After Theory

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Critical Realism
Review: Terry Eagleton's book After Theory is fantastic. It details the problems of the aging ideas of postmodernism and critical theory. His views are particularly explosive because they threaten the way many professors have gotten their PhDs. (See other reviews to witness fear.) Also Eagleton literally wrote the book on Literary Theory so his views carry considerable weight. The book is fun and accessible. This book is a must read for anyone interested in Literary Theory. After Theory, though unwittingly, points to the movement of Critical Realism in today's intellectual thought.

Rating:
Summary: Rehabilitating the Left
Review: This book has been somewhat mis-categorized by sellers as literary theory. Chapter 1 covers that ground admirably, and Eagleton's no-nonsense historical tour will be bracingly refreshing to anyone who has studied literature at university in the last twenty years. Of course, he doesn't quite toss out everything from structuralism to postmodernism, but he does probe their limits with his customary humour and flair, and gives a convincing explanation of the academic interest in pop culture that followed them. But all this is merely a prelude. Eagleton's real project here is the recovery of the intellectual Left which, since the 1970s, has been burrowing ever deeper into arcane academic specializations under the banner of "cultural theory", and simultaneously becoming ever more politically remote. As Eagleton puts it, Marxism is now just a mildly interesting way of talking about "Wuthering Heights". This won't do. By and large, cultural theory has been massively evasive on such central topics as Truth, Objectivity, Morality, Virtue and Evil, preferring to take a contingent, relativistic, culturally-informed non-view on the rare occasions when it got around to raising such issues at all rather than just shunning them in embarrassment at the prospect of having to stand for something. But the period when this was more or less acceptable may be coming to an end. The Left, he maintains, has a lot to offer in an age of resurgent far-right extremism - a malady afflicting both the West's enemies and its self-proclaimed defenders. Most of "After Theory" consists of an attempt to rehabilitate the Left - to lure it down from the ivory tower (if not smash its foundations) and to reapply it to those Big Questions. Socialism is offered not only as a system of government, but as probably the only way of really understanding what a human being is. Does Eagleton convince? He puts his case with verve and enthusiasm - even if a little too flippantly at times - but in devoting only 200-odd pages to such a vast topic he can do little more than scratch the surface. He admits as much in the final pages, but is a text which merely gestures towards the topic enough? "After Theory" will probably remind dormant radicals what they used to care about before they became depressed, but it won't convince the conservative morons it needs to. The problem is that it's very difficult to point to working examples of socialism. Marxism shifted to cultural theory partly out of political impotence and mass disenchantment. Nothing has changed on that score, whereas triumphal capitalism is the very air we breath (increasingly polluted as it is). Most people associate socialism with repression, uniformity and an embarrassing class consciousness, whereas capitalism (which has all those traits and more) has cunningly refashioned itself as democratic, libertarian and impeccably inclusive. Everyone is welcome. As Eagleton quips: "It really doesn't care who it exploits." Yes, Terry, but it doesn't much mind who it elevates, either. And while ever capitalism continues to succeed in pitching the dubious but occasionally truthful argument that the next billionaire might very well be you, then thinkers like Eagleton will have a very hard time shifting it. If you lean to the Left anyway, then "After Theory" will make you think about what you've wasted the last 20 years being distracted by, and it just might rekindle your revolutionary spirit. If you lean to the Right, then it's unlikely to change your mind.

Rating:
Summary: Reawakening after Post-Modernity
Review: While Eagleton seems to dismiss theory just because the revolution it might have envisaged actually did not happen (as if a few philosophical works could have been enough to cause it) he nevertheless has the merit of warning against that unfortunate consequence of the misuse of deconstruction that we may call "the bog of indeterminacy." Why has Derrida's crucial notion of "différance" de facto turned into a diffused practice of indifference? Probably because many post-modern intellectuals have grown suspicious of all material and rational distinctions whatsoever. Among the various intellectual habits, there is the one typical of "those who know and distinguish," warned Roger Fowler: let's still try to be among them, repeats Terry Eagleton. Personally, I could not agree more.