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After Theory

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Terry Eagleton's After Theory was hailed as philosophically serious and important on arrival and is destined to be far more popular that anything he has written before. It's not the first book to be titled After Theory, but it is the first book to take on the pretentions of `high theory', especially as articulated through postmodernism and cultural studies, explain its claims, evaluate them and offer alternative ideas and projects in plain language and with lots of excellent humour. With three or four stand alone one-liners on most pages and ideas concretized with examples from popular culture (as well as Aristotle, the Book of Isaiah, Shakespeare and Marx) and ordinary life, it is a rollicking good read and a welcome corrective to the laborious Derridean obscurantism that some still mistake for wisdom.

Eagleton is happy to concede that high theory has entrenched some useful if not original insights such as the ideas that human beings are about desire and fantasy as much as reason, that ordinary life is an important focus of critical attention and that seriousness and pleasure are not necessarily separate. But he also argues that it has a disabling tendency towards the valorisation of the experiences of elites and the disregard for the experiences of ordinary people. He is deeply skeptical about, say, an Indian academic moving between Oxford and Harvard who celebrates cosmopolitanism and hybridity as the vanguard of post-coloniality while saying nothing about the children sewing Nike shoes in Delhi. He is equally skeptical about academics who reject the idea of progress without rejecting dental anesthetics. And he shows that post-modern arguments are very easily deployed by overtly reactionary agendas. He explores the attraction of postmodern arguments about liminality and diversity to reactionary Ulster academics. Some reactionary Afrikaaner academics have made very similar use of postmodernism.

But the essence of Eagleton's critique goes deeper and is more interesting than his attacks on the pompous narcissism of Theory. He argues that postmodernism is a symptom of capitalism and not, as it claims, critical theory. Postmodernism celebrates the non-normative and sees redemption in diversity and transgression. Eagleton's point is that `the non-normative has become the norm...the norm is now money'. `Money', he notes, `is utterly promiscuous' and infinitely adaptive without any opinions of its own. Body piercing and Kwanza and sado-masochism are all just niche markets. They pose no threat to capital. And while capitalism has invented or exacerbated social divisions and exclusions when alliances with local elites are to its advantage it is, in principle, `an impeccably inclusive creed, it really doesn't care who it exploits...Most of the time it is eager to mix together as many diverse cultures as possible, so that it can peddle its commodities to them all...It thrives on bursting bounds and slaying sacred cows. Its desire is unslakeable and its space infinite. Its law is the flouting of all limits.'

Eagleton argues that the rise of the global anti-capitalist movements has shown that thinking globally is not the same as being totalitarian and develops a range of arguments against the postmodern critique of its own caricature of radical politics. For example he observes that conviction is not the same as authoritarianism and truth is not the same as dogmatism. One can be passionately democratic and committed to the truth that experiences differ. He argues for a radicalism that gives ontological priority to experience of the poor and seeks to enable collective action to sub-ordinate the market to democratic control.

Once one has learnt the jargon of high theory it is quite easy to prick its wildly over inflated balloons. But Eagleton goes further and shows that it is entirely possible to return to questions that matter. He develops stimulating and important meditations on virtue, suffering, death, politics and revolution. But his consideration of these questions is primarily ethical with the result that the hard political questions about strategy are not taken on.

Omissions are inevitable, but the book does have one obvious failing. Eagleton makes much of Hardt and Negri's argument that the poor have an ontological privilege when it comes to rebellion because they incarnate the failure of the system and so have less delusions about it and less of a stake in the system. But he ignores Hardt and Negri's warnings about anti-Americanism. Eagleton's scathing contempt for American consumerism and fundamentalism is persuasive and his argument that these are two, mutually dependent, consequences of the same ethical and political failure to respect the dignity of ordinary people is very interesting. But he completely ignores the radical America that Howard Zinn's history records and takes no account of the genuine popularity of radicals like John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie and, in the current era, Bruce Springsteen. This omission gives Eagleton's account of America something of the feeling of a very English caricature.

After Theory is not written for a non-specialist audience. Slavoj Zizek and Frank Kermode are wildly enthusiastic about it. But it will be particularly appreciated by people whose encounters with `high theory' have been intimidating rather than enlightening. It proves the validity of Nietzsche's dictum that "Those who know they are profound strive for clarity: those who would like to seem profound...strive for obscurity." Hopefully, After Theory will prove to be one of many new books that seek to explore important philosophical questions in a spirit vastly more democratic than the narcissistic obscuratism of high theory.

I picked up this book after it had been mentioned on the Chicago NPR station as being hailed as 'critical bomb' being dropped on critical theory. This it was not.

Eagleton's work--at least all that I have read--is always lucidly written and adorned with insights of wide-breadth and importance. This book is not an exception. It is, however, not a book that seems to me likely to be read for eternity.

What I enjoyed most about was its fireside wisdom quality. In a sense, this book resembles a series a letters from your mentor about academic work, its potential, failings, and excesses, and some words about his view of life in general.

Thus, the claimed philosophical importance of the work is an exaggeration attached for pushing the work forward for publishing. It is by no means a definitively new alternative course for critical theory. It is nevertheless an enjoyable book full of numerous worthwhile insights.

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 give 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.

Out with postmodernism's "anything goes"; in with "objective" morality.

Eagleton argues that postmodernism and cultural theory fail to provide much help in moving society toward the good. He argues, contra pomo and cultural theory, that a "grand narrative"--if carefully crafted and based on morality--can help promote progressive societal change.

Eagleton's guide for this task is Aristotle (and neo-Aristotleans such as Alasdair MacIntyre). He wants to argue that a human essence exists, that a notion of a human essence need not imply naturalism and oppression of some by others, and that socialism is the best way for people to fulfill their human essence.

I think he is right. Unfortunately, this book fails to make a very strong case for this. I was disappointed in this book not because of Eagleton's goals (I fancy myself an Aristotlean and a socialist) but because he could have done so much more in this book than he did. I wish that he had substituted more hard thinking for the plentiful superficial cleaverness found in this book.

Often the the book seemed written in haste and without much care. Many points are repeatedly restated and Eagleton often fails to provide good arguments for his points. Often I found it hard to even tell exactly what he was arguing.

Too often Eagleton relies on quips rather than arguments to make his points. And most of these quips are, at best, mildly funny.

Eagleton seemingly is unaware of much relevant philosophical literature and, so, I'm afraid that his book with contribute little to the forging of a solid post-postmodernist theory. As far as I can tell, much of his argument presumes the existance of a "fact/value dichotomy." But for decades much interesting work has been written that shows acceptance of this dichotomy leads to uninteresting results and needless conclusions.

As far as I can tell, his argument in favor of "objective" morals is, basically, "I think they are important." He is silent about how exactly we are going to come up with a list of what characteristics make up the human essence. He is vague when he talks about the possibility of different cultures having different notions of a human essence.

I agree with those who find this book preaches to the converted. In this case, the radical (as opposed to the liberal) left. I remain skeptical of all such world-changing agendas, but if you're needing a sharp rejoinder to the capitalist hegemony that permeates even this electronic screen you're reading, then this book's a sensible collection of somewhat scattered thoughts on the need for kindness, humility, and idealism. Getting back to the roots of Marx rather than Marxism, and the socialist imperative to assist what Eagleton updates to be "reciprocal self-realization", he argues that cultural theory must revive itself through an embrace of Aristotle's ethics of flourishing, and that freedom and autonomy can be achieved by attending to others' needs rather than our own, as capitalism demands.

Of course, as with many works in both philosophy and critical theory, how this is to be practically accomplished cannot be found in these lively if self-congratulatory pages that take on the current Bush administration, the selfish and hypocritical psuedo-Christian contigent, and those pursuing profit so that, as Eagleton notes in an aside that seems to be more true each day, capitalism can appropriate our very senses. Even if this is more inspiration than information, Eagleton, by his use of examplars as disparate as George Best, Lady Macbeth, Mick Jagger, the anawim of the book of Isaiah, and especially Lear on the heath makes his points engagingly and wittily. I noticed a strong anti-Americanism permeating nearly every page, especially as the book went on, but his postscript assures readers that he only means those in charge right now, not the rest of us presumably much better educated and more sensitively altruistic!

The brisk first hundred pages, taking on the high and low points of what has come to be the currently pre-eminent power of critical theory were, for me, the most insightful. After this, his journey into philosophy, while nearly understandable and almost cogently clear (by comparison with most theorists), wandered into more rarified territory. I recommend his short book--nearly an elegy--on Marx as a companion to this; it's a bit of a shock to read 227 pages that preach the end of theory after his primer on Literary Theory: an Introduction aided many of us two decades ago in plodding our way through the muddled theorists with whom so many of my tenure-grasping professors and ambitious classmates were smitten. I disagree with his inclusion of some of these theorists as clear explicators of academic prose. On the other hand, his put-downs of scholarly obfuscation prove welcome. If only all scholars wrote with such verve.

After decades commenting on as well as leading the lefty and tenured vanguard, Eagleton keeps up with impressive stamina with the current zeitgeist, and he's not winded yet. While this book, again, will not likely convince anyone who is not already sympathetic to the socialist-humanist approach, it is worthwhile, if a little too reliant on a flow of snappy and snarky rejoinders. But then, how many theorists, right, left, or center, can entertain as they educate?

Although I left this book wondering all the more how Eagleton's mission to retrain the world so as to "take a breather from capitalism" and opt for a socialist rest-cure is in any real sense going to happen, I did learn from his eagerness and his enthusiasm to keep more aware of how we are being led further and further away from the compassion and the moral decency that have characterized true socialists, humanists, and educators.

Eagleton is a very lucid and interesting writer for an intellectual/academic, whether you agree with the guy's central points or not, hence the three stars. This book, as already noted by other reviewers here, is nothing close to being a radical break from theory - it critiques anti-theory (sometimes quite well) and stays pretty much in line with Marxist theoretical lines. What I would like to know is where Terry gets off as acting the oppressed one in academia - in my final undergraduate year and having majored in literature, I can quite truthfully say that his Marxist position is all but canonical (I recommend Harold Bloom to read along side Eagleton...). One gets the impression, particularly since literature itself only makes occasional fleeting and vaguely embarrased appearances in the book (something like a very self-conscious gatecrasher at an exclusive millionaire's cocktail party), that Eagleton, like many other literary theorists, don't actually like literature. Literature as a study seems to be obsessed with proving just how fundamentaly awful literature is, so I would suggest to anyone who actually loves literature as an artform: avoid the study of literature and theory until the pendulum of aesthetic enquiry swings around again...

Terry Eagleton, who introduced a generation of students to deconstructionism and postmodern theory (also called "theory"), now laments the state of the movement he once heralded. While still respecting some of the insights of Derrida, Barthes, Kristeva, and others, Eagleton believes their disciples are in need of correction. The movement is largely spent, focusing on trivialities instead of on deeper questions of truth and justice. So he charts a course "after theory." (He voiced similar criticisms in his 1996 book, The Illusions of Postmodernism.) Unlike postmodernists, who often revel in obscurity, Eagleton writes with lucidity, passion, and pluck. The book should interest philosophers as well as literary critics, since Eagleton addresses classic philosophical topics such as the objectivity and absoluteness of truth, the meaning and moral purpose of human life, and political philosophy.

By "postmodernism," Eagleton means, "roughly speaking, the contemporary movement of thought which rejects totalities, universal values, grand historical narratives, solid foundations to human existence and the possibility of objective knowledge. Postmodernism is skeptical of truth, unity and progress, opposes what it sees as elitism in culture, tends toward cultural relativism, and celebrates pluralism, discontinuity and heterogeneity." This perspective provides scant resources for the perennial issues of philosophy and politics, since it denies the possibility of finding a philosophically satisfying worldview (or metanarrative.) But Eagleton believes that the crisis of international terrorism against the West means that it must reflect on its own foundations, a notion postmodernists abhor as "modernistic." Eagleton sometimes strongly indicts the deficits of postmodern theory. "It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals, and foundations, and superficial about truth objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is a rather large slice of human existence to fall down on." Indeed.

Cutting against the postmodern grain, Eagleton argues persuasively for objective and absolute truth. He rightly notes that the fallibility of some truth claims does nothing to undermine the category of truth itself. Although he does not put it this way, postmodernists often confuse the metaphysics and the epistemology of truth. Truth, on the correspondence view--which Eagleton advocates-- is (or means) "agreement with reality." This is the definition--or metaphysics--of truth. Truth-claims may be defended through a variety of intellectual means; this concerns epistemology. Simply because truth is sometimes elusive does not imply that it is constructed (and deconstructed) by linguistic communities, as postmodernists posit. This matters to Eagleton because "it belongs to our dignity as moderately rational creatures to know the truth." Moreover, political critique and action demand access to reality. If truth "loses it force, then political radicals can stop talking as though it is unequivocally true that women are oppressed..."

This ethical concern lies at the root of Eagleton's desire to reform society according to a particular vision--a mixture of Marxism and Thomism (sans God). Eagleton's Catholic roots are evident when he describes an ideal order in which humans flourish within communities as they realize their own natures and contribute to the realization of others' natures as well. His vision is socialistic--with plenty of acerbic criticisms of capitalism and American conservatism--and post-religious. Nevertheless, he argues that a secular worldview will have difficulty wedding fact and value meaningfully. In one eloquent paragraph, he speaks of Christianity's profound power to give meaning, value, morality, and vision to existence. In spite of that, "It was thus a particular shame that it involved a set of beliefs which seemed to many decent, rational people remarkably benighted and implausible."

There are, of course, "many decent, rational people" (including many contemporary analytic philosophers) who do not find this religious worldview "benighted and implausible" but rational. Truth isn't settled by counting (educated) noses, but one wishes that Eagleton had provided some arguments for denying a worldview he seems ambivalent about abandoning. He sometimes sounds like a God-haunted atheist, given the attention he pays to explicitly biblical themes. Moreover, his notion of a rational human nature and telos with access to objective moral truths may cohere better with a theistic worldview than an atheistic one. Eagleton asks, "What are human beings for? The answer is surely: nothing..." because we are simply ends in ourselves. He takes this to be a brute fact, requiring no explanation. But how can humans have intrinsic moral value as ends in themselves in a materialistic world without design? How do these objective moral values emerge from a purely material matrix of cause and effect? Moral relativism may be more fitting for such a metaphysic. Eagleton advances no real arguments regarding these significant philosophical concerns.

Despite this large lacuna, After Theory deserves a wide readership because of its insistence that truth has yet to succumb to the machinations of postmodernist assassins.

I suspect that the title of Terry Eagleton's After Theory is intentionally uncertain. The book is readable, interesting, insightful, just like Eagleton's numerous other publications. But one gets the distinct impression that he wasn't quite sure what he wanted to do or where he wanted to go when he started working on this one. In fact, there is a stream-of-consciousness feel to much of the book that invites the judgment that Eagleton wrote After Theory as he went along, off the top of his well-stocked head, without much prior planning.

After Theory is oddly disjointed. Chapters are strung together with a bare minimum of connective tissue, using transitions consisting of no more than an off-handed sentence or two. In this respect, the book reminds me of a hurried paper prepared for presentation at a meeting that is scheduled a day or two earlier than the author would like. With some judicious editing, however, After Theory could easily consititute a much more coherent presentation.

Similarly, Eagleton is good at aphorisms. He knows a lot, has read and remembered a lifetime of disparate literature, has an enormously broad range of references, and achieved mature insights that certainly merit sharing. Some of his pages are heavy-laden with four, five six ... truly pithy observations, but they remain disconnected and undeveloped. Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman autodidact who wrote The True Believer, was fond of saying that he thought in aphorisms, and that he had trouble understanding the work of authors whose work could not be reduced to aphorisms. If Hoffer were still around to read After Theory, he'd see that Eagleton, especially in the latter half of the book, has done the reduction-to-aphorisms work for him. It's good material, but mabye Eagleton should have titled his book "What I Have Learned: Make of It What You Will."

Eagleton also seems to have mixed, perhaps irreconcilably contradictory, assessments of recent literary and cultural theory, meaning structuralism, post-structuralism, and post-modernism. He begins by paying homage to the power and originality of writers such as Athusser, Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, and numerous others whose theoertical work came to fruition during the period from 1965 to 1985, generating intellectual ferment in literary studies and the interpretation of culture generally. Eagleton's laudatory observations, however, remain at a very high level of abstraction. When he gets concrete, rather than offering accolades he focuses on the authors' conceptual tunnel vision, over-reaching, internal contradictions, misconstruing the meaning of basic ideas, and the trivializing of genuinely important issues while over-valuing the aesthetics of personal preference. Eagleton may be perfectly serious when he argues that the theoretical frameworks and perspectives promulgated during the intellectual excitement of the mid-'60's to the mid-'80's are of enduring value. He may really mean it when he says that these points of view enable us to see a good deal of value that we otherwise would miss. But he seems hard-pressed to come up with concrete examples. Even when he expresses indebtedness to Foucault for providing the conceptual wherewithal that made the concluding section of After Theory possible, Eagleton offer no explanation.

The further we get into After Theory, the clearer it becomes that Eagleton regards these recent theoretical developments as, for better or worse, extensions of early Twentieth Century modernism. The first decades of the Twentieth Century, as a result, seem much more theoretically fertile than the period from 1965 to 1985. By giving priority to earlier decades, Eagleton presents subsequent theoretical work as rooted in, and perhaps ancillary to, the emergence and development of modernism early in the last century. In the case of post-modernism, moreover, modernism, as Eagleton sees it, has been perverted into a manifestation of the globalization of capital, with its unmistakable claims that markets are the only sacred institutions and that value is transitory, arbitrary, unsubstantiated, and groundless.

Whatever the merit of recent theoretical work, Eagleton finds the work of Marx and Freud still fresh and conceptually powerful, providing the intellectual wherewithal to understand today's world. Structuralism, post-structuralism, and post-modernism may very well have a contribution to make, but the work of Marx and Freud remains much more illuminating than anything that has come along since they put pen to paper.

I suspect that Eagleton is of an age and temperament that make finding satisfaction in slippery signifiers and excietment in radical anti-foundationalism seem decadent. Such notions have their place, but they have been over-valued, and their effect on efforts to make the miserable world that we share a better home for all of us has been pernicious.

After theory is not Eagleton's best book, but it is a good one. It's good to read something that takes a stand against the self-indulgent triviliazation of important issues that one finds in modern social theory, and tries to find a philosophical basis for social action of a genuinely progressive sort.

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.

When I first read Eagleton's Literary Theory, I thought he was brilliant: knowledgeable and witty. This book has occasional flashes of insight, but is marred by, among other things, grotesque caricatures of pretty much all things American. I find fault with many of the same things that Eagleton belabors, only I can do without the puerile snottiness and strained attempts at eccentric humor. Too much of a screed. Unimpressive.