Terry Eagleton - After Theory

‘Capitalism needs a person who has never yet existed – one who is prudently restrained in the office and wildly anarchic in the shopping mall.’

I’ll be honest, I didn’t finish the whole book and the words above were the last I read up until this point. I felt it was an interesting sentence to leave it on due to its seeming link to my last blog where we discussed cities of excess where the constrained capitalist world go to escape. Maybe these people do exist, and maybe capitalism creates its own consumer?

Anyway, from the first quarter of the book I read, ‘After Theory’ reflects on the state of cultural theory today after the days of the great theorists of our time.  Eagleton talks about how the very subject matter on all levels has been ‘trivialised’ and today all it boils down to is sex, drugs, rock n roll and pop culture.

The great cultural theorists and theories of our time were perhaps so truly ground breaking and influential that they have been re-hashed over and over again to the point of no return.  Some would say that Eagleton is just an ‘old fart’ and not open to any of these new ideas in modern western culture but it seems to me that originality and creativity in a lot of work now comes down to the theological reasoning behind why Lady Gaga wearing a dress made of raw meat is so fundamentally ground breaking in modern society (Seriously, I’ve read this!) I mean, give me a break.

I think we’ve certainly lost site of the importance of theory today and I think it’s largely down to our dependence on celebrity culture (just look and the ratings figures for X Factor and Newsnight for a start).  I was asked (actually, told) to turn the news over once so an unnamed individual could watch the X Factor. When I kindly replied, ‘no’ I was greeted with ‘But who cares what’s happening somewhere halfway across the world?!’ I digress slightly here, but my point is that the general ‘masses’ nowadays don’t seem to give a shit about things that are ‘really’ going on, they need an escape and will go to any lengths to get it. Even if this means twisting theory so that it becomes the ‘unreal’ or the ‘escape,’ and their social life can become the very subject of study.

I’ll certainly continue to read this book. Eagleton’s style of writing is one that I can fall into easily, and his use of simile to allow the reader to grasp a fairly intense subject area is a good one.  

Looking back perhaps Eagleton is slightly hypocritical? He talks and preaches about the re use and distortion of the old theories, but has managed to write an entire book about theories of old and how good they really were. He introduces nothing that new to the area.

Maybe that’s it. Maybe new theorists can only be spawned out of the age they  live in. The great theorists of old came from the back drop of revolutionary times of communism, Marxism, socialism etc.  Maybe the back drop now is ‘gagarism.’

God I hope not….