On Terry Eagleton's After Theory

Pheeeeeew! This was long! I actually didn’t plan to read the whole book due to design work overload but for some reason I couldn’t stop at some point as I thought it was rather interesting and well written (did totally not expect to enjoy reading this!!!). In his book ‘After Theory’ Terry Eagleton says that we are

                                     ‘living in the aftermath of (…) high theory’

and describes his view on the change of cultural and literary theory over the past 50 odd years. The first half of the book, about the beginning of postmodern theory, although linguistically very well written, to me is somewhat unorganised and all over the place. I think he fails to get to the point and just strings together many statements, he stays too general in my opinion. But I do think that he is very ineloquent and there were many sentences I caught myself smiling or even laughing. For example when he was talking about how the study of the ‘everyday’ has changed in universities:

 

 ‘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.’

 

The second half is much more focused and critical but is (for me) a bit annoying at the same time as he excessively criticises America. As much as I am not a big fan of a lot of things American, I did find it a bit over the top to basically blame America for everything evil and bad in the world. He kind of stereotyped America/Americans which contradicts his opinion early on in the book when he is talking about how bad it is that subjects in university have become trivial and that the students of today write about sex topics, pop culture and stereotypes rather than intellectual, traditional topics such as

                                                                 ‘Structuralism and Marxism’

 

which he says are now no longer

 

                                                                  ‘the sexy topics they were’.

 

There are now so many (new) subjects that one can study, that some of them are plain trivial and of lower class. Subjects of today’s essays have gone from

                                           ‘French Philosophy’ to ‘French Kissing’

. We live in a world where sex sells and ‘what is sexy instead is sex’. I very much agree with him on this. I think that today’s society is simply hyper-sexualised and in some aspects dumbed-down by media and sheer sensory overload. He then says that studying pleasure is pointless and rather unfulfilling as it is like

                              ‘analysing champagne rather than drinking the stuff’

It holds no value. Talking about the invention of new (weird) subjects, I must admit I had to think about some of my friends when I read this. Remember the time when you asked around what someone studies in university? The answer was clear and everyone would know what it means, it was: Medicine, Law, Architecture, Literature, English…pretty straight forward to understand, but most of my friends now study things that I can’t even tell you the name of because it’s one of these fancy new things that have one of these sesquipedalian names that sound like you study to be the next president of a country. And the worst thing is, I don’t think my friends know exactly what they are studying as well. They always say it’s hard to explain. Right. One of my friends studies ‘Gender Studies’, when I talked about this with one of my friends from university, he said that it sounds like my friend is studying how to get laid, I laughed really hard and then thought he was actually right. Eagleton says we need to come back to the big questions, we need to address them and seek change, avoiding stasis. He says it is now wonder that there are not many new great thinkers if the things they study now are as trivial as they have become.     

The main focus of his work however lies in the critique of postmodernism although I must say that this point is also one of the main issues (together with his excessive anti-Americanism) or weaknesses of the text as I think that he actually overlooks the presence of postmodernist thinking in his own work.  For example: He argues that postmodernism or postmodernists reject

‘totalities, universal values, grand historical narratives, solid foundations to human existence and the possibility of objective knowledge’

and that that is the reason why they cannot deal with contemporary politics as they believe that there is no such thing as objectivity, human nature and truth.

 

‘No idea is more unpopular with contemporary cultural theory than that of absolute truth’

 

 For Eagleton that means that the postmodernists have misunderstood the meaning of the notions of objectivity, virtue and truth. He says that their denial of

                                                                ‘absolute truth’

is simply due to their false interpretation of it. For Eagleton ‘absolute’ is not an intensifier, it actually just means

 

                                              ‘shouldn’t be done under any circumstances‘

 

 He explains this with the example of Thomas Aquinas: ‘absolutely wrong’ does not necessarily mean

                                                            ‘very, very wrong’

 

 Aquinas thought rather strangely that lying was absolutely wrong, but not killing; but he did not of course believe that lying was always more grievous an offence than killing. Being of reasonable intelligence, he appreciated well enough that lying is sometimes pretty harmless. It was just that for him it was absolutely wrong.’

‘Absolute truth is not truth removed from time and change. Things that are true at one time can cease to be true at another, or new truths can emerge. The claim that some truth is absolute is a claim about what it means to call something true, not a denial that there are different truths at different times. Absolute truth does not mean non-historical truth: it does not mean the kind of truths which drop from the sky, or which are vouchsafed to us by some bogus prophet from Utah. On the contrary, they are truths which are discovered by argument, evidence, experiment, investigation. A lot of what is taken as (absolutely) true at any given time will no doubt turn out to be false. Most apparently watertight scientific hypotheses have turned out to be full of holes. Not everything which is considered to be true is actually true’

 

 His point seems to be clear but then, as I mentioned before, he does also say something that is actually quite a postmodernist thought. He says that there are no

                    ‘first principles, fixed meanings and self-evident truths’

and even compares these terms with totalitarianism. His analysis of this to me is somewhat similar to the views of the postmodernists he is ranting about. He also thinks that these worldviews are due to a need of the people for security.

‘It is a fear of the unscripted, improvised or indeterminate, as well as a horror of excess and ambiguity‘

But overall I really enjoyed reading this book and like his style of writing, and I did agree with him on many things, some things I did not of course but all in all I was positively surprised and thought it was time well spent.