After Theory

by Terry Eagleton

  The record was mixed in another sense too. New theories of discourse, deviancy and desire were not simply alternatives to a political leftism that had failed. They were also ways of deepening and enriching it. Perhaps, so some argued, it would not have failed in the first place had it taken these insights fully on board. Cultural theory was there to remind the traditional left of what it had flouted: art, pleasure, gender, power, sexuality, language, madness, desire, spirituality, the family, the body, the ecosystem, the unconscious, ethnicity, life-style, hegemony. This, on any estimate, was a sizeable slice of human existence. One needed to be pretty myopic to overlook as much as this. It was rather like an account of human anatomy which left out the lungs and stomach. Or like the medieval Irish monk who wrote a dictionary but unaccountably omitted the letter S.

  In fact, traditional left politics – which at the time really meant Marxism – was never quite as purblind as this suggests. It had had a great deal to say of art and culture, some of it tedious, some of it arrestingly original. In fact, culture bulked large in the tradition which has come to be known as Western Marxism. Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Wilhelm Reich, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Lucien Goldmann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Fredric Jameson: these are hardly thinkers who ignored the erotic and symbolic, art and the unconscious, lived experience and transformations of consciousness. There is arguably no richer heritage of such thought in the twentieth century. It was from this heritage that modern-day cultural studies took its cue, though much of it is a pale shadow of its predecessors.

  Western Marxism’s shift to culture was born partly out of political impotence and disenchantment. Caught between capitalism and Stalinism, groups like the Frankfurt School could compensate for their political homelessness by turning to cultural and philosophical questions. Politically marooned, they could draw upon their formidable cultural resources to confront a capitalism in which the role of culture was becoming more and more vital, and thus prove themselves once more politically relevant. In the same act, they could dissociate themselves from a savagely philistine Communist world, while immeasurably enriching the traditions of thought that Communism had betrayed. In doing so, however, much Western Marxism ended up as a somewhat gentrified version of its militant revolutionary forebears, academicist, disillusioned and politically toothless. This, too, it passed on to its successors in cultural studies, for whom such thinkers as Antonio Gramsci came to mean theories of subjectivity rather than workers’ revolution.

  Marxism had certainly sidelined gender and sexuality. But it had by no means ignored these topics, even though much of what it had to say about them was painfully insufficient. The uprising which was to topple the Russian Tsar and install a Bolshevik regime in his place was launched with demonstrations on International Women’s Day in 1917. Once in power, the Bolsheviks gave equality for women a high priority. Marxism had been largely silent on the environment, but so at the time had almost everyone else. There were, even so, some pregnant reflections on Nature in the early Marx and later socialist thinkers. Marxism had not exactly overlooked the unconscious, simply dismissed it out of hand as a bourgeois invention. Yet there were important exceptions to this simple-mindedness, like the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich; and pleasure and desire had played a key role in the reflections of Marxist philosophers like Herbert Marcuse. One of the finest books ever written on the body, The Phenomenology of Perception, was the work of the French leftist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It was through the influence of phenomenology that some Marxist thinkers came to engage with questions of lived experience and everyday life.

  The charge that Marxism has had nothing to say about race, nation, colonialism or ethnicity is equally false. Indeed, the Communist movement was the only place in the early twentieth century where the issues of nationalism and colonialism – along with the question of gender – were systematically raised and debated. As Robert J. C. Young has written: ‘Communism was the first, and only, political programme to recognize the interrelation of these different forms of domination and exploitation (class, gender and colonialism) and the necessity of abolishing all of them as the fundamental basis for the successful realization of the liberation of each.’2 Lenin put colonial revolution at the forefront of the priorities of the Soviet government. Marxist ideas became vital to anti-colonial struggles in India, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere.

  In fact, Marxism was the primary inspiration behind anti-colonial campaigns. Many of the great anti-colonial theorists and political leaders of the twentieth century were educated in the West, and learned enduringly from Western Marxism. Gandhi drew on Ruskin, Tolstoy and other such sources. Most Marxist states have been non-European. It is arguable that cultural politics themselves, as the West knows them, were for the most part the product of so-called Third World thinkers like Castro, Cabral, Fanon and James Connolly. Some postmodern thinkers would doubtless regard it as a pity that ‘Third World’ militants should have had recourse to such manifestations of dominative Western Reason as Marxism. These are the kind of theorists who would point out that, say, the Marquis de Condorcet, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment, believed to his discredit in disinterested knowledge, the splendours of science, perpetual progress, abstract human rights, the infinite perfectibility of humankind, and the steady unfolding in history of the essence of true humanity.

  Condorcet certainly held such views. It is just that the same theorists, carried away by their entirely understandable disapproval of these opinions, might well forget to point out that he also believed – at a time when precious few others did – in universal suffrage, equal rights for women, non-violent political revolution, equal education for all, the welfare state, colonial emancipation, free speech, religious tolerance and the overthrow of both despotism and clericalism. These humane views were not at all unrelated to his unprepossessing philosophy, though they can be detached from it. Enlightenment is, one might claim, as Enlightenment does. There are those today for whom ‘teleology’, ‘progress’ and ‘universalism’ are such heinous thought-crimes (which, indeed, they have sometimes most certainly proved to be) that they entirely overshadow a little matter like being a couple of centuries ahead of one’s time in practical political terms.

  It is true, even so, that the Communist movement had been culpably silent on some central questions. But Marxism is not some Philosophy of Life or Secret of the Universe, which feels duty bound to pronounce on everything from how to break your way into a boiled egg to the quickest way to delouse cocker spaniels. It is an account, roughly speaking, of how one historical mode of production changes into another. It is not a deficiency of Marxism that it has nothing very interesting to say about whether physical exercise or wiring your jaws together is the best way of dieting. Nor is it a defect of feminism that it has so far remained silent about the Bermuda Triangle. Some of those who upbraid Marxism with not saying enough are also allergic to grand narratives which try to say too much.

  A lot of the cultural theory which emerged in the 1960s and 70s can be seen as a critique of classical Marxism. On the whole, it was a comradely rather than hostile response – a situation which was later to change. Marxism, for example, had been the guiding theoretical light of the new revolutionary nationalist movements in Asia and Africa; but this, inevitably, had meant a remaking of the theory to meet distinctively new conditions, not the obedient application of a given body of knowledge. From Kenya to Malaysia, revolutionary nationalism had both revived Marxism and forced it to rethink itself. There was also a heated, highly productive debate between Marxists and feminists. Louis Althusser was a Marxist who felt the need to dismantle many received Marxist ideas. Claude Lévi-Strauss was a Marxist who felt Marxism could contribute little to his special field of expertise, anthropology. As an historical outlook, it seemed to throw little light on pre-historic culture and mythology.

  Roland Barthes was a man of the left who found Marxism lamentably lacking when it came to semiotics, the
science of signs. Julia Kristeva worked on language, desire and the body, none of which had exactly headed the Marxist agenda. Yet both thinkers had close affinities at this point to Marxist politics. The postmodern philosopher Jean-François Lyotard found Marxism irrelevant to information theory and the artistic avant-garde. The most avant-garde cultural journal of the period, the French literary organ Tel Quel, discovered an ephemeral alternative to Stalinism in Maoism. This was rather like finding an alternative to heroin in crack cocaine. New connections were forged between Paris and the paddyfields. Many others found an alternative in Trotskyism.

  The litany can be extended. Jacques Derrida claims nowadays that he has always understood his own theory of deconstruction as a kind of radicalized Marxism. Whether this is true or not, deconstruction acted for a while as a kind of code for anti-Communist dissent in some intellectual circles in Eastern Europe. Michel Foucault, a student of Louis Althusser, was a post-Marxist heretic who found Marxism unpersuasive on questions of power, madness and sexuality, but who continued to move for a while within its general ambience. Marxism provided Foucault with a silent interlocutor in several of his most renowned works. The French sociologist Henri Lefebvre found classical Marxism bereft of a notion of everyday life, a concept which in his hands was to exert a potent influence on the militants of 1968. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu plundered the resources of Marxist theory to produce such concepts as ‘symbolic capital’, while remaining distinctly sceptical of Marxism as a whole. There were times when it was well-nigh impossible to tell whether the finest cultural thinker of post-war Britain, Raymond Williams, was a Marxist or not. But this was more a strength of his work than a fatal ambiguity. The same goes for much of the so-called New Left, in Britain and the USA. The new cultural thinkers were fellow-travellers – but fellow-travellers of Marxism rather than of Soviet Communism, unlike their predecessors in the 1930s.

  Not all of the new cultural thinkers had this fraught relationship with Marxist ideas. But it seems fair to say that much of the new cultural theory was born out of an extraordinarily creative dialogue with Marxism. It began as an attempt to find a way around Marxism without quite leaving it behind. It ended by doing exactly that. In France, the dialogue repeated in a different key an earlier rapprochement between Marxism, humanism and existentialism, centred on the revered figure of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre once famously observed that Marxism represented a kind of ultimate horizon for the twentieth century, which one could ignore but not go beyond. Thinkers like Foucault and Kristeva, however, were now busy going beyond it – but it was this horizon they were striving to surpass, not some other. Nobody was quarrelling with Taoism or Duns Scotus. To this extent, if only negatively, Marxism retained its centrality. It was the thing to bounce off against. If the new cultural thinkers could be sharply critical of it, some of them still shared something of its radical vision. They were, at the very least, Communists in the sense that John F. Kennedy was a Berliner.

  In fact, it was sometimes hard to say whether these theorists were repudiating Marxism or renewing it. To do so, you would need to have a fairly exact idea of what Marxism was in the first place. But had this not been precisely part of the trouble? Was this not one reason why Marxism had won itself such a bad name? Was it not presumptuous to suppose that there was a strict definition of the theory, against which you could measure other versions of it for their degrees of criminal deviancy? It was rather like the old argument about whether Freudianism was a science. Both sides of the quarrel seemed to take for granted exactly what science was; the only question was whether Freudianism fitted into it. But what if psychoanalysis forced us to overhaul our idea of what counted as science in the first place?

  What mattered, surely, were your politics, not how you pigeonholed them. Of course there has to be something specific to a particular body of ideas. At the very least, there has to be something which counts as incompatible with it. You could not be a Marxist and clamour for a return to slavery. Feminism is a fairly loose collection of beliefs, but however loose it is it cannot include worshipping men as a superior species. It is true that there are some Anglican clerics who seem to reject God, Jesus, the virgin birth, miracles, the resurrection, hell, heaven, the real presence and original sin, but this is because, being gentle, infinitely accepting souls, they do not like to offend anybody by believing anything too uncomfortably specific. They just believe that everybody should be nice to each other. But the alternative to dogmatism is not the assumption that anything goes.

  In some quarters, however, Marxism had become just such a species of dogmatism, not least under Stalin and his successors. In the name of Marxism, millions had been slaughtered, persecuted and imprisoned. The question was whether you could loosen the theory up without it falling apart. The answer of some of the cultural pioneers was a guarded yes; the answer of the postmodernists is an unequivocal no. Before long, as Eastern Europe continued on its downhill slope to disaster, most of the pioneers would come round to this conclusion themselves. Just as the radical cultural populism of the 1960s was to pave the way, despite itself, for the cynical consumerism of the 80s, so some of the cultural theory of the time set out to radicalize Marxism, and ended often enough by moving beyond politics altogether. It started out by deepening Marxism, and ended up by displacing it. Julia Kristeva and the Tel Quel group turned to religious mysticism and a celebration of the American way of life. Post-structuralist pluralism now seemed best exemplified not by the Chinese cultural revolution but by the North American supermarket. Roland Barthes shifted from politics to pleasure. Jean-Francois Lyotard turned his attention to intergalactic travel and supported the right-wing Giscard in the French presidential elections. Michel Foucault renounced all aspirations to a new social order. If Louis Althusser rewrote Marxism from the inside, he opened a door in doing so through which many of his disciples would shuffle out of it altogether.

  So the crisis of Marxism did not begin with the crumbling of the Berlin wall. It could be felt at the very heart of the political radicalism of the late 60s and early 70s. Not only that, but it was to a large extent the driving force behind the cascade of provocative new ideas. When Lyotard rejected what he called grand narratives, he first used the term to mean, simply, Marxism. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia occurred at the same moment as the celebrated student uprising of 1968. If carnival was in the air, so was the Cold War. It was not a question of the left first flourishing and then declining. As far as classical Marxism went, the worm was already in the bud, the serpent curled secretly in the garden.

  Marxism had been badly tarnished in the West by the monstrosities of Stalinism. But many felt that it had also been discredited by changes in capitalism itself. It seemed ill-adapted to a new kind of capitalist system which revolved on consumption rather than production, image rather than reality, the media rather than cotton mills. Above all, it seemed ill-adapted to affluence. The post-war economic boom may have been on its last legs by the late 1960s, but it was still setting the political pace. Many of the problems which preoccupied militant students and radical theorists in the West were ones bred by progress, not poverty. They were problems of bureaucratic regulation, conspicuous consumption, sophisticated military hardware, technologies which seemed to be lurching out of control. The sense of a world which was claustrophobically coded, administered, shot through with signs and conventions from end to end, helped to give birth to structuralism, which investigates the hidden codes and conventions which produce human meaning. The 1960s were stifling as well as swinging. There were anxieties about packaged learning, advertising and the despotic power of the commodity. Some years later, the cultural theory which examined all this would itself be at risk of becoming one more glossy commodity, a way of touting one’s symbolic capital. These were all questions of culture, lived experience, Utopian desire, the emotional and perceptual damage wrought by a two-dimensional society. They were not matters which Marxism had traditionally had much to say about.

  Pleasure, des
ire, art, language, the media, the body, gender, ethnicity: a single word to sum all these up would be culture. Culture, in a sense of the word which included Bill Wyman and fast food as well as Debussy and Dostoevsky, was what Marxism seemed to be lacking. And this is one reason why the dialogue with Marxism was pitched largely on that terrain. Culture was also a way for the civilized, humanistic left to distance itself from the crass philistinism of actually existing socialism. Nor was it surprising that it was cultural theory, rather than politics, economics or orthodox philosophy, which took issue with Marxism in those turbulent years. Students of culture quite often tend to be politically radical, if not easily disciplined. Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness is a deeply subversive affair.

  In any case, art and literature encompass a great many ideas and experiences which are hard to reconcile with the present political set-up. They also raise questions of the quality of life in a world where experience itself seems brittle and degraded. How in such conditions can you produce worthwhile art in the first place? Would you not need to change society in order to flourish as an artist? Besides, those who deal with art speak the language of value rather than price. They deal with works whose depth and intensity show up the meagreness of everyday life in a market-obsessed society. They are also trained to imagine alternatives to the actual. Art encourages you to fantasize and desire. For all these reasons, it is easy to see why it is students of art or English rather than chemical engineering who tend to staff the barricades.