Cultural Theorists, Start Your Epitaphs

[Dave Monroe]

The New York times
January 3, 2004
Cultural Theorists, Start Your Epitaphs
By DINITIA SMITH
 
DUBLIN — Get the critic Terry Eagleton in the right
mood, and he will sing his song about literary theory
for you. The ditty may seem nonsensical, but just
imagine the round-faced and gray-bearded Mr. Eagleton
singing in a mellow baritone to the tune of "Somethin'
Stupid":

"Nostalgic petit-bourgeois social democrat
subjectivist empiricist,/I saw the light of day," he
sings, ending the verse, "Until I went and spoiled it
all by writing something stupid in New Left Review."

"The song is fiction, ironic," said Mr. Eagleton, 60.
"It reflects a growing desperation." 

Yes, desperation about literary theory, from one of
the most prominent cultural critics around; from a man
whose best-selling academic book "Literary Theory: An
Introduction" (1983) has for two decades been the
classic text that professors assign to give graduate
students an overview of modern literary criticism. 

But now the postmodernist giants — like Jacques
Derrida and Roland Barthes — are over, he says. 

"The golden age of cultural theory is long past," Mr.
Eagleton writes in his new book, "After Theory" (Basic
Books), to be published in the United States in
January. In this age of terrorism, he says, cultural
theory has become increasingly irrelevant, because
theorists have failed to address the big questions of
morality, metaphysics, love, religion, revolution,
death and suffering. 

Today graduate students and professors are bogged down
in relativism, writing about sex and the body instead
of the big issues. "On the wilder shores of academia,"
he writes, "an interest in French philosophy has given
way to a fascination with French kissing." 

His critique goes further. "The postmodern prejudice
against norms, unities and consensuses is a
politically catastrophic one," he writes. Cultural
theorists can no longer "afford simply to keep
recounting the same narratives of class, race and
gender, indispensable as these topics are."

What Mr. Eagleton, one of the few remaining Marxist
critics, wants now is a search for absolutes, for
norms, for answers to what he calls "fundamental
questions of truth and love in order to meet the
urgencies of our global situation." 

[...]

He is unrepentant in his defense of Marxism, which, he
writes, offers the blueprint for a moral society. For
Marx, "questions of good and bad had been falsely
abstracted from their social contexts, and had to be
restored to them again," he writes, adding, "In this
sense, Marx was a moralist in the classical sense of
the word." 

[...]

The Marxist cultural historian Raymond Williams later
became his intellectual mentor and got him a teaching
position. 

[...]

Still, his work is shadowed by Roman Catholicism. Mr.
Eagleton seems to find a confluence between his
interpretation of Marxism and Christianity, in a
shared ethic of cooperativism, and protection of the
poor and the weak. He cites one of Paul's letters to
the Corinthians: "God chose what is weakest in the
world to shame the strong." Morality begins with a
recognition of one's weakness and mortality, Mr.
Eagleton says. He uses the example of King Lear, who
is redeemed only after he has endured the storm on the
heath and understands is own vulnerability. 

Although Mr. Eagleton remains vague about what his
longed-for absolute truths would look like, he writes
that an ethical society can only happen under
socialism, "in which each attains his or her freedom
and autonomy in and through the self-realization of
others."

And he defends Marxists against the familiar litany of
crimes. 

"If you want the most trenchant account of Stalinism
you have to go to Marxism, not liberalism," he said.
"Stalinism wasn't, from our point of view, radical
enough. Long before Tiananmen Square the mainstream
Marxists were saying the Soviet system is a travesty.
You can't build Communism in backward conditions. You
need international support. You need a society with a
liberal democracy. Marx always saw socialism in
continuity with middle-class democracy."

So what is his advice, specifically? "Get out of NATO.
Get rid of capitalism. Put the economy back into
public ownership."

Since 2001, Mr. Eagleton has been a professor of
cultural theory at Manchester University, near where
he grew up. He left Oxford after more than 30 years, a
place he said he hated. In "The Gatekeeper" he refers
to the faculty as "petulant, snobbish, spiteful,
arrogant, autocratic and ferociously self-centered."

Still, Mr. Eagleton became involved with radical
politics there and joined the Socialist Workers Party.
He was known for his exuberant lectures, and organized
an Irish singing group where his song on literary
theory was born.

He said he left "with as much regret as if it were the
day I went in."

Despite his new book, Mr. Eagleton said that the
golden age of cultural theory was not all for naught.
"We provided an important left intellectual core at a
time when other things got more conservative," he
said.

Yet what theorists have forgotten, he said, is the
importance of the system to people's lives. "You need
the satirist and the debunker," he said. "But you need
constructive politics, too."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/03/arts/03EAGL.html

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