Terry Eagleton, After Theory
I think a bullet-point list of statements may well have been an alternative way of presenting a lot of this work, so fast and furious were they flung out. Trying to cover the what/why and wherefore of all Western contemporary thought in the first forty pages just creates a blur of opinion that you can't react to. Your only choice is to go with the flow, assuming the statements are correct, because before you have had a chance to stop, assimilate and react you have already met another vast, swingeing statement in the next sentence. Qualifying all the assumptions he makes would be an impossible task, unless you fancy taking a lot longer and a forensic line by line analysis of each and every field of study he refers to.
So, taking what he says with a pinch of salt... In the first chapter, he broadly sets out the idea that a great generation of thinkers has been and gone since the Second World War, and we are left with scrapping over the bones of what remains, but not thinking up anything new, apart from analysing Jack Nicholson's toe nail clippings. While he doesn't exactly want to 'live in interesting times', he recognizes that the turbulent times through the 1940's, feeding into the socially climatic '50's and '60's, caused a revolution in the way we look at the world and deal with one another. Maybe, he thinks, a new generation of 'gurus' will appear to create a new wave of thinking, but its pretty clear that he thinks the big stuff has all been covered, and he hungers for the old clarity of modernist truth and linear cause and effect - although he can be pretty disparaging about people who pretend to practice them today ie. politicians and corporate execs. He reserves his most vitriolic statements for the characteristics of post modernism.
As the 'big' ideas of modernist theory gave way to post-modernism, coupling with rampant capitalism, he see the loss of power of broad social movements and the creation of a world where it is required to attempt to be an individual, but it is impossible to do so. In striving to move away from a collective identity, we lose the power of group support and so become marginalised, voluntarily. I do agree with that, and I think the examples of such are everywhere - from the big, serious aspects such as a lack of cohesive labour power to defend adequate pay to the current geek fashion - big 1970's NHS specs couldn't be more in vogue. (En vogue?) No American TV or film represents the middle class successful football jock as the good guy - its not John Wayne who's the hero anymore. It is aspirational to be the quirky outsider. Take the Twilight vampire thing as your perfect example - teenage angst writ large against the whole of society.
That might really start to annoy Eagleton actually... an essay entitled "After Theory and its contemporary relevance to vampirism".
I'm running out of steam - from a barrage of statements about the cause and effect of post-colonial nationalism on Marxist theory, the impact of Derrida, the rise of neo-ethnicity versus capitalism... blah blah, the validity of which I struggle to verify, I agree with his gist of what he is saying. And yet, I struggle to find a conclusion. He has presented a view on past events, a perspective I tend to agree with. "We have achieved affluence without fulfilment". But where do we go from this?
I have been trying to boil down all the content to one or two questions, and (I think) I remain unsatisfied as to this: What can we draw from the conclusion that this period of High Theory is over? Have these theories had the impact that he praises them so highly for? If they have, is the world such a good place now? If they haven't, what has stopped them from having the impact that he thinks they should have had? And if they haven't had such a big impact, are they all that important in the end anyway?
Confusion reigns supreme (for me, anyway) - I feel my education has let me down in understanding what he wrote. I have never come across the theory he is talking about. Is that my fault or the system? Am I a coke snorter or a oboe listener?
I think a bullet-point list of statements may well have been an alternative way of presenting a lot of this work, so fast and furious were they flung out. Trying to cover the what/why and wherefore of all Western contemporary thought in the first forty pages just creates a blur of opinion that you can't react to. Your only choice is to go with the flow, assuming the statements are correct, because before you have had a chance to stop, assimilate and react you have already met another vast, swingeing statement in the next sentence. Qualifying all the assumptions he makes would be an impossible task, unless you fancy taking a lot longer and a forensic line by line analysis of each and every field of study he refers to.
So, taking what he says with a pinch of salt... In the first chapter, he broadly sets out the idea that a great generation of thinkers has been and gone since the Second World War, and we are left with scrapping over the bones of what remains, but not thinking up anything new, apart from analysing Jack Nicholson's toe nail clippings. While he doesn't exactly want to 'live in interesting times', he recognizes that the turbulent times through the 1940's, feeding into the socially climatic '50's and '60's, caused a revolution in the way we look at the world and deal with one another. Maybe, he thinks, a new generation of 'gurus' will appear to create a new wave of thinking, but its pretty clear that he thinks the big stuff has all been covered, and he hungers for the old clarity of modernist truth and linear cause and effect - although he can be pretty disparaging about people who pretend to practice them today ie. politicians and corporate execs. He reserves his most vitriolic statements for the characteristics of post modernism.
As the 'big' ideas of modernist theory gave way to post-modernism, coupling with rampant capitalism, he see the loss of power of broad social movements and the creation of a world where it is required to attempt to be an individual, but it is impossible to do so. In striving to move away from a collective identity, we lose the power of group support and so become marginalised, voluntarily. I do agree with that, and I think the examples of such are everywhere - from the big, serious aspects such as a lack of cohesive labour power to defend adequate pay to the current geek fashion - big 1970's NHS specs couldn't be more in vogue. (En vogue?) No American TV or film represents the middle class successful football jock as the good guy - its not John Wayne who's the hero anymore. It is aspirational to be the quirky outsider. Take the Twilight vampire thing as your perfect example - teenage angst writ large against the whole of society.
That might really start to annoy Eagleton actually... an essay entitled "After Theory and its contemporary relevance to vampirism".
I'm running out of steam - from a barrage of statements about the cause and effect of post-colonial nationalism on Marxist theory, the impact of Derrida, the rise of neo-ethnicity versus capitalism... blah blah, the validity of which I struggle to verify, I agree with his gist of what he is saying. And yet, I struggle to find a conclusion. He has presented a view on past events, a perspective I tend to agree with. "We have achieved affluence without fulfilment". But where do we go from this?
I have been trying to boil down all the content to one or two questions, and (I think) I remain unsatisfied as to this: What can we draw from the conclusion that this period of High Theory is over? Have these theories had the impact that he praises them so highly for? If they have, is the world such a good place now? If they haven't, what has stopped them from having the impact that he thinks they should have had? And if they haven't had such a big impact, are they all that important in the end anyway?
Confusion reigns supreme (for me, anyway) - I feel my education has let me down in understanding what he wrote. I have never come across the theory he is talking about. Is that my fault or the system? Am I a coke snorter or a oboe listener?
