SHILLING FOR PROFESSOR EAGLETON

NOT THAT TERRY EAGLETON, English literary theorist and public intellectual, needs the like of me to encourage folks to his lectures. But his “Where Does Culture Come From?,” London Review of Books, April 25, 2024, is a thoughtful piece well worth recommending to others.

Indeed, for less literary types there’s even a YouTube of his presentation, delivered as the third of this year’s LRB Winter Lectures. 

What follows here are tidbits gleaned from his LRB piece (honest, I learned of the YouTube only after having enjoyed the magazine version). His writing prompted me to some extracurricular Internet sleuthing as well.

C.V. Professor Eagleton served as Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford (1992–2001) and John Edward Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester (2001–2008), together with visiting appointments at Cornell, Duke, Iowa, Melbourne, Trinity College Dublin, and Yale. Currently he’s Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University.

Terrence Francis Eagleton, Salford, England-born 1943, English literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. Image by Billion at English Wikipedia. 

Public Intellectuals. Wikipedia describes public intellectuals as “impartial critics who can ‘rise above the partial preoccupation of one’s own profession—and engage with the global issues of truth, judgment, and taste of the time.’ ” This certainly fits Professor Eagleton.

Culture Etymology: Here I turn to The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1971, which devotes a full column of its microprinted page to Culture, “from Old French couture, cultura cultivation, tending, in Christian authors worship, see Cult.”

Eagleton cites that “a cognate word, coulter, means the blade of a plough. The kinship between culture and agriculture was brought home to me some years ago when I was driving with the dean of arts of a state university in the US past farms blooming with luxuriant crops. ‘Might get a couple of professorships out of that,’ the dean remarked.”

An Oedipal Child. “This is not the way culture generally likes to see itself,” Eagleton observes. “Like the Oedipal child, it tends to disavow its lowly parentage and fantasise that it sprang from its own loins, self-generating and self-fashioning.”

Eagleton continues, “Thought, for idealist philosophers, is self-dependent. You can’t nip behind it to something more fundamental, since that itself would have to be captured in a thought. Geist goes all the way down.”

Profiting from Economic Surplus. Eagleton notes, “You can’t have culture in the sense of galleries and museums and publishing houses unless society has evolved to the point where it can produce an economic surplus. Only then can some people be released from the business of keeping the tribe alive in order to constitute a caste of priests, bards, DJs, hermeneuticists, bassoon players, LRB interns, gaffers on film sets and the like.”

I like Eagleton’s examples of cultural types.

“In fact,” Eagleton says, “you might define culture as a surplus over strict need. We need to eat, but we don’t need to eat at the Ivy. We need clothes in cold climates, but they don’t have to be designed by Stella McCartney.”

The Middle Class. “If you open a history book at random,” Eagleton advises, “it will say three things about the period you light on: it was essentially an age of transition; it was a period of rapid change; and the middle classes went on rising. That’s the reason God put the middle classes on earth: to rise like the sun, but, unlike the sun, without ever setting.”

Wikipedia lists Eagleton’s ideological leanings as Continental philosophy and Marxism, these two broadly defined these days.

Marxism. Eagleton recounts, “Marx’s thought concerns the material conditions that would make life for its own sake possible for whole societies, one such condition being the shortening of the working day. Marxism is about leisure, not labour.”

“The only good reason for being a socialist,” Eagleton says (with a smile) “apart from annoying people you don’t like, is that you don’t like to work. For Oscar Wilde, who was closer in this respect to Marx than to Morris, communism was the condition in which we would lie around all day in various interesting postures of jouissance, dressed in loose crimson garments, reciting Homer to one another and sipping absinthe. And that was just the working day.” 

Image from YouTube.

As noted in a preface to the YouTube presentation, “The word ‘culture’ now drags the term ‘wars’ in its wake, but this is too narrow an approach to a concept with a much more capacious history. In the closing LRB Winter Lecture for 2024, Terry Eagleton examines various aspects of that history—culture and power, culture and ethics, culture and critique, culture and ideology—in an attempt to broaden the argument and understand where we are now.” 

And he does so in a cogent, articulate, and often amusing manner. Indeed, he’s the kind of professor I would have enjoyed. ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024