Home > Notes from the Underground
I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
A rather odd article from Elaine Showalter, reviewing Terry Eagleton's latest cultural theory treatise;"Eagleton linked the rise of theory to revolutionary social change, political militancy, and global struggle... Doing cultural theory (using politics, culture, philosophy, and psychoanalysis in equal measure)... [But] Even Eagleton, in the preface to the second edition of Literary Theory in 1996, conceded that with the collapse of communism in the late 1980s, and the revelations of the Yale deconstructionist Paul de Man's hidden Nazi collaborationist past, the wind had gone out of theory's radical sails."
It's an odd criticism. The term theory covers a multitude of sins; reception theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, post-structuralism and Marxism, to name some of the principal components. It is the last of these that largely describes Eagleton's position and it is certainly true that his work has increasingly suffered from what William Gibson described as the predicament where "everything capitalism said about communism was true. As was everything communism said about capitalism." But that is hardly unique to literary theory and it seems a little unfair to single Eagleton out for criticism on that score.
The greater difficulty was always that Marxism had a rather uneasy relationship with the other components mentioned above. Deconstruction of a text can produce meanings amenable to conservative viewpoints as easily as it can produce meanings amenable to the feminist and Marxist critics that flirted with deconstruction. Eagleton himself furnishes a further example, that Lyotard's postmodernist conception of meta-narratives invalidates the Marxist progressive emancipation. Showalter herself furnishes further examples; that Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis are implicated in the kinds of ideologies deplored by feminism. This rather uncertain ground led onwards to other problems; in particular, the encroachment of cultural theory into the territory of more established and formalised disciplines such as sociology (or for that matter, philosophy or political theory), where its assumption that cultural artefacts were both entirely representative of their culture and indeed deterministic of it seemed more than a little uncertain.
The great shame is that theory did perform a valuable function. The earlier new criticism had treated literature as if it were contained within a hermetically sealed environment, dealing only with the text and the language in it. The result was that literature failed to connect with anything, becoming a set of arid exercises, such as Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity. If nothing else, theory did re-connect literature with something else, allowing rich new meanings to be seen within works of literature (albeit through a feminist or marxist lens). The regret is that theory was never formalised (reception theory in particular was something that could have been studied in much more scientific terms) into something that was either more closely imbricated with philosophy or history and instead sought to change itself into something that foolishly tried to compete with other disciplines instead.Labels: Theory
posted by Richard 10:37 pm
