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Living in a material world: The problem with cultural theory

Posted on: Saturday, 20 September 2003, 06:00 CDT

The golden age of cultural theory is long past. The pioneering works of Jacques Lacan, Claude Levi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault are several decades behind us. But there can be no going back to an age when it was enough to pronounce Keats delectable or Milton a doughty spirit. If "theory" means a reasonably systematic reflection on our guiding assumptions, it remains as indispensable as ever.

Structuralism, Marxism, post-structuralism and the like are no longer the sexy topics they were. What is sexy instead is sex. On the wilder shores of academia an interest in French philosophy has given way to a fascination with French kissing. In some circles, the politics of masturbation exert far more fascination than the politics of the Middle East.

Nothing could be more understandable. There are advantages in being able to write your PhD thesis without stirring from in front of the TV set. In the old days, rock music was a distraction from your studies; now it may well be what you are studying. Intellectual matters are no longer an ivory-tower affair, but belong to the world of media and shopping malls, bedrooms and brothels.

Not many of the standard objections to cultural theory hold water. Some of it has been intolerably jargon-ridden; but the impulse behind it is attractively democratic. Anyway, some forms of specialised language are desirable rather than distasteful. No lay person opens a botany textbook and shuts it with an irascible bang if they do not understand it straight away. Yet a lot of people who are not surprised to find botany hard are mildly outraged not to be able to understand an account of a sculpture or a novel. If cultural theory can sometimes be an obstacle to real understanding, so can other forms of art criticism. It does not believe Jeffrey Archer is as good as Jane Austen; it simply inquires what we mean when we make such claims.

But a far more devastating criticism of theory can be launched. Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on. It is also rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions.

No idea is more unpopular with contemporary cultural theory than that of absolute truth. The phrase smacks of dogmatism, authoritarianism, a belief in the timeless and universal. In fact, some postmodernists claim not to believe in truth at all. In less sophisticated postmodern circles, holding a position with conviction is seen as unpleasantly authoritarian, whereas to be fuzzy, sceptical and ambiguous is somehow democratic.

Why does this matter? It matters, for one thing, because it belongs to our dignity as moderately rational creatures to know the truth. And that includes knowing the truth about truth. But it also matters because a ludicrous bugbear has been made of the word "absolute" in this context; and because if the relativist is right, then truth is emptied of much of its value. As Bernard Williams points out, relativism is really a way of explaining away conflict. If you maintain that democracy means everyone being allowed to vote, while I maintain it means that only those people may vote who have passed a set of fiendishly complicated intelligence tests, there will always be a liberal on hand to claim that we are both right from our different points of view. To hold on to the truth in such cases is to insist that if someone is right, then someone else must be wrong.

If absolute truth is out of favour these days, so is the idea of objectivity. Impartiality, it is suggested, is a bogus proposition, suggestive of an autocratic god's-eye view. Yet objectivity can mean a selfless openness to the needs of others, one which lies very close to love. Disinterestedness, a notion almost universally scorned by the cultural left nowadays, grew up in the 18th century as the opposite not of interests, but of self-interest. It was a weapon to wield against the Hobbesians and possessive individualists. Disinterestedness means not viewing the world from some sublime Olympian height, but a kind of compassion or fellow- feeling. It means trying to feel your way imaginatively into the experience of another, sharing their delight and sorrow without thinking of oneself. George Eliot is one of the great 19th-century inheritors of this ethical lineage.

Objectivity does not mean judging from nowhere. On the contrary, you can only know how the situation is if you are in a position to know. Only by standing at a certain angle to reality can it be illuminated for you. The wretched of the earth, for example, are likely to appreciate more of the truth of human history than their masters - not because they are innately more perceptive, but because they can glean from their own everyday experience that history for the vast majority of men and women has largely been a matter of despotic power and fruitless toil.

Another subject about which cultural theorists have found little to say is morality, which for a long time was regarded as something of an embarrassment. It seemed preachy, priggish and heavy-handed. But while it is true that appeals to morality, like appeals to psychology, have often been a way of avoiding political argument, in the light of classical moral thought this is deeply ironic. For Aristotle, ethics and politics are intimately related. Ethics is about excelling at being human, and nobody can do this in isolation. Moreover, nobody can do it unless the political institutions that allow you to do it are available. This kind of moral thinking was inherited by Karl Marx.

Marx was a classical moralist who did not seem aware that he was. Like a lot of radicals since his time, he thought on the whole that morality was just ideology. This is because he made the mistake of confusing morality with moralism. Moralism believes that there is a set of questions known as moral questions that are quite distinct from social or political ones. It does not see that "moral" means exploring the texture and quality of human behaviour as richly and sensitively as you can, and that you cannot do this by abstracting men and women from their social surroundings. This is morality as, say, the novelist Henry James understood it, as opposed to those who believe you can reduce it to rules, prohibitions and obligations.

Aristotle thought there was a particular way of living that allowed us, so to speak, to be at our best for the kind of creatures we are. This was life conducted according to the virtues. The Judaeo- Christian tradition considers that it is the life of charity or love. What this means, roughly speaking, is that we become the occasion for each other's self-realisation. It is only through being the means of your self-fulfilment that I can attain my own, and vice versa. There is little about such reciprocity in Aristotle himself. The political form of this ethic is known as socialism, for which, as Marx comments, the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. It is, as it were, politicised love, or reciprocity all round.

The opposite of self-sufficiency is dependency. Like some other key terms, this hovers somewhere between the material and the moral. It is a material fact that we are dependent on others for our material survival, given the helpless state in which we are born. Yet this material dependency cannot really be divorced from such moral capacities as care, selflessness, vigilance and protectiveness, since what we are dependent on is exactly such capacities in those who look after us. Nor, according to Freud, can it be divorced from the dawning of moral feeling in the dependent one, in the form of gratitude. To this extent, the moral and material are sides of the same coin.

This idea of a materialist morality is illustrated by Shakespeare's King Lear . Lear begins the play by exemplifying the megalomania of absolute sovereignty, which imagines that it is omnipotent partly because it has no body. In casting off so cruelly the fruits of his body, his daughter Cordelia, he discloses the fantasy of disembodiment which lies at the heart of the most grossly material of powers. Lear believes at this point he is everything; but since an identity that is everything has nothing to measure itself against, it is merely a void.

In the course of the drama, Lear will learn it is preferable to be a modestly determinate "something" than a vacuously global "all". This is not because others tell him so, being for the most part too craven or too crafty to respond to his tormented question, "Who is it that can tell me who I am?" It is because he is forced up against the brute recalcitrance of nature, which terrorises him into finally embracing his own finitude. And this includes his creaturely compassion for others. It therefore redeems him from delusion, if not from destruction.

The play opens with a celebrated bandying of nothings:

Lear: . . . what can you say to draw

A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak.

Cordelia: Nothing, my lord.

Lear: Nothing!

Cordelia: Nothing.

Lear: Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.

Only when this paranoid monarch accepts that he stinks of mortality will he be en route to redemption. It is then that his lying courtiers will be discredited:

"To say "ay" and "no" to everything that I said! "Ay" and "no" too was not good divinity. When the rain came to wet me once, and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I found 'em, there I smelt 'em out. Go to, they are not men of their words. They told me I was everything; 'tis a lie - I am not ague-proof."

The storm has thrown Lear's creatureliness into exposure, deflating his hubristic fantasies. He has discovered his flesh for the first time, and along with it his frailty and finitude. Gloucester will do the same when he is blinded, forced to "smell his way to Dover". He must learn, as he says, to "see feelingly" - to allow his reason to move within the constraints of the sensitive, suffering body. Lear's new-found sensuous materialism takes the form of a political solidarity with the poor:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O' I have ta'en

Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,

And show the heavens more just.

If our sympathy for others were not so sensuously depleted, we would be moved by their deprivation to share with them the very goods that prevent us from feeling their wretchedness:

So distribution should undo excess,

And each man have enough.

The renewal of the body and a radical redistribution of wealth are closely linked in King Lear.

Postmodernism is obsessed by the body and terrified of biology. The body is a wildly popular topic in US cultural studies - but this is the plastic, remouldable, socially constructed body, not the piece of matter that sickens and dies. The creature who emerges from postmodern thought is centreless, hedonistic, self-inventing, ceaselessly adaptive. He sounds more like a Los Angeles media executive than an Indonesian fisherman. Postmodernists oppose universality, and well they might: nothing is more parochial than the kind of human being they admire.

Postmodernism rejects the idea of there being firm foundations to social life. "Nothing we do," writes Ludwig Wittgenstein, "can be defended absolutely and finally," a statement that may be taken as a keynote of much modern thought. In a brutally fundamentalist era, this sense of the provisional nature of all our ideas - one central to post-structuralism and postmodernism - is deeply salutary. Whatever the blind spots and prejudices of these theories, they pale in comparison with the lethal self-righteousness of the fundamentalist. And they can of course be valuable antidotes to it. The problem is that the bracing scepticism of such postmodern thought is hard to distinguish from its aversion to engaging with fundamentalism at the kind of deep moral or metaphysical level where it needs to be confronted. Indeed, this might serve as a summary of the dilemma in which cultural theory is now caught. Postmodernism has an allergy to depth, as indeed did the later Wittgenstein.

We can never be "after theory", in the sense that there can be no reflective human life without it. We can simply run out of particular styles of thinking, as our situation changes. With the launch of a new global narrative of capitalism, along with the so- called war on terror, it may well be that the style of thinking known as postmodernism is now approaching an end. It was, after all, the theory that assured us that "grand narratives" - the over- arching stories we had relied upon to explain the world until postmodernism offered us an alternative - were a thing of the past.

This, however, presents cultural theory with a fresh challenge. If it is to engage with an ambitious global history, it must have answerable resources of its own, equal in depth and scope to the situation it confronts. It cannot afford simply to keep recounting the same narratives of class, race and gender, indispensable as these topics are. It needs to chance its arm, break out of a rather stifling orthodoxy and explore new topics, not least those of which it has so far been unreasonably shy.

This is an edited extract from After Theory by Terry Eagleton, published by Allen Lane on September 25 at pounds 18.99. To order a copy for pounds 16.99 call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979.

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