In After Theory, Terry Eagleton interprets the cries of the oracle: “The golden age of cultural theory is over (1).” This decree might not matter so much save for the fact that Eagleton is a great theorist himself, one who carried a torch that proclaimed the relevance of literary theory to the world of politics. And so in our depleted era, the great authors are now gone, including those who declared (while alive) that authorship was dead (Barthes, Foucault). In his estimation, no one of much distinction has risen up to relight the theoretical flame onto Mount Olympus.

According to Eagleton, those of us who continue to labor on using the tools of cultural theory do so narcissistically, pointlessly lolling about in subjective positions and indulging in the sinful pleasures of media (as if we were decadent Romans at the Coliseum watching gladiators as opposed to proper Greeks at the temple attending a sophisticated theatre piece) . Apparently our only success is in avoiding all the key philosophical and political necessities of the day as we prattle on about the meaningfulness of popular culture—from our own point of view and not in the interest of a social class.

Well, Eagleton has a point. It does seem a bit impractical at times to issue forth with yet another reading of the subversiveness of Buffy (especially after the show’s been cancelled) or indulge in one more attempt at decoding The Matrix trilogy or LOTR or Kill Bill in order to support a dead French theorist’s work. Indeed this may be an especially extravagant detour when a cowboy ayatollah such as George W. Bush doesn’t know how to pronounce “nuclear” (or is being told by Karl Rove to deliberately mispronounce it so he can seem like just a normal, uneducated guy), admits to not reading any newspapers, and insists that the United States doesn’t need “a permission slip” (as he asserted in his State of the Union speech on January 20) to invade another country.

But Eagleton also has own precarious point of view. Judging by the number of times that he quotes ole’ William Shakespeare, and refers to D. H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats and by the veracity of the jabs he makes at those intellectuals who study popular culture, he has an ongoing love for the greats of Anglo-Irish literature--and a disdain for mass cultural products (especially those manufactured in the U.S.A). Yet surely it remains crucial to study and analyze the use of such cultural products that “the masses” enjoy--or make attempts to resist--rather than always to resort to the Greats for wisdom. Slavoj Žižek, a “post-theorist” who also rejects postmodernism and much of American cultural studies and liberal multiculturalism, renders his texts almost accessible because he illustrates his concepts via popular film and media. Also Slavoj loves sex and sexuality (and fetishism and perversity) and I’m not sure the same is true for Terry—at least in this most recent writing.

Eagleton distrusts the academic obsession with embodied pleasures (which I’d argue was related to the more permissive frivolity of the Clinton/Blair/Mitterrand era and has now subsided with the illicit primness of the Bush/Blair/Chirac era). Eagleton writes:

Socialism has lost out to sado-masochism. Among students of culture, the body is an immensely fashionable topic, but it is usually the erotic body, not the famished one. There is a keen interest in coupling bodies, but not in laboring ones. Quietly-spoken middle class students huddle diligently in libraries, at work on sensationalist subjects like vampirism and eye-gouging, cyborgs and porno movies. (2-3)

And yet when one stifles discussion of the body and reverts to the old universalisms of truth and class and the grand narrative of capitalism and superstructure, one cordons off avenues of inclusion for the theoretical and political concerns of gays and lesbians and anyone who foregrounds gender—and reduces defenses against current right wing prohibitions. American cultural studies’ and queer theory’s obsession with the theoretical, cyborgian, or textual body was in large part a response to the Christian right wing’s return to the surveillance of marginalized actual bodies. Living in England and Ireland, Eagleton may not experience how prevalent and pervasive retro-Puritanical ideology is in the States--Hollywood films, Sex and the City, and Queer Eye serve to veil rampant cultural conservatism. When one is confronted by these particularly outspoken American Christians and their access to mainstream media, one laughs along to some very obvious double entendres from Samantha or Carrie (or Buffy and Willow) in search of solidarity, even if those characters will never quote Judith Butler.

Eagleton is rightly concerned about “real” people, especially the proletariat and the subaltern. Of course the poor need not only food but real political representation, and yes American imperialism, especially in its current aggressive and reactive stage, needs to be challenged in its every maneuver and utterance. But women and gays and lesbians and young people—even those in the States--also need to wrest control of their corporeality away from Fundamentalist ideologues, who wish to patrol their bodies and outlaw explicit expressions of pleasure. There are connections to be made between struggles for equal rights and self-governance of the body in the West and the non-West. But Eagleton does not go there: for him the suffering of the Other is more important than the care of the Self.

Instead he offers his later chapters to suggest new ways to re-use those old concepts such as objectivity and truth and virtue in order to confront the realities of religious backlash and death and a re-energized American empire. His writing is often lucid and succeeds in being both philosophical and approachable. Eagleton ends the book with a postscript supporting those American citizens who remain free-thinking despite the country’s current regime, which hints at his own sentimentality and subjectivity.

Eagleton is not alone is his return to truth and objectivity, mind you. Alain Badiou, in Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy (2003), advocates a new questioning with those once passé words. Also critical of postmodernism and disdainful of mass communication and popular media (and parliamentarian politics), Badiou reinvigorates these terms with very specific meanings and processes, which might lead the reader out of the cul-de-sac to which Eagleton repeatedly brings the reader.

Badiou writes: “For the process of a truth to begin, something must happen. What there already is – the situation of knowledge as such – generates nothing other than repetition” (62). To attempt an explication de texte (Badiou is difficult): An event is an innovation which interrupts an ongoing situation. Truth is operational not absolute or eternal—it is faithfulness to innovation. Examples of the outbreaks of such truths include the beginnings of tragedy with Aeschylus or mathematical physics with Galileo. In more simple terms, truth is an opportunity that arrives from newness, not from a given situation. It is the opposite of a cultural inheritance or tradition. Objectivity is an acknowledgment that the world is not only made of words, but also of objects. For Badiou it is possible for people to share an objective perception and end the poststructuralist obsession with language as reality. Thus one can avoid the circularity of the postmodernist roundabout that delimits access to political action.

Although more demanding, Badiou’s new operational definitions allow for more possibility than the retracing that Eagleton enacts. Regardless, if postmodern theory is over, then "post-theory" threatens to be quite philosophical in nature. Get ready to be told—all over again--about the relevance of the Greats. After all this searching in the folds of contemporary popular culture, it turns out that the source codes are kept in the ancient texts of the West. Apparently Truth is back, in a big way—and it is an outfit that needs no accessory.

Details
Badiou, Alain
Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy
Continuum, 2003
ISBN 0826467245
Hardcover US$19.95

Eagleton, Terry
After Theory
Basic Books, 2003
ISBN 0465017738
Hardcover US$25.00