Thoughts on Eagleton

As I read through After Theory, I began to wonder a few things about the text and about my response to it – not my calculated, intellectual response to the book, but my visceral, gut reaction to the text. There’s something very appealing about what Eagleton is saying, and I wanted to explore why it is that there’s something so pleasurable about seeing him take potshots at the theoretical talking heads that we’ve been studying throughout this semester. And I think that the answer that I’ve come up with is that Eagleton appeals to me because he is trying to make theory matter again.

I read this book not necessarily as having it out for postmodernism, trying to debunk Derrida or Focucault – but I see Eagleton as appealing to the students of their theories, pleading with them to apply their critical faculties to real problems we endure in our daily lives. He sees postmodernism as reveling in the study of popular culture, sexuality, feminism, and colonized populations without aim for real world repurcussions. I think that his position can be boiled down to the fact that most of postmodern academic study is built around play – a kind of play which is of course intellectual stimulating, but politically and socially de-fanged.  Most of this can be best summed up in the following quote:

Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver.  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…It is also, as we have suggested before, rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions. (101-2)

In essence, we could say that Eagleton doesn’t necessarily have any beef with cultural theory on a fundamental level – but rather has a problem with the way that it is being conducted as of late. I don’t think the methods are at question here, but the ends those methods are moving towards.  It seems that Eagleton puts a finger on the fact that even if academics disregard grand narratives in favor of a kind of postmodern pluralism it will not stop grand narratives from being developed. The grand narrative of Islamic Fundamentalism might be one. And if academics do not play a part in discussing the fundamental issues at play in these grand narratives the narratives will go on nonetheless, and the inevitable promulgation of disastrous political and economic paradigms will, perhaps, go unchecked.

            One of other main questions I had while reading Eagleton’s text is whether or not the ‘absence’ of theorists in the political sphere has some repercussion on the composition classroom. Thinking back to Graff’s text we read earlier in the semester, it would seem that Eagleton might have some critiques of Graff available. I am thinking, in this respect, of Graff’s idea that composition can be taught on any subject. Teachers of composition, whether they employ Graff’s model or not, are increasingly bringing cultural studies and popular culture into the classroom in ways that perhaps form the academics that they will eventually become – ones who, in Eagleton’s words “huddle diligently in libraries, at work on sensationalist subjects like vampirism and eye-gouging, cyborgs and porno movies.”

            I guess the question here is how much of what Eagleton identifies as the deficiencies of theory have permeated, through periphery and cross-doctrinal influence, into others areas of study? Does postmodernism influence all the way down to the composition classroom, where it is now entrenched?

Also, I found a great hour-long lecture online where Eagleton is talking about some similar ideas to the ones he writes about in After Theory. Check it out.