After Theory

Terry Eagleton, After Theory - one of the achievements of cultural theory has been the investigation into the new themes of gender and sexuality, popular culture and a post-colonial reality. Post-colonial theory marked the end of the Third world revolutions and shifted its focus from the existing socialist Marxist theory to culture; “socialism proved least possible where it was most necessary”.

The discourse about ethnicity (which meant margins and minorities) implied that norms and conventions were inherently oppressive, because they mould uniquely different individuals to the same shape. There were different approaches to the norms among liberals, its sanguine and pessimist representatives and postmodernists. Postmodernists had prejudice against norms, unities and consensuses thus reflected “the apparent disintegration of old-fashioned bourgeois society into a host of sub-cultures”.

The traditional middle-class “the solid, civilized, morally upright bourgeoisie which managed to survive the Second World War” were displaced by “the projectors and managers, auditors and janitors, administrators and speculators of contemporary capital”. The norm now was the money without any principles or identity of its own. The new cultural ideas had emerged in the reality of various movements of civil rights, student movement, women’s movement, anti-war and anti-nuclear campaigns, cultural liberation. By the 1960s and 70s  “the media, popular culture, sub-cultures and the cult of youth first emerged as social forces to be reckoned with”. Western Marxism turned to cultural values and human powers for which industrial capitalism had no time. In the postmodern 80s and 90s cultural studies replaced socialist thinking and culture had become “well-nigh indistinguishable” from capitalism.

Postmodernism and post-colonialism were real-life formations reflecting changes in their environment. For anti-theorists theory was “how you try to justify your way of life, but this was neither possible nor necessary, because theory was part of that way of life”. Modernism reflected that all the beliefs of the nineteenth-century middle-class society, like liberalism, democracy, individualism, scientific inquiry, historical progress were in crisis. There was the rapid development of technology, “capitalist society became increasingly dependent in its everyday operations on myth and fantasy, fictional wealth, exoticism and hyperbole, rhetoric, virtual reality and sheer appearance”. This was postmodernism which was dealing with the world as a matter of information to represent great invisible crisscrossing circuits of communication and multitude of signs that the contemporary society requested. The themes of postmodernism for the most part were such things as advertising and public relations, and there were sex, drugs and art free from any classes, and consumer-friendly.