Hee hee. This article in the UK Independent has no place on a poetry site, so of course I must excerpt it here, and link to the book on my book list, just to scare the bejesus out of all of you folks who find even the smallest suggestion of Language Poetry abhorrent (hey, I'm one of those...).
I'd like to think I predicted postmodernists would get themselves into this predicament the next time they (re)discovered fascists, and then I went and sort of became a pointy-headed type myself (not really), which means, in true postmodern fashion, this article below gives me a big laugh on at least 3 different levels.
Terry Eagleton: Culture and society
The man who 'sexed up' literary theory believes that postmodernism is dead. Christina Patterson talks to Terry Eagleton about love, sex, God - and the global crisis
27 September 2003
"You won't believe what happened last night!" Terry Eagleton announces, with a twinkly smile that is clearly something of a trademark. He had, it turns out, been walking along the Strand, after seeing Michael Frayn's new play, Democracy, when he was stopped by a young man with a Yorkshire accent. "Where's that David Blunkett?" the youth demanded. Eagleton suggested politely that he try the Home Office."No, no," insisted the youth, "the one in the glass cage."
It is a strangely surreal scenario, but somehow not surprising: the former Thomas Warton Professor of English at Oxford being asked for directions to the weirdest show in town, the sort of narcissistic, navel-gazing enterprise, in fact, that has been one of the triggers for his new book. After Theory (Allen Lane, £18.99) is an explosive follow-up to Literary Theory, the book that changed the intellectual lives, and curricula, of a generation of undergraduates. At a time (the early 1980s) when students of English literature were either battling with Beowulf or ploughing through swathes of opaque prose by literary theorists announcing the Death of the Author and the pre-eminence of the Text, Eagleton took the literary theoretical bull by the horns and, well, deconstructed it. With him as their down-to-earth and witty guide, thousands of students suddenly saw the postmodernist light. If all was not clear exactly, at least they knew why.
There was no such thing as clarity, only the "seething multiplicity of the text", hitherto obscured by one's hidden, and simplistic, assumptions. The advantage of this view, as he helpfully points out in the chapter on post-structuralism, "is that it allows you to drive a coach and horses through everybody else's beliefs while not saddling you with the inconvenience of having to adopt any yourself".
More than 20 years on, After Theory is not, of course, an attempt to redress the balance (a woolly liberal concept that Eagleton would hate) but a response to a crisis. The jacket bears the silhouette of a plane, a motif that could imply the book is yet another knee-jerk response to September 11 and the rise of fundamentalism. That is part of it, Eagleton admits, but the general issue is very much wider. Students today, he asserts, are engaging neither with history nor with post-structuralism. "What is sexy instead is sex," he announces, in the first chapter, on "The Politics of Amnesia": "Quietly spoken middle-class students huddle diligently in libraries, at work on sensationalist subjects like vampirism and eye-gouging, cyborgs and porno movies." Cast adrift in the stormy currents of postmodernism, they prefer to focus their energy on "the history of pubic hair" or the evolution of "Friends," a trend that Eagleton regards as "politically catastrophic".
Considering I did my dissertation on the online mostly lesbian fans of "Xena: Warrior Princess," and wrote the argument in native hypertext in a form impossible to reproduce in print (on purpose) (http://www.nutball.com/dissertation), I sure do know where I fall in the above picture Eagleton is painting. And that makes me laugh even more, because I do believe I was making an original argument involving VERY big ideas (which were centered on power and politics) on many different levels that most certainly did deliberately loop around recursively (see, I'm not PoMo enough to disbelieve that there is any such thing as an original idea. Hell, I used to get in trouble in grad school for putting too many original ideas in my stuff, overstepping, not paying enough homage to previous scholarship).
We are sitting in a minuscule office on the eighth floor at Penguin, surrounded by leaning piles of Penguin Classics. We'd been promised panoramic views over the Thames but the posh meeting rooms on the 10th floor have all, today, been colonised by Pearson. Our conversation in this cramped corner is, in more ways than one, a consequence of the Triumph of Capitalism. The entire building, with its vast, open-plan vistas and rabbit warren of tiny, glass-walled offices and spaces for meetings and parties, is a symbol of contemporary cultural production. Here culture is acquired, processed, marketed and launched, with sauvignon and canapés, before hitting the media and then the shops in its final incarnation as cash-producing commodity.
We have to of course get in our obigatory pseudo-critique of capitalism, as if being a postmodernist exempts one from being painted as an utter hypocrite with 3 homes and a 30-year career as an elitist Oxford don. But more on that below.
Eagleton looks back, he says, with "proper nostalgia" to a time when "there was a sense that culture was somewhere you could make a political difference". He even, astonishingly, expresses a long-standing regret at having turned down a job at the Open University. He went instead to Oxford, where he stayed for 30 years and which he left "without the slightest twinge or sense of nostalgia". Oxford gave him "a lot of freedom", but he never came to terms with its innate conservatism and unfriendliness. "When I came to Oxford some of the rather hostile vibes that I felt I was getting I thought were because I was a Marxist," Eagleton confides with a wry smile, "but were probably because I was from Cambridge."
If he really WAS a Marxist, he would have taken the position at Open University, or been like Paulo Freire in Brazil, teaching dialogically among the rural poor. It oughta be against the LAW to take a job at Oxford or Cambridge, or maybe even the Open University and still call yourself a Marxist. That's the problem with PoMo heads. They have embraced irony so fully they can't even muster up proper shame at their own hypocrisy.
It is certainly true that Eagleton has been "ill-served by his acolytes", those jargon-spouting, willfully obfuscating and, sadly, often not too bright purveyors of the kinds of arguments that prefer to loop endlessly rather than take the risk of any kind of original thought. Whoever bears the responsibility for this cultural mire - and only a conspiracy theorist could lay the blame entirely at Eagleton's DM-shod feet - there is, he believes, an urgent need for fresh, and more profound, thinking about the world we are in. "History now is such," he explains, "with the political drive from the right, that thinking small isn't really an option any more ... There are different ways of thinking big, or deep."
After Theory outlines just some of them. With his characteristic lucidity and wit, it charts the gains and losses of cultural theory and its refusal, or inability, to engage with the Big Issues: not just political, but moral and metaphysical, too. Unlike the vast majority of contemporary cultural theorists, Eagleton is not afraid to talk about love and death, or to reinstate the body as on object of frailty as well as a source of Californian myths of eternal youth.
Methinks he should be afraid. Or rather, I'm wondering, if one's theories are thin as water, if one doesn't become far more fearless than those who strive for greater substance. I'd wonder that, surely, if that wasn't what my professors used to say about me when I was off bird-walking across disciplines and theories in a single bound, being original and thinking big, and as a result, not paying enough homage to the entrenched canons of Great Ideas that had gone before me. Once again, I resemble the thing I'm criticizing. I must be having a postmodern moment too. Oh! The irony!
(all exclamation marks are provided exclusively courtesy of various Romantic Poets, and not postmodernists. Byron and Shelley always had a few to spare, so next week I'll have to post some of those in here just for equal time, to make up for the borrowing)
Chris
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