After Theory

An easy read – NO!! Maybe I am just falling into Terry Eagleton’s ideas of what our culture has become. I was interested about “the politics of masturbation” and “subjects like vampirism and eye-gouging, cyborgs and porno movies” yet when he goes on to talk about “post-colonialism” and “Western‘identity politics’” he just loses me. His language which can be interesting and to the point, gives way to long, incomprehensible lectures; all of which I am barely able to understand, unless I have a dictionary by my side. Why it is necessary to write a paragraph when a sentence can quickly and easily say what needs to be said?

He does make some interesting comparatives between the past “cultural theories” and ours of today. Undoubtedly the utter misery I felt in reading his latter pages would have left me as one of the “common people” who the traditional scholars would have “ignored”, if I had been around in “the golden age of cultural theory”, where only truly important issues were studied. Sex was not discussed because as Eagleton explains “human beings had no genitals”.

This begs the question, has our fascination with everyday life, sex, tattoo, drinking or what this person had for dinner, been forced into our cultural thinking because of technological advances? Or has technology been developed because of our need to study the everyday? I refuse to join Twitter and hate that I have a Facebook account because, quite frankly, I don’t give a shit about what quirky thought has popped into your head or if you find something is “lols”. Are we, in this culture of sharing everything with thousands of people, eventually going to burn out? How many times can we discuss nail polish, a school shooting in America, Bieber’s pants or the tragedy of Breaking Bad finishing, before we beg for silence?

As Eagleton says “to live in interesting times is not, to be sure, an unmixed blessing…….. what has proved most damaging, at least before the emergence of the anti-capitalist movement, is the absence of memories of collective, and effective, political action”. When having a heated debate with a friend over a few drinks a month ago, he expressed the pride he had when “back in his time” students would protest, riot and actively stand up for what they believed in. He then carried on to say how as a generation we have no interest in government policies, third world crises or the destruction of the O-zone - I disagreed and called him an “old fart”.

I think we do stand up for what we believe in, the only problem is that we have become slightly numbed to them because of the sheer volume of information we get bombarded with. Every day we hear or read about some new catastrophe, and it’s too much to keep up with. In-between the news reports, we also have to read blogs, essays, interviews and posts, while all the time trying to deal with our own lives of answering texts with “lol” and facebooking that we “like” something. Now we can snapchat a pic because even though most texts contains less than 10 words, a picture can tell a thousand….

Is the obsession with everyday events eventually going to cause us to blow a fuse? Will the relentless tweets and texts cause us to look desperately for isolation? Will the constant stream of information dull us towards the important issues? Has it already?