{"id":981,"date":"2016-07-20T16:27:45","date_gmt":"2016-07-20T20:27:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/?p=981"},"modified":"2024-05-28T08:14:39","modified_gmt":"2024-05-28T12:14:39","slug":"brief-comments-on-terry-eagletons-latest-book-culture-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/?p=981","title":{"rendered":"Brief comments on Terry Eagleton’s latest book, Culture (2016)"},"content":{"rendered":"

See \"Culture\"<\/a>Culture<\/a> by Terry Eagleton<\/a>
\nMy rating: 4 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

Lucid and concise readings of Burke, Swift, Herder, Austen, Marx, Wilde, and T.S. Eliot, among others. The book is less focused and persuasive when Eagleton traces the long and complicated dialectic between capitalism and various meanings of \u201cculture.\u201d <\/p>\n

Eagleton\u2019s own version of Marx\u2019s base vs. superstructure dichotomy has various forms of cultural \u201csuperstructure\u201d competing with each other and often canceling each other out. He also understands these competing versions of \u201cculture\u201d to be hubristic: each thinks it<\/em> is the most powerful force of all, able at will to intervene into capitalism\u2019s workings and alter its course, or free to transcend it. These various understandings of \u201cculture\u201d certainly don\u2019t think of culture as secondary and determined by\/complicit with economic forces and structures, as Marx did. Eagleton despairingly mocks cultural studies\u2019 and postmodernism\u2019s various forms of delusion in his Swiftian concluding chapter, \u201cThe Hubris of Culture,\u201d which traces how capitalism and the marketplace have more power over our ideas of culture than ever before, basically erasing any possibility for culture to generate powerful oppositional ideas and energies, as opposed to various forms of consumerism and status acquisition.<\/p>\n

Some quotations:
\u201c[C]ulture has shed its innocence. Indeed, the history of the modern age is among other things the tale of the gradual demystification of this noble ideal. From [culture\u2019s] sublime status in the thought of thinkers like Schiller, Herder and Arnold, it becomes caught up in a dangerously rhapsodic brand of nationalism, entangled in racist anthropology, absorbed into general commodity production and embroiled in political conflict. Far from providing an antidote to power, it turns out to be deeply collusive with it\u2026. (148)<\/p>\n

\u201c[C]apitalism has incorporated culture for its own material ends\u2026 this aestheticized mode of capitalist production [the \u2018culture\u2019 industries, the \u2018creative\u2019 economy, etc.] has proved more ruthlessly instrumental than ever\u201d (152). \u201cNeo-liberal capitalism has no difficulty with terms like \u2018diversity\u2019 or \u2018inclusiveness,\u2019 as it does with the language of class struggle\u201d (154).<\/p>\n

\u201cToday\u2019s cultural politics \u2026 speaks the language of gender, identity, marginality, diversity and oppression, but not for the most part the idiom of state, property, class-struggle, ideology and exploitation. Roughly speaking, it is the difference between anti-colonialism and postcolonialism. Cultural politics of this kind are in one sense the very opposite of elitist notions of culture. Yet they share in their own way that elitism\u2019s overvaluing of cultural affairs, as well as its distance from the prospect of fundamental change.\u201d (160-61).<\/p>\n

\nView all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

See Culture by Terry Eagleton My rating: 4 of 5 stars Lucid and concise readings of Burke, Swift, Herder, Austen, Marx, Wilde, and T.S. Eliot, among others. The book is less focused and persuasive when Eagleton traces the long and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8,1],"tags":[127,126],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=981"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":986,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981\/revisions\/986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}