After Theory

by Terry Eagleton

  It is here that the essence of the classical intellectual is to be found. Intellectuals were not simply narrow specialists. Indeed, a snap definition of intellectuals might be that they are the opposite of academics. Jean-Paul Sartre deemed a nuclear scientist to be an intellectual only if he or she had signed a petition against nuclear testing. Intellectuals were concerned with the bearing of ideas on society and humanity as a whole. Because they were engaged with fundamental social, political and metaphysical questions, they had to be adept in more than one academic arena. What academic label, for example, could be pinned on writers like Raymond Williams, Susan Sontag, Jurgen Habermas, Julia Kristeva or Michel Foucault? There is no obvious term to describe the kind of thinkers they are, which is one reason why the rather vague word ‘theory’ floated into existence. And the fact that their work cannot easily be categorized is a central part of its significance.

  Yet there was a clear danger of amateurism here. As knowledge grew more complex and technical, there was a need for thinkers who could shake off their scholarly myopia and address some unsettling questions to society as a whole. Indeed, some of these questions concerned the very forces which were creating this division of intellectual labour in the first place. Yet in a world of jealously compartmentalized knowledges, where was such a figure to stand? And what would he or she have to say that would be of relevance? Would they not have to stand so far back that their speech sank to an inaudible murmur? How could a discourse which assaulted the division of intellectual labour itself be intellectually legitimate?

  There were, in short, fewer and fewer vacancies for sages, prophets, peripatetic moralists, belle-lettrists, cracker-barrel philosophers and Meaning-of-the-Universe merchants. This was in one sense an advance. It was a relief to be hectored no longer by the authoritarian rant of men like Thomas Carlyle, or patronized by the bland generalities of a Matthew Arnold. But the situation was also highly convenient for a social order which had no particular eagerness to be fundamentally challenged. Intellectuals now had to find some way of launching such challenges without falling back into the blithe amateurism of the gentleman scholar on the one hand, or capitulating to the short-sighted scholars on the other. They were caught between dons and dilettantes, at ease with neither. They were too scornful of traditional academic specialisms for the dons, but their language was too technical for the dilettantes. And they were too politically involved for either camp to feel comfortable with.

  From the late nineteenth century onward, the role of the intellectual came to pass more and more to the humanities. There were several reasons for this transition. In a world dominated by science and commerce, the humanities were being pushed increasingly to the margins; but this lent them the powerfully distancing perspective on the social order which was not so available to those in the thick of its commercial, scientific and technological interests. Ironically, then, it was their growing superfluousness in a philistine society which lent the humanities a new kind of spiritual centrality. It was just that, for much the same reasons, they were unlikely to be attended to.

  Besides, the humanities, or ‘culture’, was one place where the crisis of modernity as a whole was most sensitively registered. Culture was about civility, community, imaginative creation, spiritual values, moral qualities, the texture of lived experience, all of which were under siege from a soulless industrial capitalism. Science, philosophy and sociology all seemed to have capitulated to this barbarous order. Philosophy appeared too fascinated by the logical distinction between the phrases ‘nothing matters’ and ‘nothing chatters’ to take much interest in changing the world. Moral thought assumed that enlightened self-interest was the driving force of human life. Sociology investigated society as it was, not as it might be. It looked as though culture, faute de mieux, was left holding the buck.

  Now that religion was on the wane, culture seemed the only forum where one could still raise questions about fundamental ends and values, in the midst of a society impatient with such airy-fairy notions. If culture could be critical, however, it was partly because of its increasing irrelevance. It could be permitted its toothless dissent. Many of its solutions to contemporary woes were backward-looking, patrician and intolerably high-minded, which served to underline its pathos. Like religion, it was often enough valued in theory but disregarded in practice. Culture was what you tipped your hat to on the way to the bank. It was therefore just the place for the intellectual – a figure who retained a certain venerable spiritual aura, but whom nobody took very seriously when it came to working out where to locate the new sewage plant. Like culture, intellectuals were inside and outside society at the same time. They had authority but not power. They were the secular clergy of the modern age.

  But there was a more positive reason for the growing appeal of culture to the intelligentsia. If they needed to avoid the kidgloved gentleman-scholar on the one hand and the horny-handed specialist on the other, culture seemed to be just the way to do it. On the one hand, no concept could be more general. In fact, one of its embarrassments was that it was hard to know what it left out. It ranged all the way from the rarefied peaks of art to the humdrum valleys of everyday life. Chopin was culture, and so was double-entry book-keeping. On the other hand, culture was becoming an increasingly specialist set of pursuits – no longer just an abstract idea but a whole industry, which demanded some toughly analytical investigation. If culture could pronounce on the quality of social life as a whole, it could also come up with detailed accounts of working-class hair-styles or the strategies of Expressionism. It combined scope and specificity. If it had the open texture of a social concept, it also had the close-grainedness of an aesthetic one. As such, it had a natural allure for intellectuals, not least because it now seemed hard to raise the kind of questions which concerned them from within an increasingly co-opted politics, economics, sociology and philosophy. The intellectual, accordingly, became the cultural theorist. Culture was left holding the baby partly because those around it had cut and run.

  The sense that there was something self-contradictory about the idea of cultural theory, however, would not go away. It was all very well to intellectualize about politics or economics, since these seemed to be properly impersonal matters. As such, they lent themselves to a clinical, dispassionate treatment. Culture, however, was the very home of value, passion, sensuous experience, more concerned with how the world felt than with how it was. It was not the kind of thing to be cerebral and cold-blooded about. Intellectuals had long been seen in Anglo-Saxon cultures as desiccated, buttoned-down life-deniers, but also as sinisterly robotic and remote. One thinks of the spooky opening music of the TV show Mastermind, as opposed to the jolly student jingle of University Challenge. There is something spine-chilling about the intellect. A history of Western rationalism has severed it from the emotions, leaving it menacingly frigid and unfeeling. Intellectuals are the thin-lipped Robespierres of Anglo-Saxon nightmare. Would a theorist even recognize an artistic emotion, let alone have anything to say about it?

  Yet the popular image of intellectuals is in fact hopelessly confused. If they are censured as cold-hearted, they are also denounced as passionately partisan. Indeed, from a conservative point of view they combine the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, they turn a stonily distancing gaze on the customs and pieties dear to traditionalist hearts; on the other hand, they are associated with rancour, polemic and partisanship. If they are steely-eyed and grim of visage, they are also wild-haired and comically shambolic. As such, they are an odd mixture of clowns and clinicians, to be mocked as much as feared.

  The contradiction, however, is only apparent. It is just because intellectuals seek to examine customs and pieties, rather than complacently take them for granted, that they are stirred to clamour for social change. Detaching yourself from received pieties like the need to slap down hard on trade unionists goes along with a passion for a society in which working people are treated less as disposable commodities. Radical intellectuals are not with
out passion, just without conservative passions. If you try to look dispassionately at the overall structure of society, you might well end up being fired by the conviction that it stands in need of a major overhaul. The dispassionate and the partisan are not necessarily at loggerheads. Popular prejudice is right to see the classical intellectual as both together, even if it has precious little idea why.

  It is odd to dismiss cultural intellectuals as cerebral, emotionally anaemic creatures when they are to be found at work these days on madness, fantasy, sado-masochism, horror films, eroticism, pornography and schizoid poetry. Some people find these topics trashy, but only seriously bizarre people find them tediously cerebral. In any case, studying flower imagery in Alfred Tennyson is not exactly a Dionysian pursuit. What the critics of such cultural theory miss is its sheer excitement. It is this, above all, which has attracted generations of students to it, along with the belief that it raises fundamental questions which are too often ducked by conventional criticism. Critics of theory sometimes complain that its devotees seem to find theory more exciting than the works of art it is meant to illuminate. But sometimes it is. Freud is a lot more fascinating than Cecil Day Lewis. Foucault’s The Order of Things is a good deal more arresting and original than the novels of Charles Kingsley.

  The assumption that theory is valuable only if it illuminates works of art is an interesting one. Somewhere behind it lurks the puritanical conviction that anything which is not useful, which has no immediate cash-value, is a form of sinful self-indulgence. Everything from thinking to love-making must justify its existence before some grim-lipped tribunal of utility. Even our thoughts must be rigorously instrumental. There is no recognition here of Bertolt Brecht’s desire that thinking might become ‘a real sensuous pleasure’. Unless thinking is directly tied to doing, it is worthless. It is hard to see how you could justify astronomy on these grounds. The political left has its own version of this philistine pragmatism, in the assumption that ‘theory’ must always be directly geared to ‘practice’. Gazing at a Jackson Pollock is permissible only if it makes a tangible contribution to the emancipation of the working class.

  It is true that theory can powerfully illuminate works of art. (Though some of those who pretend to regard this as its sole justification in fact doubt that it can.) But it can also be richly illuminating in its own right. Not a single branch of cultural theory – feminism, structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, semiotics and the like – is in principle confined to the discussion of art, or actually began life there. This, for some of its critics, is quite enough to disqualify it. They forget that this is also true of much so-called traditional criticism. (‘So-called’, because the narrow conception of criticism as purely ‘aesthetic’ is not in fact traditional at all. Our current ideas of the aesthetic are themselves of recent vintage. Criticism began life in ancient society as rhetoric, which was always diverse in its uses and political in its effects.) It is true that in a social order which urgently needs repair, theory must indeed be harnessed to practical political ends. But we would know that a social order had improved in this respect when we no longer felt the compulsion to justify our thinking at the bar of utility. We would then be able to think for its own sake, without feeling the neurotic impulse to apologize for it. We would see that Freud, for example, is worth reading for his own sake, not just to throw light on Where the Wild Things Are.

  Cultural theory is in the habit of posing what one might call meta-questions. Instead of asking ‘Is this poem valuable?’ it asks ‘What do we mean by calling a poem good or bad?’ Instead of asking whether the novel has an implausible plot, it asks itself what a novel is anyway. Instead of asking whether the clarinet concerto is slightly too cloying to be entirely persuasive, it inquires about the material conditions which you need to produce concertos in the first place, and how these help to shape the work itself. Critics discuss symbols, whereas theorists ask by what mysterious process one thing can come to stand for another. Critics talk about the character of Coriolanus, while theorists ask how it comes about that a pattern of words on a page can appear to be a person.

  None of these meta-questions need replace straightforward critical questions. You can ask both kinds of question together. But theory, in its unassuming way, is unsettled by the way in which conventional art criticism seems to take far too much briskly for granted. It moves too fast and self-assuredly, refusing to push questions far back enough. It has the air of appearing to know all kinds of things that we are actually unsure about. In this sense, theory is less dogmatic than conventional criticism, more agnostic and open-minded. It wants to take fewer preconceptions casually for granted, and to scrutinize our spontaneous assumptions as far as it can. Inquiry, of course, has to begin somewhere. In principle, it is possible to push the question back ad infinitum. But received ways of talking about culture are rather too precipitous in what they take as read.

  From this viewpoint, non-theorists look remarkably lacking in curiosity. Though they may have been studying, say, prose fiction for years, they never seem to have paused to ask themselves what prose fiction actually is. It would be like caring for an animal for years without having a clue whether it was a badger, a rabbit or a deformed mongoose. This is not to assume that there is only one answer, or even any satisfactory answer at all, to the question of what fiction is. It is just to propose that the question is worth asking.

  One might begin to answer it by pointing out that fiction is a kind of writing in which you can neither lie, tell the truth nor make a mistake. You cannot lie in fiction, because the reader does not assume that you are intending to be truthful. ‘Once upon a time, there was a little girl called Goldilocks’ is not true, but it is not a lie either. ‘Oh no, there wasn’t’ is not a relevant riposte, even though it is a true one. Lying means stating what is false with an intention to deceive, and nobody is out to con us that Goldilocks really existed. ‘Refreshes the parts that other beers can’t reach’ is not true, but neither is it a lie, since nobody is expected to take such a palpable exaggeration literally. ‘Once upon a time, there was a little girl called Goldilocks’ can always be rewritten: ‘I invite you to imagine a fictional world in which there was a little girl called Goldilocks.’ Even if there did happen to be a little girl called Goldilocks, who actually did meet up with three bears, this would not affect the fictional status of the story. The story is not there to give us factual information, but to deliver what one might call a moral truth. The fact that this truth in the case of ‘Goldilocks’ is fairly trivial and blatantly ideological -don’t tamper with other people’s private property, even if they are hairy, irascible and waddle along on four legs – makes no difference to this fact.

  In another sense, to be sure, fiction can be truer than real life, which sometimes gets things hopelessly confused or just plain wrong. It was obtuse of real life to have Byron die of a fever in Greece rather than be felled by a bullet in the fight for Greek independence. It was careless of history to allow the quintessentially Victorian Florence Nightingale to linger on well into the twentieth century, or to allow Robert Maxwell to slip gently into the ocean and escape public disgrace. Art would have handled all of these things much more proficiently.

  In another sense, however, fiction is incapable of telling the truth. If an author breaks off to assure us that what she is now asserting is actually true – that it really, literally happened – we would take this as a fictional statement. Novelists and short-story writers are like the boy who cried wolf: they are condemned to be perpetually disbelieved. You could put the statement in a separate footnote and sign it with your initials and the date, but this would not transfer it from fiction to fact. The subtitle ‘A Novel’ is enough to ensure that. In his novel Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann pauses to pay homage to a real-life individual, a man whose actual existence we might well take his word for. But there is still nothing to stop us from choosing to take this reference fictionally. Even if a novel states actual facts, it does not somehow become truer. Once
again, the fact that we know this is a novel ensures that we do not scrutinize these statements for their truth-value, but take them as part of some overall rhetorical design. Novels do not exist to tell us that the loris is a slow-moving nocturnal primate or that Helena is the capital of Montana. They mobilize such facts as part of a moral pattern.

  It is hard for fiction to make mistakes, because one of the invisible instructions which accompanies it is: ‘Take everything said here as intended.’ If an author makes Napoleon an adolescent girl, we assume that this is not just the result of shockingly negligent educators. If she consistently misspells Napoleon’s name, we assume that this, too, has some kind of symbolic significance. If she misspells his name only once or twice, we might well assume that this is a typo, and so no part of the literary text itself. Fiction, in short, is an ideal form for those with only a fragile grasp of the factual world. Nobody can unmask their ignorance. This is one reason why there is an intimate bond between otherworldly intellectuals and creative writers, who occasionally inhabit the same body.