After Theory

by Terry Eagleton

  Students of chemical engineering, however, are in general better at getting out of bed than students of art and English. Some of the very qualities which attract cultural specialists to the political left are also the ones which make them hard to organize. They are the jokers in the political pack, reluctant joiners who tend to be more interested in Utopia than trade unions. Unlike Oscar Wilde’s philistine, they know the value of everything and the price of nothing. You would not put Arthur Rimbaud on the sanitation committee. In the 1960s and 70s, this made cultural thinkers ideal candidates for being inside and outside Marxism simultaneously. In Britain, a prominent cultural theorist like Stuart Hall occupied this position for decades, before shifting decisively into the non-Marxist camp.

  To be inside and outside a position at the same time – to occupy a territory while loitering sceptically on the boundary – is often where the most intensely creative ideas stem from. It is a resourceful place to be, if not always a painless one. One has only to think of the great names of twentieth-century English literature, almost all of whom moved between two or more national cultures. Later, this ambiguity of position was to be inherited by the new ‘French’ cultural theorists. Not many of them were French in origin, and not many of those who were were heterosexual. Some hailed from Algeria, some from Bulgaria, and others from Utopia. As the 1970s wore on, however, quite a few of these erstwhile radicals began to come in from the cold. The passage towards the depoliticized 80s and 90s had been opened.

  3

  The Path to Postmodernism

  As the countercultural 1960s and 70s turned into the postmodern 80s and 90s, the sheer irrelevance of Marxism seemed all the more striking. For now industrial production really did seem on the way out, and along with it the proletariat. The post-war boom faded in the face of intensified international competition which forced down rates of profit. National capitalisms were now struggling to stay on their feet in an increasingly global world. They were less protected than before. As a result of this slackening in profits, the whole capitalist system was forced to undergo a dramatic make-over. Production was exported to low-wage spots in what the West fondly likes to think of as the developing world. The labour movement was bound hand and foot, forced to accept humiliating restraints on its liberties. Investment shifted away from industrial manufacture to the service, finance and communications sectors. As big business became cultural, ever more reliant on image, packaging and display, the culture industry became big business.

  Yet from Marxism’s own standpoint, the irony was plain. The changes which seemed to consign it to oblivion were ones it was itself in the business of explaining. Marxism was not superfluous because the system had altered its spots; it was out of favour because the system was all the more intensively what it had been before. It was plunged into crisis; and it was Marxism above all which had given an account of how such crises came and went. From Marxism’s own viewpoint, then, what made it look redundant was exactly what confirmed its relevance. It had not been shown the door because the system had reformed itself, leaving socialist criticism superfluous. It had been turfed out for exactly the opposite reason. It was because the system looked too hard to beat, not because it had changed its spots, which caused many to despair of radical change.

  The enduring relevance of Marxism was most evident on a global scale. It was not so obvious to those Eurocentric critics of the theory who could only see that the Yorkshire coal-mines were closing and the Western working class shrinking. On a planetary scale, the inequalities between rich and poor have continued to widen, as The Communist Manifesto had foreseen. As it also predicted, there is growing militant disaffection on the part of the world’s poor. It is just that whereas Marx had looked for such disaffection to Bradford and the Bronx, it is to be found today in the souks of Tripoli and Damascus. And it is smallpox, not storming the Winter Palace, that some of them have in mind.

  As for the disappearance of the proletariat, we should recall to mind the etymology of the word. The proletariat in ancient society were those who were too poor to serve the state by holding property, and who served it instead by producing children (proles, offspring) as labour power. They are those who have nothing to give but their bodies. Proletarians and women are thus intimately allied, as indeed they are in the impoverished regions of the world today. The ultimate poverty or loss of being is to be left with nothing but yourself. It is to work directly with your body, like the other animals. And since this is still the condition of millions of men and women on the planet today, it is strange to be told that the proletariat has disappeared.

  In the heyday of cultural theory, then, the forces which would help to undo the left were already at their deconstructive work within it. What looked like its moment of insurgency was already the dawn of a political downturn. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were already looming ominously over the horizon. In a decade or so’s time, nobody would actually have disproved Marxism, just as no spacecraft had ever travelled beyond the edges of the universe to establish that God was not lurking there. But almost everyone now began to behave as though Marxism was not there, whatever they thought about the status of the Almighty.

  Indeed, with the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellites, Marxism had quite literally disappeared from a whole sector of the globe. It was not so much answered as out of the question. You no more needed to have an opinion on it than you did on crop circles or poltergeists. In the brittle, avaricious Western world of the 1980s, it was less false than irrelevant. It was a solution to a set of questions which were no longer even on the agenda. Like the Loch Ness monster, it would make no difference even if it were true. You could continue to cultivate it on the side, as a harmless quirk or endearingly eccentric hobby, but it was not really the kind of thing to air in public unless you had a peculiarly thick skin or a pronounced masochistic streak. The earlier generation of thinkers had been post-Marxist in the sense of both distancing and drawing upon it; the new generation was post-Marxist in the sense that David Bowie is post-Darwinist.

  This was a curious situation. For you did not have to be a Marxist to recognize that Marxism was not just a hypothesis which, like the extraterrestrial origins of crop circles, you could believe or disbelieve at will. It was not in the first place a hypothesis at all. Marxism – or, to put it within a wider context, socialism – had been a political movement involving millions of men and women across both countries and centuries. One thinker has described it as the greatest reform movement in human history. For good or ill, it has transformed the face of the earth. It is not just a cluster of intriguing ideas, like neo-Hegelianism or logical positivism. Nobody ever fought and died for logical positivism, though it may have sparked the odd inebriated scuffle in senior common rooms. If neo-Hegelians may occasionally have been propped against the wall and shot, it was not for being neo-Hegelians. In the so-called Third World, socialism had found a welcome among the wretched of the earth, who were not quite so eager to clasp semiotics or reception theory to their bosom. Now, however, it looked as though what had started life as an underground movement among dockers and factory workers had turned into a mildly interesting way of analysing Wuthering Heights.

  The period when cultural theory was riding high displayed one peculiar feature. It seemed to mix politics and culture in equal measure. If there was civil rights and the peace movement, there was also sexual experiment, heightenings of consciousness and flamboyant changes of lifestyle. In this, the 1960s resembled nothing quite so much as the nineteenth-century fin de siécle. The closing decades of the nineteenth century were an astonishing blend of political and cultural radicalism. It is the period of both anarchism and aestheticism, The Yellow Book and the Second International, decadence and the great dock strike. Oscar Wilde believed in both socialism and art for art’s sake. William Morris was a Marxist revolutionary who championed medieval art. In Ireland, Maud Gonne and Constance Markievicz moved easily between theatre, the women’s movement, prison reform, Irish Republicanism and
the Parisian avant-garde. W. B. Yeats was poet, mystic, political organizer, folklorist, occultist, theatre director and cultural commissar. In this extraordinary period, the same figures can be seen dabbling in Theosophy and demonstrating against unemployment. There were underground movements of socialist homosexuals. You could be enthralled by symbolism and syndicalism at the same time. Dope and diabolism were quite as plentiful as feminism.

  Something of this heady brew was inherited by the 1960s. Both periods were marked by utopianism, sexual politics, spiritual slumming, imperial wars, gospels of peace and fellowship, pseudo-orientalism, political revolutionism, exotic art-forms, psychedelic states, returns to Nature, the unleashing of the unconscious. In fact, in some ways the 1960s was the tamer epoch – an age of love-ins and flower-power rather than of fin-de-siécle Satanism, more angelic than demonic. Towards the end of this period, it was the women’s movement which forged the deepest links between the global and the personal, the political and the cultural. And some of this was bequeathed to later, postmodern times, which is to say to the next fin de siécle. Culture was a language which faced both ways, towards the personal and the political simultaneously. The same idiom could encompass anti-psychiatry and anti-colonialism.

  Culture had been among other things a way of keeping radical politics warm, a continuation of it by other means. Increasingly, however, it was to become a substitute for it. In some ways, the 1980s were like the 1880s or 1960s without the politics. As leftist political hopes faded, cultural studies came to the fore. Dreams of ambitious social change were denounced as illicit ‘grand narratives’, more likely to lead to totalitarianism than to liberty. From Sydney to San Diego, Capetown to Tromso, everyone was thinking small. Micropolitics broke out on a global scale. A new epic fable of the end of epic fables unfurled across the globe. From one end of a diseased planet to the other, there were calls to abandon planetary thinking. Whatever linked us – whatever was the same – was noxious. Difference was the new catch-cry, in a world increasingly subject to the same indignities of starvation and disease, cloned cities, deadly weapons and CNN television.

  It was ironic that postmodern thought should make such a fetish of difference, given that its own impulse was to erase the distinctions between image and reality, truth and fiction, history and fable, ethics and aesthetics, culture and economics, high and popular art, political left and right. Even so, while the brokers and financiers were drawing Huddersfield and Hong Kong ever closer, the cultural theorists were struggling to wedge them apart. Meanwhile, the End of History was complacently promulgated from a United States which looks increasingly in danger of ending it for real. There would be no more important world conflicts. It would become clear later that Islamic fundamentalists had not been paying sufficient attention when this announcement was broadcast.

  ‘Cultural politics’ had been born. But the phrase is deeply ambiguous. There had long been a recognition in radical circles that political change had to be ‘cultural’ to be effective. Any political change which does not embed itself in people’s feelings and perceptions – which does not secure their consent, engage their desires and weave its way into their sense of identity – is unlikely to endure very long. This, roughly speaking, is what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci meant by ‘hegemony’. Socialist artists from the Bolsheviks to Bertolt Brecht spoke in briskly macho terms of dismantling the middle-class citizen and constructing the New Man in its place. A whole new kind of human being was needed for the new political order, with altered sense organs and bodily habits, a different kind of memory and set of drives. And it was the task of culture to provide it.

  Mao’s grotesque cultural revolution had learned this lesson badly, cynically using ‘culture’ as a weapon in an internal power-struggle. Some anti-colonial leaders, however, had learned the lesson well: colonialist culture had to be ditched along with colonialist rule. There was no point in simply replacing wigged and robed white judges with wigged and robed black ones. But they did not imagine that culture could be a substitute for social transformation. Irish nationalists were not just fighting for green mail boxes rather than red ones. Black South Africans were not just fighting for the right to be black South Africans. There was a great deal more at stake than so-called identity politics.

  There were movements like feminism, for which culture in the broad sense of the word is not an optional extra. On the contrary, it is central to feminism’s political demands, the grammar in which they are framed. Value, speech, image, experience and identity are here the very language of political struggle, as they are in all ethnic or sexual politics. Ways of feeling and forms of representation are in the long run quite as crucial as childcare provision or equal pay. They are a vital part of the project of political emancipation. This had not been quite so true of traditional class politics. Mill workers in Victorian England might rise at dawn to study Shakespeare together before work, or keep precious transcripts of their working lives and local culture. But cultural activity of this kind was not integral to the struggle for better pay and conditions, in the sense that a struggle over sexist imagery is integral to feminism.

  There were also, however, forms of cultural politics which divorced questions of experience and identity from their political contexts. The point was not to change the political world, but to secure one’s cultural niche within it. At times, cultural politics seemed to be what you were left with when you had no other kind of politics. In Northern Ireland, for example, a conflict between Catholics and Protestants, in which the latter had enjoyed a gerrymandered majority for decades, was gentrified as a question of respectful relations betwen two ‘cultural traditions’. Unionists who only a few years previously had been shouting ‘Kick the Pope!’ and ‘Burn the Taigs!’1 were suddenly defending British power in Ireland in terms of margins, vibrant minorities, cultural pluralism. In the United States, ethnicity sometimes just meant minorities within the United States itself, rather than the millions throughout the world doomed to a wretched existence by the system the USA spearheaded. It meant domestic culture rather than international politics. Abroad was still something of an esoteric concept for the USA, despite the fact that it had devoted considerable energy over the years to subduing various annoying bits of it.

  ‘Culture’ is a slippery term, which can be either trivial or momentous. A glossy colour supplement is culture, and so are the images of emaciated Africans it offers to our eye. In Belfast or the Basque country, culture can mean what you are prepared to kill for. Or – for the slightly less zealous – die for. It can also be a squabble over the merits of U2. You can be burnt to death because of culture, or it can be a question of whether to wear that rather fetching Pre-Raphaelite-style shirt. Like sex, culture is the kind of phenomenon which it seems one can avoid underrating only by overrating. In one sense it is what we live by, the act of sense-making itself, the very social air we breathe; in another sense it is far from what most profoundly shapes our lives.

  There are, however, plenty of excuses for overrating the importance of culture in our time. If culture began to be more crucial to capitalism in the 1960s, it had become well-nigh indistinguishable from it by the 1990s. This, indeed, is part of what we mean by postmodernism. In a world of film-actor Presidents, erotically alluring commodities, political spectaculars and a multi-billion-dollar culture industry, culture, economic production, political dominance and ideological propaganda seemed to have merged into a single featureless whole. Culture had always been about signs and representations; but now we had a whole society which performed permanently before the looking-glass, weaving everything it did into one vast mega-text, fashioning at every moment a ghostly mirror-image of its world which doubled it at every point. It was known as computerization.

  At the same time, culture in the sense of identity had grown even more pressing. The more the system unfolded a drearily uniform culture across the planet, the more men and women aggressively championed the culture of their nation, region, neighbourhood or religion
. At its bleakest, this meant that the narrower culture grew at one level, the more it was spread thin at another. Blandness found its response in bigotry. Rootless advertising executives jet-setted in the skies over those for whom not sharing the same piece of sky as themselves meant to be hardly human.

  Capitalism has always pitched diverse forms of life promiscuously together – a fact which should give pause to those unwary postmodernists for whom diversity, astonishingly, is somehow a virtue in itself. Those for whom ‘dynamic’ is always a positive term might also care to reconsider their opinion, in the light of the most dynamically destructive system of production which humanity has ever seen. But we are now witnessing a brutally quickened version of this melt-down, with the tearing up of traditional communities, the breaking down of national barriers, the generating of great tidal waves of migration. Culture in the form of fundamentalism has reared its head in reaction to these shattering upheavals. Everywhere you look, people are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to be themselves.

  This is partly because other people have abandoned the notion of being themselves as an undue restriction on their activities.

  Fundamentalism is formidably hard to budge – which should warn us against assuming that culture is endlessly malleable while Nature is always fixed. This is another dogma of postmodernists, who are perpetually on the watch for those who ‘naturalize’ social or cultural facts, and so make what is changeable appear permanent and inevitable. They seem not to have noticed that this view of Nature as unchangeable has itself changed rather a lot since the days of Wordsworth. Living as they apparently do in a pre-Darwinist, pre-technological world, they fail to see that Nature is in some ways much more pliable stuff than culture. It has proved a lot easier to level mountains than to change patriarchal values. Cloning sheep is child’s play compared to persuading chauvinists out of their prejudices. Cultural beliefs, not least the fundamentalist variety which are bound up with fears for one’s identity, are far harder to uproot than forests.