Terry Eagleton - What’s Next After Postmodernism?
British literary theorist Terry Eagleton
discusses literary theory in connection to broader political and historical
trends, and the persistence of Marxism. What do culture, art, and theory
express in the current context of crisis, renewed class struggle, and retreat
of postmodernism—and what is their potential role?
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In The Event of Literature (2012), you argue literary theory has been in decline for the last twenty years and that, historically, there has been a strong relationship between shifts in theory and social conflict. Does theory develop its highest point during periods of upheaval?
Literary theory
reached its high point roughly when the political left was in ascendency. There
was a major outbreak of such theory in the period from about 1965 to the mid or
late 1970s, which coincides more or less with the time when the Left was a good
deal more militant and self-confident than it is today. From the 1980s onward,
with the tightening hold of advanced post-industrial capitalism, these
theoretical outgrowths began to yield to postmodernism, which as Fredric
Jameson has remarked is, among other things, the ideology of late capitalism.
Radical theory
certainly didn’t fade away, but it was pushed to the margins, and gradually
became less popular with students. The great exceptions to this were feminism,
which continued to attract a good deal of interest, and post-colonialism, which
became something of a growth industry and has continued to be so.
One shouldn’t conclude
from this that theory is inherently radical. There are many non-radical forms
of literary and cultural theory. But theory as such poses some fundamental
questions—more fundamental than routine literary criticism. Whereas such
criticism may ask, “What does the novel mean?,” theory asks, “What is a novel?”
Theory is also a
systematic reflection on the assumptions, procedures and conventions which
govern a social or intellectual practice. It is, so to speak, the point at
which that practice is forced into a new form of self-reflectiveness, taking
itself as an object of its own inquiry. This doesn’t necessarily have
subversive effects; but it may mean that the practice is forced to transform
itself, having inspected some of its underlying assumptions in a newly critical
way.
In The Ideology of the
Aesthetic (1990), you argue the concept of literature is a recent phenomenon,
one that emerged as a shelter for stable values in uncertain times. But you
also point out that aesthetics has been a form of internalization of social
values as well as a means of visualising utopias and questioning capitalist
society. Does art still play this contradictory role in the present?
Both the concept of
literature and the idea of the aesthetic are indeed politically double-edged.
There are senses in which they conform to the ruling powers and other ways in
which they challenge them—an ambiguity which is also true of many individual
works of art. The concept of literature dates from a period when there was a
felt need to protect certain creative and imaginative values from an
increasingly philistine, mechanistic society. It’s more or less twinned at
birth with the advent of industrial capitalism. This allowed such values to act
as a powerful critique of that social order. But by the same token, it
distanced them from everyday social life and sometimes offered an imaginary
compensation for it. Which is to say that it behaved ideologically... Read more:
http://www.leftvoice.org/What-s-Next-After-Postmodernismread more ideas and debates on LeftVoice
see also
Militarism and the coming wars
Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies - The New School for Social Research
