In the 'Afterword' to his 1983 book 'Literary theory- an introduction', Terry Eagleton wrote
The 1970s, or at least the first half of them, were a decade of
stagflation and social malaise
social hope, political militancy
it died out. The thing had become a joke- e.g Citizen Smith of the Tooting Revolutionary front- whereas Trade Union leaders- like Clive Jenkins- were more and more willing to appear in proprio persona on TV screens or even chat shows. Intellectuals had been disintermediated.
and high theory.
People were getting high. But what they produced wasn't theory. It was paranoid nonsense.
This conjuncture was not accidental: theory of a grand kind tends to break out when routine social or intellectual practices have come unstuck, run into trouble, and urgently need to rethink themselves.
The grand theory that prevailed was that of Hayek & Friedman. Nixon was the first and last avowedly Keynesian President. But 'Prices & Incomes policy' failed once challenged by the Unions. The other big shock to the Left eco-system was that voters had rejected Wilson- who had raised Labour's share of National Income to an unprecedented 83 percent- for Ted Heath. This showed they didn't care about Income or Wealth inequality. They cared about real disposable income. The 'politics of envy' was over. Immigration mattered. Equality did not.
Indeed theory is in one sense nothing more than the moment when those practices are forced for the first time to take themselves as the object of their own enquiry.
That is true of Coprophagy. Theory is only useful if inquires into what Time & superior technology might be able to empirically verify.
There is thus always something inescapably narcissistic about it, as anyone who has run into a few literary theorists will no doubt confirm.
Solipsistic. Narcissus liked what he saw but his curse (the boon his mother had secured for him) was 'not to know himself'.
The emergence of theory is the moment when a practice begins to curve back upon itself, so as to scrutinize its own conditions of possibility; and since this is in any fundamental way impossible, as we cannot after all pick ourselves up by our own bootstraps, or examine our life-forms with the clinical detachment of a Venusian, theory is always in some ultimate sense a self-defeating enterprise.
This wasn't the case in Mathematics or Physics. Brouwer & Weyl & Godel and so forth did useful work which has improved our lives. Literary theory was only important for those who taught that shite. If their discipline attracted bright kids, they had salience. But Literature, History & Philosophy no longer attracted bright students. The ambitious went for PPE- with more econ and less and less politics or philosophy.
Indeed this has been one recurrent motif of what theory has happened since this book was first published. Even so, the late 1960s and early 1970s was a period in which new social forces were consolidating,
they weren't new. What changed was rising affluence and 'life-chances'. Women had more money. The market would cater to women and homosexual DINKs (dual income no kids).
certain global struggles (such as revolutionary nationalism) were intensifying,
Nope. They were becoming gerontocratic, corrupt, and increasingly dynastic.
and a new, more heterogeneous body of students and teachers was flooding into academia from backgrounds which sometimes put them at odds with its governing consensus.
The consensus was that they should be allowed to sleep with their girl friends. But what really mattered was good jobs for them to step into. But this meant that students didn't really want increasing equality. They wanted bigger pay differentials.
Unusually, then, the campuses themselves became for a time hotbeds of political conflict; and this oubreak of militancy coincided in the late 1960s with the first emergence of literary theory.
No. Some guys already doing that stupid shite tried to jump on the bandwagon. Maybe they would be put in charge of a concentration camp in the new Maoist State.
The first pathbreaking works of Jacques Derrida appeared just as French students were gearing themselves up for a confrontation with state power.
They wanted to be able to sleep with their girl friends. Also, there were too many of them and thus only a few of them had a chance to get a good job. Essentially, the French worker and student wanted rapid economic growth to continue while getting a larger share for themselves. Sadly, the 'thirty glorious years' of growth were over by the end of the Sixties. The Arab Sheikh would get rich while the French would have to work hard and use their brains for some useful purpose.
It was no longer possible to take for granted what literature was,
It was no longer possible to pretend Sartre was Voltaire. De Gaulle may have thought otherwise but he was as old as fuck.
how to read it or what social functions it might serve; and neither was it quite so easy to take for granted the liberal disinterestedness of academia itself, in an era when, not least in the Vietnam adventure, the Western universities themselves seemed increasingly locked into structures of social power, ideological control and military violence.
Young people didn't want to get shot in some paddy field. The Western University which defined the coming age was Stanford which seeded Silicon Valley. Disruptive individualism triumphed over entrenched bureaucracies. Ayn Rand was more important than the RAND Corporation.
The humanities in particular depend crucially on some tacit consensus of value between teachers and taught; and this was now becoming harder to achieve.
It depended on trusting that teechur was posh and that some of his poshness would rub off on you. This was clearly no longer the case. Plumbers made more money. Being posh without plenty of money is so not worth it.
What was perhaps most in question was the assumption that literature embodied universal value,
Any 'contract of adhesion' can be said to embody a universal value- by a stupid person. It is obvious, that if you say 'I teach Victorian Literature', what you mean is 'I teach it to those interested in Victorian Literature' not 'everybody should study Victorian Literature.'
and this intellectual crisis was closely linked to changes in the social composition of the universities themselves.
Which was linked to a change in their economic function- viz. to raise general purpose productivity.
Students had traditionally been expected, when encountering a literary text, to put their own particular histories temporarily on ice, and judge it from the vantage-point of some classless, genderless, non-ethnic, disinterested universal subject.
No. They had been expected to pretend to be posh and put in some Greek and Latin quotations to show they had been to the right kind of school. But there was little point maintaining that pretence if plumbers made more money.
This was an easy enough operation to pull off when those individual histories sprang from roughly the same kind of social world;
That was the pretence. But everybody knew that some graduates were born on the wrong side of the tracks.
but it was becoming much less apparent to those from ethnic or working-class backgrounds, or those from sexually dispossessed groups, that these supposedly universal values were in any real sense theirs.
I suppose aristocracy was a universal value. You may only be able to afford cheap plonk but at least you could make a fuss about its terroir in a manner which suggested an ancestral chateau whose cellars were stuffed with rare vintages.
It is no wonder, then, that the Russian Formalists, French structuralists and German reception theorists were suddenly in fashion;
You could pretend that you were so deeply immersed in their thinking that you failed to show, in your essay, that you had actually read the prescribed text.
for all of these approaches 'denaturalized' certain traditional literary assumptions in ways congenial to the academic newcomers.
You could write illiterate shite and still get your sheepskin.
The Formalist doctrine of 'estrangement', invented to characterize the peculiar devices of a poem, could be extended to a critical estranging of the conventions which the academic institutions took complacently for granted.
Infantilization is not estrangement. Universities were about 'neoteny'- prolonging infantile dependence so as to achieve greater cognitive plasticity which was linked to higher general purpose productivity.
Structuralism pressed this project to even more scandalous limits, insisting that both self and society were simply constructs governed by certain deep structures which were necessarily absent from our consciousness.
But which were discoverable mathematically. To appear smart, it was wise to mention Bourbaki. Lesser minds had to settle for Jacques Monod.
It thus struck a devastating blow at the humanist preoccupation with consciousness, experience, deliberated judgement, fine living, moral quality, all of which it placed boldly in brackets.
It was an acknowledgment that University couldn't turn you into a gentleman. For that you needed money.
The idea of a 'science of literature' was suddenly on the agenda,
because everybody was pretending to be sciencey. Since pseudo-science is cheaper to teach, you had more and more PhDs in nonsense.
an enterprise which for the humanists seemed as grotesquely self-contradictory as a science of sneezing.
Sneezing is studied by scientists. LLMs are trained on literature.
The structuralist confidence in rigorous analysis and universal laws was appropriate to a technological age,
only if technology improved in some useful manner.
lifting that scientific logic into the protected enclave of the human spirit itself, as Freud had done somewhat similarly with psychoanalysis.
He discovered that it is more profitable to treat healthy people because they can keep paying from year to year, decade to decade. By contrast treating the genuinely mad was neither profitable nor hygienic. Lunatics tend to take a crap on your couch.
But in doing so it offered, contradictorily, to undermine one of the ruling belief systems of that society, which could be roughly characterized as liberal humanist,
which is what gentlemen who owned a Chateau or two got credit for being. A beggar who quotes Sophocles in between critiquing John Stuart Mill is still just a beggar.
and so was radical and technocratic together.
It was silly. Thatcher & Reagan were the radicals. Mitterrand was forced to do a U turn and follow their path once he found Socialist policies were ruinous to the economy.
Reception theory took the most apparently natural and spontaneous of activities - reading a book - and showed just how many learnt operations and questionable cultural assumptions it involved.
Why bother? Just point out that many people who read books don't have to sit down to pee. How is that fair? Ban dicks immediately! They are raping the environment! That's the message Jane Austen should have gotten across. Fuck you Jane Austen! Fuck you very much!
Much of this rather brash theoretical buoyancy was soon to be dispersed. Theory of this early seventies kind - Marxist, feminist, structuralist - was of a totalizing bent,
unless it was actually bent- i.e. Queer Theory
concerned to put a whole form of political life into question in the name of some desirable alternative. It went all the way down, and thus belonged in its intellectual verve and daring with the insurgent political radicalisms of the day. It was, to adapt a phrase of Louis Althusser's, political struggle at the level of theory;
It was crazy shit. Althusser strangled his wife. Like I said, dicks should be banned.
and its ambitiousness was reflected in the fact that what was very soon at stake was not simply different ways of dissecting literature, but the whole definition and constitution of the field of study.
It was shit. Thus, any shite could be 'studied'.
The children of the sixties and seventies were also the inheritors of so-called popular culture, which was part of what they were required to put in suspension when studying Jane Austen.
When I studied Jane Austen, teacher refused to let us eat our packed lunches in class. I believe, in higher class skools, even masturbation was frowned upon. This was rather unfair because there's a lot of very hard core porn in 'Northanger Abbey'. Anyway, that's the reason Mum insisted I study Econ rather than Eng Lit.
But structuralism had apparently revealed that the same codes and conventions traversed both 'high' and 'low' culture, with scant regard for classical distinctions of value; so why not seize advantage of the fact that, methodologically speaking, nobody quite knew where Coriolanus ended and Coronation Street began
Everybody knew. The former was a play- like Agatha Christie's 'the mousetrap'. The other was a TV series about working class folk ooop north.
and construct an entirely fresh field of enquiry ('cultural studies') which would gratify the antielitist iconoclasm of the sixty-eighters and yet appear wholly in line with 'scientific' theoretical findings?
It didn't gratify parents. They get naches if you qualify as a Dentist or Actuarial Scientist.
It was, in its academicist way, the latest version of the traditional avant-garde project of leaping the barriers between art and society,
that happened when artists, clubbing together with some Manifesto or the other, started selling their work to rich, aristocratic, dudes. Look at the Pre-Raphaelites. As Robert Browning jealously observed, they were making way more money than the poets.
and was bound to make its appeal to those who found, rather like an apprentice chef cooking his evening meal, that it linked classroom and leisure time with wonderful economy.
Except it didn't. In the classroom you pretended to like Finnegan's Wake but it was Robert Ludlum you turned to to while away your leisure hours.
What happened in the event was not a defeat for this project,
it was defeated when students discovered that though you could 'read' English at Uni, there was no similar credential available for masturbation. When I was young, I spent way more time wanking than reading.
which has indeed been gathering institutional strength ever since, but a defeat for the political forces which originally underpinned the new evolutions in literary theory.
The 'political force' was the notion that more graduates would magically raise productivity. Sadly, it didn't. We need plumbers not Pundits.
The student movement was rolled back, finding the political system too hard to break.
Students and workers didn't really want to take over the means of production. They wanted higher material standards of living and more sexual opportunities.
The momentum of national liberation movements throughout the Third World slackened
because liberation had been achieved. That's why things were turning to shit. Smart peeps emigrated to places still ruled by White people. Fanon's Martinique voted to remain part of France.
in the early 1970s after the Portuguese revolution. Social democracy in the West, apparently unable to cope with the mounting problems of a capitalism in severe crisis, gave way to political regimes of a distinctly right-wing tenor, whose aim was not simply to combat radical values but to wipe them from living memory.
Nonsense! Reagan had done very well out of the crazy antics of the students at Berkeley. The right needs the loony left as a bogeyman.
By the close of the 1970s, Marxist criticism was rapidly falling from favour, as the world capitalist system, with its back to the economic wall since the oil crisis of the early 1970s, aggressively confronted Third World revolutionary nationalism abroad,
Nonsense! 'Revolutionary nationalists' were accommodated- if they had oil- or ignored. The good news was that the terms of trade were moving against primary producers. You don't have to intervene in a place which keeps supplying more raw materials for fewer dollars.
and at home launched a series of virulent onslaughts on the labour movement
it had to be brought to heel. The alternative was stagflationary 'stasis'- i.e. becoming like Argentina.
and the forces of the left, along with liberal or enlightened thought in general. As if all this were not enough, the Almighty, evidently displeased with cultural theory, stepped in and picked off Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan.
also, God got Althusser to kill his wife. Still, there were plenty of others to step into their shoes.
What held the fort of political criticism was feminism, which had rapidly come into its own; and it is no accident that this was also the heyday of poststructuralism.
Nonsense! Third Wave Feminism failed in the early Seventies. Like Shulamith Firestone, it was as crazy as a bedbug.
For though post-structuralism has its radical wing, its politics have been on the whole somewhat muted and oblique, and so more in keeping with a post-radical age. It preserves the dissenting energies of an earlier epoch, but combines them with a scepticism of determinate truths and meanings which blended reasonably well with a disillusioned liberal sensibility.
The one guy laughing all the way to the bank was Bernard Henri Levy. His net worth is probably about 200 million dollars.
In fact many of post-structuralism's emphases - a suspicion of semiotic closure and metaphysical foundations, a nervousness about the positive or programmatic, a distaste for notions of historical progress, a pluralist resistance to the doctrinal — merge well enough with that liberal frame of mind.
Which is what I too would have if I had 200 million dollars.
Post-stucturalism is in many respects a much more subversive project than that;
to be subversive, you actually have to subvert something. Standing around with your thumb up your arse isn't enough.
but it fitted well enough in other respects with a society in which dissidence was still possible,
you were also allowed to stand around with your thumb up your arse
but no one had any longer much trust in the individual or collective subject who had once been the agent of it,
Nonsense! They trusted individuals or collectives running big enterprises. Sometimes, this was a mistake.
or in the systematic theory which might guide its actions.
Structural Causal Models matter. Structuralism didn't.
Feminist theory, then as now, was near to the top of the intellectual agenda, and for reasons not hard to seek.
Women be kray kray.
Of all such theoretical currents, it was the one which connected most deeply and urgently with the political needs and experience of well over half of those actually studying literature.
Fortunately Black Women wanted to scratch out the eyes of White women who were busy cashing the pension checks of Dead White Males.
Women could now make a unique, distinctive intervention in a subject which had always, in practice if not in theory, been largely theirs.
But that subject didn't matter at all. Germaine Greer could have been as successful as Clive James. Instead she went down a Feminist rabbit hole. She even suggested that women needed to drink their own menstrual blood. Later, in the Eighties, she did something of a volte face. By then, nobody cared. Thatcher had changed the world. She had bashed Galtieri & Scargill with her handbag. Gorbachev respected her. The Queen was totes not amused.
Eagleton has to pretend to like Feminist theory because he has a dick. This shows his ideological immaturity. He should chop off his own bollocks because dicks are raping Environment too much I say.
The fading popularity of Marxist criticism from the 1970s onwards was the result of
people noticing that everybody wanted to run away from the Soviet Union. It wasn't really a paradise for the workers.
developments in the so-called First World, not in the so-called Second.
A fair point. The industrial proletariat was ageing and shrinking. Skilled workers had zero interest in 'solidarity wages'. Moreover, 'fiscal drag' (i.e. failure to index-link tax allowances) meant they were paying more and more in Income tax. The suspicion was that 'Welfare Queens' or 'Paki' immigrants were living large on the dole.
It stemmed in part from the crisis of global capitalism
There was a crisis of 'mixed-economy' Bretton Woods style Keynesianism. What replaced it was more Hayekian- i.e. Capitalist. Hicks noticed this approvingly. Indians, like Sen, didn't understand that the man had never been a Leftist. But, as a patriot, he supported policies which enabled Britain to defeat Hitler and then rise up economically. Once it got nukes, it was safe.
which we have glanced at already, in part from the criticisms aimed at Marxism by the various 'new' political currents — feminism, gay rights, ecology, ethnic movements and the rest - which sprang up in the wake of an earlier working-class militancy, nationalist insurrection, civil rights and student movements.
These things existed even if there was no 'working-class' to speak of- e.g. Hafizullah Amin's Afghanistan.
Most of these earlier projects had been based on a belief in a struggle between mass political organization on the one hand and an oppressive state power on the other;
first you have to create state power. Afghanistan was too poor to have ever had much of the commodity.
most of them envisaged the radical transformation of capitalism, racism or imperialism as a whole, and so thought in ambitiously 'totalizing' terms.
In other words, a Utopia could be created. Sadly, it turned out that the rich don't actually have a magical money tree. Raise taxes on them and revenue falls. Also Marxian exploitation is impossible if labour is elastic in supply. Raise 'general purpose productivity' and this happens automatically.
Since state power had proved too strong to dismantle,
State power isn't exerted if the cost outweighs the benefit.
so-called micropolitics were now the order of the day.
The Mafia is an example of 'micropolitics'.
Totalizing theories and organized mass politics were increasingly associated with
wedge issues?
the dominative reason of patriarchy or Enlightenment.
penises are a wedge issue. They should be banned. Kant will cry and cry but his bollocks must be chopped off.
And if all theory was, as some suspected, inherently totalizing, then the new styles of theory had to be a species of anti-theory: local, sectoral, subjective, anecdotal, aestheticized, autobiographical, rather than objectivist and all-knowing.
The opposite of a 'totalizing narrative' is the cultivation of a niche market. This may be more profitable if you are a bit shit at narrating. I had originally planned to write a book about a boy wizard who defeats the forces of Evil. Sadly, I am shit at writing. Nevertheless my book about my playing with my wand- if turned into a sexually explicit film- may attract a select audience of perverts.
A new generation of literary students and theorists was born, fascinated by sexuality but bored by social class,
why spend three or four years at Uni? The answer is, 'assortative mating'. Thus, the small town homosexual goes to college to gain access to a wider pool of people like himself. I'd imagine that 'culture studies' graduates with specialist knowledge of Queer Theory or Feminism would be attractive hires for Marketing companies. But this has to do with acquiring a specific sort of 'savoir faire' rather than some ponderous theory.
enthused by popular culture but ignorant of labour history,
a lot of which has to do with the skilled or those of the majority community seeking to keep down the less skilled or the minority
enthralled by exotic otherness but only dimly acquainted with the workings of imperialism.
It was about money and geopolitics. Don't keep a colony which doesn't pay for itself or which has no strategic value.
As the 1980s wore on, then, Michel Foucault rapidly overtook Karl Marx as the doyen of political theory,
because he was genuinely mad and evil. He wasn't faking paranoia or his enthusiasm for the Marquis de Sade.
while Freud, as cryptically re-interpreted by Jacques Lacan, was still riding high.
No. He was a joke. Frazier, on Cheers, is a Freudian psychoanalyst. He is also a loser. Sam took Diane away from him- though he lived to regret it.
The standing of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction proved rather more ambiguous.
He wasn't mad- just silly. Still he and Rene Girard did well enough for themselves.
When this book was first published, that current was much in vogue; today, while still exerting a powerful influence here and there, it is rather less in fashion.
The Clinton era was not favourable to thought. Why fuck your Professor when you can become an intern and put out to POTUS?
The early, breathtakingly original works of Derrida (Voice and Phenomenon, Of Grammatology, Writing and, Difference, Dissemination, Margins of Philosophy), are now, like the pioneering work of the early feminists, some quarter-of-acentury or more behind us.
I suppose, if you didn't study Greek at School both Foucault & Derrida enable you to pick up one or two words- like 'pharmakos' or 'parrhesia' but both were behind the times when it came to Philosophy or Historiography.
Derrida himself continued to turn out much scintillating work in the 1980s and 1990s,
No. By then the French didn't have to pretend the Communist party could ever take power. On the other hand, Kojeve had become a Eurocrat. The trick was to get Germany to pay for the French structural deficit. That is the 'post-structural' problem which has come to bite Macron- Ricouer's disciple- in the ass.
but nothing quite to match the ambition and profundity of these early seminal texts. His writing has become in general less programmatic and synoptic, more varied and eclectic.
Rene Girard stayed on message and acquired a following in Silicon Valley especially amongst lapsed Catholics. Deleuze could have made a better fist of things. Sadly, he had teamed up with Guattari who was low IQ.
In the hands of some of his Anglo-Saxon disciples, deconstruction was reduced to a narrowly textual form ofdiarrhea
enquiry, lending a boost to the literary canon it offered to subvert by roaming ceaselessly over its contents, deconstructing as it went and so keeping the critical industry well supplied with sophisticated new materials.
Only in the sense that coprophagy produces a turd different from the turd it consumed.
Derrida himself has always insisted on the political, historical, institutional nature of his project; but this, transplanted from Paris to Yale or Cornell, tended like the odd French wine not to travel well, and this audacious, iconoclastic thought-form proved easily assimilable to a formalist paradigm.
The good thing about Derrida was that you didn't have to read anything. You could just write nonsense. Look at Gayatri Spivak.
What emerged on the scene in the 1980s, with the so-called new historicism,
i.e. Greenblatt- a good enough writer. Like Eagleton he is interested in the period he writes about.
was a style of historical criticism which revolved precisely on the rejection of all of these doctrines. It was a historiography appropriate for a postmodern age in which the very notions of historical truth, causality, pattern, purpose and direction were increasingly under fire.
It was quite cultured and gentlemanly compared to what some other Professors were producing. Don't forget there is a large middle-brow market for well written books.
The new historicism, which focused largely on the Renaissance period,
which is of intrinsic interest
yoked an epistemological scepticism about assured historical truth to a notable nervousness of grand narratives.
e.g. that the Renaissance led to the Reformation. Catholics are very evil.
History was less a determinate pattern of cause and effect than a random, contingent field of forces, in which causes and effects were to be constructed by the observer rather than taken as given. It was a tangled skein of dispersed narratives, none of which was necessarily more significant than any other; and all knowledge of the past was skewed by the interests and desires of the present.
Nothing wrong in that. It is true enough. Economists had given up on 'causation'. The best they could do was to find 'correlation' or Granger causality.
There was no firm distinction any longer between historical highways and minor footpaths, or indeed any hard-and-fast opposition between fact and fiction. Historical events were treated as 'textual' phenomena, while literary works were regarded as material events.
Okay, that is a bit silly.
Historiography was a form of narration conditioned by the narrator's own prejudices and preoccupations, and so itself a kind of rhetoric or fiction.
There is a long tradition of partisan historiography in the English language. If the prose is good, we don't care. It occurs to me that Eagleton was AJP Taylor's successor- a man of the left who wrote in a manner intelligible to ordinary people like me.
The grand master of the school, Stephen Greenblatt, had moved from the influence of Raymond Williams, of whom he had once been a pupil, to that of Michel Foucault;
after he gave up his infatuation with Maoism and became what he was always meant to be- a haut bourgeois 'maître de pensée' combining great pomposity with greater ignorance.
and this was among other things a shift from political hope to political pessimism which well reflected the changing mood of the 1980s, not least in a Reaganite United States.
Which was a time of optimism for Americans. They won the Cold War and then got the South Africans to give up Apartheid. There was a time when it seemed Russia and China would turn into liberal Democracies.
The new historicism, then, certainly judged the past in the light of the present, but not necessarily in ways which always reflected credit on itself,
because it didn't even try to shoot Reagan.
or in ways about which it was prepared to be self-critical and selfhistoricizing. It is a familiar truth that the very last thing which historicisms are usually prepared to place under historical judgement is their own historical conditions.
The reverse is the case. Greenblatt sees his own work as 'cultural poetics'.
Like many a postmodern form of thought, it implicitly offered as a universal imperative -
this is also what happens when somebody offers to let you suck his dick. It is implicit in such an offer that all beings long to suck the dick of that loser. This is the 'universal imperative' no Prophet has bothered to reveal to an unhappy world.
the imperative, for example, not to universalize - what could be fairly easily seen, from some way off, as the historically peculiar situation of a specific wing of the Western left intelligentisa. Perhaps it is easier in California to feel that history is random, unsystematic, directionless,
because the present offers so much
than in some less privileged places in the world - just as it was easier for Virginia Woolf to feel that life was fragmentary and unstructured than it was for her servants.
Unless they too were mentally ill.
New historicism has produced some critical commentary of rare boldness and brilliance,
No. It is readable but superficial. Nothing wrong with being middle-brow or pretending you like Merlot when all you drink is Dr. Pepper.
and challenged many an historiographical shibboleth; but its rejection of macro-historical schemes is uncomfortably close to commonplace conservative thought, which has its own political reasons for scorning the idea of historical structures and long-term trends.
Surely the reverse is the case? Conservatives want to conserve things. They invoke 'Chesterton's fence'. If a thing exists, there might be some good reason why it does so. We get rid of it at our peril.
Britain's reply to the new historicism was
Blackadder.
the rather different creed of cultural materialism, which - appropriately for a society with more vigorous socialist traditions
Nonsense! Henry George was important. Britain produced nobody of equal stature. Marx was a refugee- not one of us at all.
— displayed a political cutting-edge largely lacking in its transatlantic counterpart.
Georgism is practical. It focuses on Economic Rent- which can be reassigned. 'Exploitation' we will always have with us provided even one enterprise makes a profit.
The phrase 'cultural materialism' had been coined in the 1980s by Britain's premier socialist critic, Raymond Williams,
He lost salience after Wilson lost to Ted Heath. It turned out that the working class cared more about cheap holidays in Franco's Spain than some mad May Day Manifesto.
to describe a form of analysis which examined culture less as a set of isolated artistic monuments than as a material formation,
e.g. the setting up of ITV- called 'a license to print money' at the time.
complete with its own modes of production,
e.g. the Music industry which was making multi-millionaires out of Liverpudlian lads
power-effects, social relations, identifiable audiences, historically conditioned thought-forms.
If you understood that stuff, you could become very rich.
It was a way of bringing an unashamedly materialist analysis to bear on that realm of social existence - 'culture' — which was thought by conventional criticism to be the very antithesis of the material; and its ambition was less to relate 'culture' to 'society', in Williams's own earlier style, than to examine culture as always already social and material to its roots.
Can you make money selling Che Guevara posters? Yes. Do it already.
It could be seen either as an enrichment or a dilution of classical Marxism: enrichment, because it carried materialism boldly through to the 'spiritual' itself; dilution, because in doing so it blurred the distinctions, vital to orthodox Marxism, between the economic and the cultural.
Marxists liked the Opera and the Ballet and believed proles should do so too. But proles preferred the Beatles.
The method was, so Williams himself announced, 'compatible' with Marxism; but it took issue with the kind of Marxism which had relegated culture to secondary, 'superstructuraP status, and resembled the new historicism in its refusal to enforce such hierarchies.
Williams thought England should have a 'common culture'. We want no such thing. Let each man have his own wholly private reason for hating Pakis, Nig-Nogs, Kikes, Catlicks, Paddies, Taffies, Jocks, and Students of all descriptions. As for the Frogs, don't get me started mate.
It also paralleled the new historicism on taking on board a whole range of topics - notably, sexuality, feminism, ethnic and post-colonial questions — to which Marxist criticism had traditionally given short shrift.
Wait till after the revolution. Till then, shut the fuck up.
... it was clear also, as the 1980s moved into the 1990s, that certain embarrassingly large questions which had been put on ice by neo-pragmatism and some strands of post-structuralism, questions of human justice and freedom, truth and autonomy, had stubbornly refused to evaporate
Lets gas on about human rights. Did you know the Taliban has banned mini-skirts? Maybe we should invade Afghanistan. Won't that be a picnic?
Among the more glamorous commodities which postmodern society has on offer is cultural theory itself.
No. What became glamorous was IT & Fintech. Bill Gates became a billionaire at the age of 31 in 1987. Steve Jobs, who was way cooler, had to wait till 1995.
Postmodern theory is part of the postmodern marketplace, not just a reflection upon it.
It was negligible.
It represents, among other things, a way of amassing valuable 'cultural capital' in increasingly competitive intellectual conditions.
Nonsense! Make as much money as Steve Wozniak and you can finance your own Rock festival at the age of 32.
Theory, partly because of its high-poweredness, esotericism, up-to-dateness, rarity and relative novelty, has achieved high prestige in the academic marketplace, even if it stil] provokes the virulent hostility of a liberal humanism which fears being ousted by it.
I suppose there were a few 'celebrity' intellectuals from that stable. But they had something else going for them- e.g. Spivak wearing a sari and shaving her head.
Post-structuralism is sexier than Philip Sidney,
a romantic figure, but not sexy. Walter Raleigh was a real stud.
just as quarks are more alluring than quadrilaterals. Theory has been one symptom in our time of the commodifying of the intellectual life itself, as one conceptual fashion usurps another as shortwindedly as changes in hairstyle.
Back then, I still had hair. Style- not so much.
Just as the human body — along with a good deal else — has become aestheticized in our day, so theory has become a kind of minority art-form,
No. You can make big money running a chain of body building or aerobic or Zumba franchises. Literary Theory may get you tenure- but then you are condemned to teaching illiterate imbeciles who are bound to accuse you of sexual harassment sooner or later.
playful, selfironizing and hedonistic, one place to which the impulses behind highmodernist art have now migrated.
Nope. Those 'impulses' migrated to Hollywood or Madison Avenue.
It has been, among other things, the refuge of a disinherited Western intellect, cut loose
from Mother Church?
by the sheer squalor of modern history from its traditional humanistic bearings,
Latin & Greek & Cardinal Newman's idea of a University?
and so at once gullible and sophisticated, streetwise and disorientated.
just say 'low IQ' and be done with it.
It has too often acted as a modish substitute for political activity, in an age when
political activity was becoming increasingly well-rewarded.
such activity has been on the whole hard to come by; and having started life as an ambitious critique of our current ways of life, it now threatens to end up as a complacent consecration of them.
Wankers can't consecrate shit. Bashing your bishop doesn't make you a bishop.
There is always, however, more than one story to tell. If cultural theory has won itself some prestige,
It hasn't. Some losers got tenure. But then they had to teach crazier and stupider losers. So not worth it. At least Spivak could pretend she was actually teaching very poor tribal people in Birbhum rather than cretins at Columbia.
it is also because it has boldly raised some fundamental questions to which people would appreciate some answers. It has acted as a kind of dumping ground for those embarrassingly large topics nervously off-loaded by a narrowly analytical philosophy,
which turned to shit long ago- as did the entire discipline. Maybe if Grothendieck or Lawvere or some other brainy type had encountered Jean Hypolite's work in the Fifties, something could have come of the 'post-structuralist' movement.
an empiricist sociology
as opposed to one based on fantasy. Capitalists wear top-hats. They are sodomizing the children of the proletariat under the pretext of 'chimney-sweeping'. Donald Trump & Sir Keir Starmer are covering this up.
and a positivist political science.
i.e. one which enables political parties to spend money in places which maximize their chance of victory.
If it has tended to displace political action,
Coz Obama gave up the White House to teach Gramscian Grammatology at Community College- right?
it has also provided a space in which some vital political issues could be nurtured in an inhospitable climate.
Nurtured by useless nutters. This was and is counter-productive.
It has no particular unity to it as a discipline; what, for example, do phenomenology and queer theory have in common?
Phenomenology proves everybody wants to suck your dick.
And none of the methods grouped under literary theory is peculiar to the study of literature; indeed most of them germinated in fields quite beyond it.
There are plenty of good teachers of various types of literature. Some write books which ordinary people can relish.
Yet this disciplinary indeterminacy also marks a breakdown in the traditional division of intellectual labour, which the word 'theory' somehow flags. 'Theory' indicates that our classical ways of carving up knowledge are now, for hard historical reasons, in deep trouble.
If you studied a non-STEM subject, that's true enough. But the solution is to defund credentials in useless shite.
But it is as much a revealing symptom of this breakdown as a positive reconfiguration of the field. The emergence of theory suggests that, for good historical reasons, what had become known as the humanities could no longer carry on in their customary shape.
Yes they could. Some people like literature and some Professors are good at teaching it. The fact that they aren't also good at overthrowing the State and collectivizing the means of production doesn't alter the fact that lots of teachers of Literature provide value for money.
One battle which cultural theory has probably won is the contention that there is no neutral or innocent reading of a work of art.
For the same reason that everybody who looks at me wants to suck my dick. They feel ashamed and run away. It is wholly false to say that people avoid me because I fart incessantly. That's one battle which Socioproctology has won.
Even some quite conservative critics are these days less given to arguing that radical theorists are ideologically skew-eyed whereas they themselves see the work as it really is.
More particularly, if they wrote it themselves. I firmly believe the seventeen volumes of my 'Socioproctogical Investigations' are as exciting and fun to read as the Harry Potter series. Sadly, I myself am unable to see my own work as it really is.
A broad kind of historicism has also carried the day: there are few cardcarrying formalists left around. If the author is not exactly dead,
we hope someone will do a better job of killing him than the dude who stabbed Rushdie.
a naive biographism is no longer in fashion.
we want a biographism which highlights the Vampire slaying role of the subject. Also, some hot lesbian action.
The chancy nature of literary canons, their dependence on a culturally specific frame of value, is nowadays quite widely recognized,
not by publishers. If the thing keeps selling well decade after decade, stick with it.
along with the truth that certain social groups have been unjustly excluded from them.
Or unjustly included in them. Just because I am stupid and lazy do I really have to study nonsense at Uni?
And we are no longer exactly sure where high culture ends and popular culture begins.
If the thing sells for a high price tag but has a limited market it is 'high culture'. If everybody is buying it, it is popular.
Even so, some traditional humanist doctrines die hard, not least the assumption of universal value.
Anyone can assume any universal value- e.g. that everybody wants to suck your dick.
If literature matters today, it is chiefly because it
is still a cheap way to pass the time. Also, you might learn something.
seems to many conventional critics one of the few remaining places where, in a divided, fragmented world, a sense of universal value may still be incarnate;
this is more true of Pizza
and where, in a sordidly material world, a rare glimpse of transcendence can still be attained.
Pizza with a marijuana base?
Hence, no doubt, the otherwise inexplicably intense, even virulent passions which such a minority, academicist pursuit as literary theory tends to unleash.
But my smellier farts unleash passions even more virulent.
For if even this precariously surviving enclave of art can be historicized, materialized, deconstructed, then where indeed is one to find value in a degraded world?
Scripture. Go back to Mother Church. Marxism shat the bed long ago.
The radical would reply that to assume that social life is uniformly degraded, and only culture precious, is actually part of the problem rather than the solution.
The solution is killing kulaks, Capitalists and anybody else who might become a kulak or a Capitalist- i.e. everybody.
This attitude itself reflects a particular political viewpoint, rather than being a disinterested statement of fact. At the same time, the generosity of the humanist's faith in common values must be candidly acknowledged. It is just that he or she mistakes a project still to be carried through - that of a world held politically and economically in common
where pigs can fly around shitting on those prone to turn into kulaks
— with the 'universal' values of a world which has not yet been thus reconstructed.
i.e. our world as opposed to what happens after the dead rise from their graves.
The humanist is thus not wrong to trust to the possibility of such universal values; it is just that nobody can yet say exactly what they would be, since the material conditions which might allow them to flourish have not yet come into being.
Why not just trust in Jesus? That way you can believe you too will be resurrected.
If they were ever to do so, the theorist could relievedly lay down his or her theorizing, which would have been made redundant precisely by being politically realized, and do something more interesting for a change
Like clean toilets. But you can do that here and now. Why wait?
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