Much like Eagleton let’s get straight into the meat of this one. I however am not going to name drop to the extent that he does (sadly it’s because I don’t know as many as he does). Quite a clever little ploy that one, it’s not only establishing who the players are but for me is reassuring the reader that he knows his stuff, that you’re going to get the full picture of the situation not just the biased ravings of a lunatic.
Eagleton talks about the incorrect inferences that can be made about the title, that we are in a time past theory, that there is no going back. However the situations a little more après skithan post theory – the fun’s not done for the day it’s just time to remove one ridiculous get-up slide into another one and get our kicks in a different way.
He suggests that the meaning of theory is a ‘reflection on our guiding assumptions’. To me this suggests that the theory we’re dealing with here is more reactive, more commentary than theory not proposing what will come, but looking at why something has happened. Does the event have to happen before one of the names droppees can form a theory on it? It’s quite like architectures inherent link to cultural movements, much more reactive than trend setting (although the time taken to get a building built has a large influence on the architectural situation.)
The opening chapter talks a great deal about sex, and how sex has replaced most of the ism’s (socialism, capitalism etc etc) as the in vogue subject of study, and how the acceptance of sexuality as an accepted field of academic study is an achievement of cultural theory. Personal y I think it’s a great victory for capitalist society’s mantra – sex sells. The theorists are reacting again, of course it has to be an accepted area of study, cultural theory wouldn’t count for much if they weren’t talking about the major cultural aspects of the time, and right here right now the capitalist world wants sex and lots of.
The great shame of this book is it was probably published about 10 years too early. There’s a clear yearning for the past and the world events that shaped the cultural theory of the mid-20th century. Eagleton calls this a time of high theory and laments on how the younger generation of academics have little of ‘world shaking political importance’ in their living memory. Well that sure isn’t the case now what these guys have is a front row seat to the end of the world as we know it. I think it’s a pretty safe assumption that we’ve been grabbed by the short and curlies in the vice like grip of a period of high theory. I suspect that Mr Eagleton and his contemporaries are,even as I write this, glued to a giant bank of TV’s trying to understand the cluster fuck that is the eco-political situation the world finds itself in, frantically trying to formulate a coherent ism to sum up the general mood of despair engulfing the world.
Overall I like Eagleton, he can cut to the meat of some pretty hefty subjects using far simpler language than other authors in this field would, using simile and poking fun at the more obscure areas of the theory. In one section he dissects severalism’s by pointing out that they are impossible to follow, that merely by using language they are subverted. I like I think I can get on board with a theory that understands that we need to ask the right questions, but keep ourselves in the real world of the plausible.
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