is remarkable how intellectual life for centuries was conducted on the tacit assumption that human beings had no genitals. (Intellectuals also behaved as though men and women lacked stomachs. As the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas remarked of Martin Heidegger’s rather lofty concept of Dasein, meaning the kind of existence peculiar to human beings: ‘Dasein does not eat.’) Friedrich Nietzsche once commented that whenever anybody speaks crudely of a human being as a belly with two needs and a head with one, the lover of knowledge should listen carefully. In an historic advance, sexuality is now firmly established within academic life as one of the keystones of human culture. We have come to acknowledge that human existence is at least as much about fantasy and desire as it is about truth and reason. It is just that cultural theory is at present behaving rather like a celibate middle-aged professor who has stumbled absent-mindedly upon sex and is frenetically making up for lost time.

  Another historic gain of cultural theory has been to establish that popular culture is also worth studying. With some honourable exceptions, traditional scholarship has for centuries ignored the everyday life of the common people. Indeed, it was life itself it used to ignore, not just the everyday. In some traditionalist universities not long ago, you could not research on authors who were still alive. This was a great incentive to slip a knife between their ribs one foggy evening, or a remarkable test of patience if your chosen novelist was in rude health and only thirty-four. You certainly could not research on anything you saw around you every day, which was by definition not worth studying. Most things that were deemed suitable for study in the humanities were not visible, like nail-clippings or Jack Nicholson, but invisible, like Stendhal, the concept of sovereignty or the sinuous elegance of Leibniz’s notion of the monad. Today it is generally recognized that everyday life is quite as intricate, unfathomable, obscure and occasionally tedious as Wagner, and thus eminently worth investigating. In the old days, the test of what was worth studying was quite often how futile, monotonous and esoteric it was. In some circles today, it is whether it is something you and your friends do in the evenings. Students once wrote uncritical, reverential essays on Flaubert, but all that has been transformed. Nowadays they write uncritical, reverential essays on Friends.

  Even so, the advent of sexuality and popular culture as kosher subjects of study has put paid to one powerful myth. It has helped to demolish the puritan dogma that seriousness is one thing and pleasure another. The puritan mistakes pleasure for frivolity because he mistakes seriousness for solemnity. Pleasure falls outside the realm of knowledge, and thus is dangerously anarchic. On this view, to study pleasure would be like chemically analysing champagne rather than drinking the stuff. The puritan does not see that pleasure and seriousness are related in this sense: that finding out how life can become more pleasant for more people is a serious business. Traditionally, it is known as moral discourse. But ‘political’ discourse would do just as well.

  Yet pleasure, a buzz word for contemporary culture, has its limits too. Finding out how to make life more pleasant is not always pleasant. Like all scientific inquiry, it requires patience, self-discipline and an inexhaustible capacity to be bored. In any case, the hedonist who embraces pleasure as the ultimate reality is often just the puritan in full-throated rebellion. Both of them are usually obsessed with sex. Both of them equate truth with earnestness. Old-style puritanical capitalism forbade us to enjoy ourselves, since once we had acquired a taste for the stuff we would probably never see the inside of the workplace again. Sigmund Freud held that if it were not for what he called the reality principle, we would simply lie around the place all day in various mildly scandalous states of jouissance. A more canny, consumerist kind of capitalism, however, persuades us to indulge our senses and gratify ourselves as shamelessly as possible. In that way we will not only consume more goods; we will also identify our own fulfilment with the survival of the system. Anyone who fails to wallow orgasmically in sensual delight will be visited late at night by a terrifying thug known as the superego, whose penalty for such non-enjoyment is atrocious guilt. But since this ruffian also tortures us for having a good time, one might as well take the ha’pence with the kicks and enjoy oneself anyway.

  So there is nothing inherently subversive about pleasure. On the contrary, as Karl Marx recognized, it is a thoroughly aristocratic creed. The traditional English gentleman was so averse to unpleasurable labour that he could not even be bothered to articulate properly. Hence the patrician slur and drawl. Aristotle believed that being human was something you had to get good at through constant practice, like learning Catalan or playing the bagpipes; whereas if the English gentleman was virtuous, as he occasionally deigned to be, his goodness was purely spontaneous. Moral effort was for merchants and clerks.

  Not all students of culture are blind to the Western narcissism involved in working on the history of pubic hair while half the world’s population lacks adequate sanitation and survives on less than two dollars a day. Indeed, the most flourishing sector of cultural studies today is so-called post-colonial studies, which deals with just this dire condition. Like the discourse of gender and sexuality, it has been one of the most precious achievements of cultural theory. Yet these ideas have thrived among new generations who, for no fault of their own, can remember little of world-shaking political importance. Before the advent of the so-called war on terrorism, it seemed as though there might be nothing more momentous for young Europeans to recount to their grandchildren than the advent of the euro. Over the dreary decades of post-1970s conservatism, the historical sense had grown increasingly blunted, as it suited those in power that we should be able to imagine no alternative to the present. The future would simply be the present infinitely repeated – or, as the postmodernist remarked, ‘the present plus more options’. There are now those who piously insist on ‘historicizing’ and who seem to believe that anything that happened before 1980 is ancient history.

  To live in interesting times is not, to be sure, an unmixed blessing. It is no particular consolation to be able to recall the Holocaust, or to have lived through the Vietnam war. Innocence and amnesia have their advantages. There is no point in mourning the blissful days when you could have your skull fractured by the police every weekend in Hyde Park. To recall a world-shaking political history is also, for the political left at least, to recall what is for the most part a history of defeat. In any case, a new and omi
nous phase of global politics has now opened, which not even the most cloistered of academics will be able to ignore. Even so, what has proved most damaging, at least before the emergence of the anti-capitalist movement, is the absence of memories of collective, and effective, political action. It is this which has warped so many contemporary cultural ideas out of shape. There is a historical vortex at the centre of our thought which drags it out of true.

  Much of the world as we know it, despite its solid, well-upholstered appearance, is of recent vintage. It was thrown up by the tidal waves of revolutionary nationalism which swept the globe in the period after the Second World War, tearing one nation after another from the grip of Western colonialism. The Allies’ struggle in the Second World War was itself a successful collaborative action on a scale unprecedented in human history – one which crushed a malevolent fascism at the heart of Europe, and in doing so laid some of the foundations of the world we know today. Much of the global community we see around us was formed, fairly recently, by collective revolutionary projects – projects which were launched often enough by the weak and hungry, but which nevertheless proved successful in dislodging their predatory foreign rulers. Indeed, the Western empires which those revolutions dismantled were themselves for the most part the product of revolutions. It is just that they were those most victorious revolutions of all – the ones which we have forgotten ever took place. And that usually means the ones which produced the likes of us. Other people’s revolutions are always more eye-catching than one’s own.

  But it is one thing to make a revolution, and another to sustain it. Indeed, for the most eminent revolutionary leader of the twentieth century, what brought some revolutions to birth in the first place was also what was responsible for their ultimate downfall. Vladimir Lenin believed that it was the very backwardness of Tsarist Russia which had helped to make the Bolshevik revolution possible. Russia was a nation poor in the kind of civic institutions which secure the loyalty of citizens to the state, and thus help to stave off political insurrection. Its power was centralized rather than diffuse, coercive rather than consensual: it was concentrated in the state machine, so that to overthrow that was to seize sovereignty at a stroke. But this very same poverty and backwardness helped to scupper the revolution once it had been made. You could not build socialism in an economic backwater, encircled by stronger, politically hostile powers, among a mass of unskilled, illiterate workers and peasants without traditions of social organization and democratic self-government. The attempt to do so called for the strong-armed measures of Stalinism, which ended up subverting the very socialism it was trying to construct.