After Theory

by Terry Eagleton

  Despite the torrent of ideas to which both periods gave birth, they shared a deep suspicion of human reason. Modernism reacted to a top-heavy Victorian rationalism by turning to the exotic, the primitivist, the archaic and unconscious. Truth was to be felt in the guts and genitals, not in the head. Animal spontaneity was the latest cerebral experiment. For all its self-conscious modernity, it was a period rife with myth and sour with blood and soil. A figure like D. H. Lawrence, with his celebration of the dark gods, is exemplary here. We would be blown backwards into the future by gazing on the archaic images of the past, a past which resembled Utopia in its absolute non-existence.

  The 1960s also turned to cults of happy mind-blowing, along with bogus forms of the primitive and oriental. A glazed innocence stalked abroad. Intellectuals delivered erudite lectures on the value of pure mindlessness, while ageing hippies danced naked in Hyde Park. Schizophrenics were heralded as harbingers of a new form of consciousness. Men and women believed fervently in expanding the mind, but more with dope than with doses of Virgil. In both cases, it was sometimes hard to distinguish between creative challenges to reason, and plain old-fashioned irrationalism. Did you need a whole new kind of consciousness, or was consciousness itself the problem? Was logic a ruling-class conspiracy? ‘We do not want to destroy kapital [sic] because it is not rational,’ announced Jean-Franc,ois Lyotard, ‘but because it is.5 In both periods, there was a flight from the intellect to the simple rural life or the cloudy depths of the unconscious, to tropical islands, concrete poetry, raw sensations or psychedelic visions. Reflection was the problem, not the solution.

  The 1960s and 70s witnessed a great deal of highly sophisticated theory; but a lot of it, ironically, was fascinated by what escaped theorizing altogether. On the whole, it valued what could not be thought more highly than what could. What was needed was a theory beyond theory. If concepts belonged to the degenerate language of the present, then whatever eluded their clammy grasp might bring us a glimpse of Utopia. Desire, difference, the body, the unconscious, pleasure, the floating signifier: all these things finally baffled theory, to theory’s masochistic delight. To recognize this, however, demanded a good deal of rigorous thought. It took a subtle thinker to explore the limits of thought. Theory was a kind of homoeopathy, using reflection in order to get us beyond it. But this was different from the philistine complacency of the later anti-theorists, whose advice to theorists could be summed up in Richard Rorty’s folksy admonition: ‘Don’t scratch where it doesn’t itch.’

  Finally, what modernism and ‘high’ cultural theory shared in common was their many-sided ambitiousness. Both were prepared to venture into perilous territory, chance their arm and broach issues of ultimate importance. New concepts were forged and new methods elaborated. The explorations of these writers ranged across politics and sexuality, language and culture, ethics and economics, the psyche and human civilization. Today’s cultural theory is somewhat more modest. It dislikes the idea of depth, and is embarrassed by fundamentals. It shudders at the notion of the universal, and disapproves of ambitious overviews. By and large, it can see such overviews only as oppressive. It believes in the local, the pragmatic, the particular. And in this devotion, ironically, it scarcely differs from the conservative scholarship it detests, which likewise believes only in what it can see and handle.

  There is, however, a much deeper irony. At just the point that we have begun to think small, history has begun to act big. ‘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. As the grand narrative of capitalist globalization, and the destructive reaction which it brings in its wake, unfurls across the planet, it catches these intellectuals at a time when many of them have almost ceased to think in political terms at all. Confronted with an implacable political enemy, and a fundamentalist one at that, the West will no doubt be forced more and more to reflect on the foundations of its own civilization.

  It must do so, however, at the very time when the philosophers are arriving hot-foot with the news that there are no such foundations in the first place. The bad news is that the Emperor is naked. The West, then, may need to come up with some persuasive-sounding legitimations of its form of life, at exactly the point when laid-back cultural thinkers are assuring it that such legitimations are neither possible nor necessary. It may be forced to reflect on the truth and reality of its existence, at a time when postmodern thought has grave doubts about both truth and reality. It will need, in short, to sound deep in a progressively more shallow age.

  The inescapable conclusion is that cultural theory must start thinking 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 now embroiled. Before we examine what this might mean, however, we need to draw up a balance sheet of cultural theory’s gains and losses so far.

  4

  Losses and Gains

  For some of its critics, the very idea of cultural theory is a contradiction in terms, rather like ‘fascist intellectual’ or ‘Alabaman haute cuisine’. The whole point of art and literature is their particularity. Works of art and culture are living experiences, not abstract doctrines. They are sensuous, delicate, uniquely individual. Don’t abstract ideas simply kill all this dead? Isn’t a theory of art rather like trying to have a science of scowling or cuddling? You cannot have a science of the individual. Entomologists study insect life, but they would not study a single spider and nothing more. Theory is general, culture is specific. Even if we take culture in a wider sense, to mean the ways in which a group of people make symbolic sense of their situation, we are still talking about their lived experience. And it is hard to see how there can be a theory of this.

  In fact, all talk about art is abstract. Cultural theory is not exceptional in this respect. You can speak of the haunting way in which the tone of the poem shifts from despondency to lyrical exultation, but to do so is to speak in abstractions. The word ‘symbol’ is quite as abstract as the word ‘signifier’. It is just that most people have grown used to the first but not the second. A lot of so-called ordinary language is just jargon which we have forgotten is jargon. ‘Character’ and ‘monologue’ are not jargon any longer, whereas ‘class struggle’ and ‘patriarchal’ still are. ‘Her gracious Majesty the Queen’ is jargon, but not for a British royalist. ‘Secondary carcinoma’ is jargon for hair stylists but not for surgeons. Jargon often enough means ideas you happen not to agree with. A former editor of the Times Literary Supplement declared rather piously that he always put a blue pencil through words like ‘discourse’. For his predecessors in the editorial chair, it was probably words like ‘montage’ and ‘neurotic’. Perhaps for their predecessors it was ‘evolution’ and ‘sociology’.

  In any case, the assumption that all art is vividly particular is of fairly recent vintage. For all its love of the particular, this assumption oddly pretends to be a universal truth. It was only from about the late eighteenth century that art was redefined in this way. Samuel Johnson thought that the particular was tedious and the universal exciting. It is highly unlikely that Virgil, Euripides, Dante, Rabelais or Shakespeare viewed art in this light. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that they had anything like the concept of art which we have today, or in some cases a concept of art at all. The notion of art which we take for granted nowadays was invented only about two centuries ago. Nor has it passed unchallenged. A century or so after its birth, it came under heavy fire from the modernist movement.

  It is true, to misquote George Orwell, that all language is abstract but some language more abstract than others. But this is not necessarily the difference between theory and other ways of talking about art and culture. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and T. S. Eliot, who are not usually seen as ‘theorists’, are sometimes quite as abstract as Jacques Derrida. You can write about the jagged contours of a narrative or the grainy texture of a phrase;
but these are acceptable forms of jargon, as some other kinds of art-talk are not. Indeed, this kind of acceptable jargon is the house-style or patois of contemporary criticism. It is as instantly recognizable from Sydney to San Diego as a crooked finger is to a Freemason. Becoming a literary critic today means learning to be fluent in this sort of language.

  If ‘hermeneutical phenomenology’ counts as jargon, so does the on-the-job language of dockers and motor mechanics. If pig farmers can find lawyers obscure, lawyers can find pig farmers mystifying. Sometimes it is jargon we need, and sometimes ordinary language. We do not mind if the doctor asks us how the old tummy is getting along, but if he were to write ‘Old tummy playing up a bit’ on his clinical notes, our confidence in his professional abilities might take a knock. If an art critic writes that there’s a very nice sort of funny little red thing in the centre of the canvas, we might begin to wonder whether the public resources lavished on her education were really justified. We do not want sailors to talk about that thing you crank the life-boats down with. There are many situations in life when we would feel unhappy if we understood what was being said. ‘A bit to the left, then sort of drift along for a while’ is not quite what we want to hear from air traffic control over our captain’s radio.

  Even so, this hardly excuses a prominent literary theorist perpetrating a sentence like ‘The in-choate in-fans ab-original para-subject cannot be theorized as functionally completely frozen in a world where teleology is schematized into geo-graphy.’ In infant school, breaking up words with hyphens was a way of understanding them better; here, it is a silly affectation which has the opposite effect. This kind of jargon is as much a badge of tribal belonging as the stethoscope trailing ostentatiously from a physician’s pocket. It is not just that sentences like these are incomprehensible to the toiling masses; they are incomprehensible to most of the non-toiling intelligentsia as well. Sometimes, one suspects, they might even be only dimly intelligible to those who produce them. People who write like this are not even interested in being understood. To write in this way as a literary academic, someone who is actually paid for having among other things a certain flair and feel for language, is rather like being a myopic optician or a grossly obese ballet dancer. Whereas rock stars and footballers need ghost writers to make them sound more intelligent and articulate, authors like this need ghost writers to make their prose more stupid and simple-minded.

  Not that all theorists write as wretchedly as this. In fact, some of them – Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson – rank among the great literary stylists of our time. You can be difficult without being obscure. Difficulty is a matter of content, whereas obscurity is a question of how you present that content. It is true that there are some ideas, not least in science, which cannot be adequately simplified. Not all wisdom is simple and spontaneous. ‘The secret of all great art is its simplicity’ is simplistic nonsense. Yet it is possible to write clearly about some esoteric issues, just as some theorists manage with heroic perversity to write esoterically about plain ones.

  There is something particularly scandalous about radical cultural theory being so wilfully obscure. Not because it could reach hordes of the labouring masses if only it used shorter words. It is scandalous because the whole idea of cultural theory is at root a democratic one. In the bad old days, it was assumed that culture was something you needed to have in your blood, like malaria or red corpuscles. Countless generations of breeding went into the way a gentleman could instantly distinguish a sprightly metaphor from a shopsoiled one. Culture was not really something you could acquire, any more than you could acquire a second pair of eyebrows or learn how to have an erection. Civility was what came naturally. Your judgements on Stendhal and Rembrandt were as spontaneous as a sneeze, as instinctive as opening doors for elderly ladies. Theory, which as we have seen was born somewhere in the dense, democratic jungle of the 1960s, thought otherwise. All you needed in order to join in the game was to learn certain ways of talking, not to have a couple of thoroughbreds tethered outside the door. And these ways of talking were in principle open to anyone.

  No layperson opens a botany textbook and shuts it with an irascible bang if they do not understand it straight away. Since art and culture are at least as complex as the life of plants, it would be strange if talk about them were any more instantly comprehensible. Yet a lot of people who are not surprised to find botany hard going are mildly outraged not to be able to understand an account of a sculpture or a novel. And this is for an interesting reason. Art and culture are supposed to deal with ‘human’ questions rather than with ‘technical’ ones – with love, death and desire, rather than with the law of tort or the organic structure of decapods. And we can surely all understand the ‘human’. In fact, this is a fairly dubious distinction. For Aristotle, being human was in a sense a technical affair, as was love for Thomas Aquinas, desire for Sigmund Freud, and as death is for a mortician. And it is not easy to sort out the ‘human’ from the ‘technical’ in the case of art.

  Art, however, seems in principle available to anybody, in a way that knowing about the organic structure of decapods is not. In fact, some essays about decapods are probably a lot easier to read than Joyce’s Ulysses or the poetry of Paul Celan. With modernism, the language of art begins to diverge radically from the language of everyday life, in a way that George Eliot would no doubt have found surprising. People may sometimes have spoken rather like Adam Bede, but nobody ever spoke like Finnegans Wake. With postmodernism, however, the two idioms are drawn closer together: the language of the media and a good deal of culture is once again the language of everyday life. And this reinforces the conviction (itself much older than postmodernism) that art is a matter of common human concerns, and that there is something self-contradictory in talking about common concerns in uncommon language.

  This is obviously a mistake. Questions which are of interest to everyone are not necessarily simple. Lungs and livers are of interest to everyone, but medics discuss them in fairly abstruse ways. They make fine distinctions and portray complex processes of the kind that our everyday language does not require. Moral matters are also of common human concern, but because the question of what it means to live well is a hard one to answer, moral philosophy has had to evolve its specialized forms of speech in order to tackle it. The same goes for talk about neuroses or the political state. As far as neurosis goes, it is interesting that one of the rare bodies of theory to seep down to street level is psychoanalysis. This highly arcane theory, astonishingly, is the common dialect of the street. Terms like ‘ego’, ‘Oedipus complex’, ‘libido’, ‘paranoia’ and ‘unconscious’ have become part of everyday language, in a way that ‘ideology’, ‘commodity fetishism’ or ‘mode of production’ have not.

  Why this is so merits a study in itself. But it may be partly because there is something bizarre and sensational about the language of psychoanalysis whch captures the popular imagination, as there isn’t about the language of Marxism or semiotics. The other striking example of an obscure jargon becoming the common speech of millions is theology. ‘Grace’, ‘sacrament’, ‘Trinity’ and ‘original sin’ are hardly simple terms, but they are certainly everyday ones. Ordinary people have no difficulty in grasping such complex notions if they seem relevant to their lives, just as they have no problem in deciphering complex economics if their wage packets are at stake.

  We are accustomed to issues of general interest being discussed in everyday language. The press is an obvious example. We are also used to issues of minority interest being expressed in specialized language, such as the jargon of pigeon fanciers or sado-masochists. What is more disconcerting is to hear questions of common interest expressed in specialist ways. This is frustrating, since it makes us feel that we ought to be able to understand this language when in fact we don’t. Discussing issues of common interest in specialized ways is not a bad description of the role of the classical intellectual. What has happened in our time is that ‘cul
tural theorist’ has become a new label for what used to be known as the intellectual. ‘Culture’ is now one of the main patches on which we can raise the kind of searching, fundamental questions that the intelligentsia at their best have traditionally voiced.

  This was not always so. Historically speaking, the role of the intellectual has shifted from one patch to another. Intellectuals had to find the sort of specific language in which more general, fundamental issues of humanity could be raised. They were in search of what we might call a meta-language – one through which they could have simultaneous access to questions of politics, ethics, metaphysics and the like. And what this might be has altered from time to time and place to place. Sometimes one academic subject has provided intellectuals with a temporary home, and sometimes another. Sooner or later, they tended to find themselves being rudely evicted and in search of alternative accommodation.

  Once upon a time, it was theology – the so-called queen of the humanities – where the intellectual pitched his tent. Theology conveniently linked ethics, politics, aesthetics, metaphysics, everyday life and ultimate truth. This arrangement came to an end when theology became the queen of the humanities in a rather less reputable sense of the word. For a time, then, it was philosophy which gave the intellectual house room – indeed, it still is in those European cultures for which philosophy has not been reduced to an aridly semantic affair. For the nineteenth century, the obvious place for the intellectual to be was in science. The natural sciences were now the paradigm of human knowledge, with implications far beyond the nature of the physical world. Science spread its influence into ethics, sociology, theology, philosophy, literature and the like, and so was the kind of busy crossroads where the intellectual could take up home. If Voltaire and Rousseau were typical intellectuals of the eighteenth century, Darwin and Huxley played that role to perfection in the century that followed. But the nineteenth century also saw the rise of the so-called man of letters, whose task was to move between a number of specialized fields of knowledge, judging them from a broadly moral, socially responsible, humanistic standpoint. This kind of well-informed dilettante had to be proficient in more than one subject if he or she was to earn a living as a reviewer. The nineteenth century also witnessed the growth of the new disciplines of sociology and anthropology, which promised to provide meta-languages of a kind.