After Theory

It's been way too long since I updated the list of books that I'm currently engaged with--but then, I'm way too lazy to do it as often as I should, I suppose.

At any rate, one of the books that I picked up and started reading over break was Terry Eagleton's new one, After Theory. A feature on AT and Eagleton appeared a couple of days ago in the NYT.

Like I said, I started reading it. Jury's out on whether I'll finish reading it, or rather, whether I'll finish the book itself. I may already be finished reading it. Two reasons for that: first, I find that, as engaging a writer as Eagleton is, he is overwhelmingly preoccupied in this book with being witty. To wit,

"On the wilder shores of academia, an interest in French philosophy has given way to a fascination with French kissing."

Tee hee. There are lines like this all over the place in this book, and after the first couple of dozen, they got really distracting. The second thing that distressed me a little was the fact that very little of it couldn't have been written 10 years ago. I don't have my copy handy, but as I recall, the first mention of any sort of technology doesn't occur until the 3rd or 4th chapter--and this in a book that purports to tell us why the cultural theory of Lacan, Lyotard, Barthes, et al., isn't as relevant to us today. I haven't read far enough in to know if he takes on globalization in concrete ways, but quite honestly, I think that the "culture" of the kind of theory Eagleton was introducing in 1983 has changed and will continue to change in substantial ways. I'd be quite surprised if his book proves to identify those changes with much accuracy.

Eagleton's answer appears to be to return to Marx, whom he describes as a moralist. According to the NYT profile:

What Mr. Eagleton, one of the few remaining Marxist critics, wants now is a search for absolutes, for norms, for answers to what he calls "fundamental questions of truth and love in order to meet the urgencies of our global situation."

Oh my.

There's a 3rd reason I might not finish AT, but it's a more personal one that has to do with generational issues in criticism, and with the tendency in recent years for established critics to jump on trains, and then, a few years later, to jump off them and tell everyone else that the trains have gone. I just can't help but find it a little cynical for Terry Eagleton, author of the bestselling "Theory for Dummies" book ever, to talk about how theory has now become irrelevant as though he weren't making money hand-over-fist for the last 20 years as an "expert" on said theories. Theory itself isn't relevant or irrelevant, and perhaps that's a secret 4th reason: the bureaucratese nominalization of theory that absolves Eagleton's generation of any responsibility for its relevance.

I think I've talked myself into shelving the book for a time when I'm less negatively predisposed. We'll see.