January 4, 2004

More on Terry Eagleton  

More on the demise of cultural theory. As sympathetic as I am with his political agenda, I'm not sure Terry Eagleton is really the right one to be making an announcement like this. He's always been a committed Marxist critic, which means his relationship to the kind of poststructuralist theory that's really at stake here is tenuous. Marxist criticism would seem to have much to gain from a realignment along the "fundamental questions of truth and love in order to meet the urgencies of our global situation." Aren't the issues of revolution, evil, death, and suffering the perfect medium for his Marxist agenda? Today ought to be his theoretical heyday.

I myself am not yet willing to give up some of the frameworks critical theory affords. While it's true that the cultural theorizing of recent years has failed in many respects, there is a lot more to theory than cultural revisionism. At its best, poststructuralist criticism is about a multiplicity of perspectives - and an aesthetics of the space between those perspectives. What could be more relevant to the world of today?

People seem especially concerned with critical theory's inability to look evil in the face. But simply accepting evil as an explanation for what we can't understand, the cause for what we're not willing to accept as human - this is intellectual cowardice. Critical theory may not be particularly comforting in the sense of validating our own actions and perspectives; but it provides an analytical framework that makes it possible to honestly investigate the culture we encounter. It's a tool that shouldn't be abandoned.

Comments
Martial  {January 8, 2004}

Arguably, "critical theory" in fact comes out of the need to look evil in the face. The Frankfurt School, after all, was responding to the banality of Nazi brutality.

And, like all tools, there are jobs for which it is suited and jobs for which another framework would be better.


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