The Hippest

Letters

Vol. 18 No. 6 · 21 March 1996

From Nicolas Tredell

Terry Eagleton’s review of Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues (LRB, 7 March) is an intriguing performance: a strange mélange of patronising praise – Hall as the colonial immigrant who turns out to be plus anglais que les anglais – and of ignorant polemicising against Post-Modernism. The review turns, inevitably, into an indictment of Eagleton himself: for could it not once have been said of him that he was ‘a brilliant bricoleur’ who shared one of Hall’s ‘basic flaws’ – the ‘compulsion to be au courant’? But whereas Hall’s ‘compulsion’, if that is what it was, enabled him to keep up, Eagleton has dropped out of the race; instead of accepting defeat gracefully, however, he has sought to vent his frustration on those still in the running. His attack on Post-Modernism – and on a whole range of fruitful tendencies in modern cultural studies – is structured on a crude binary opposition of past and present, in which the past bears the stamp of authenticity and the present is found wanting. This is evident in his penchant for the image of the ‘veteran’. Within one sentence, we are told that Stuart Hall ‘is a veteran of Suez and Hungary’ who evinces ‘the subdued wisdom of the scarred veteran’, almost making it sound as if Hall parachuted into Port Said and sniped at Russian tanks on the streets of Budapest when he was not marching to Aldermaston or working in the office of the early New Left Review. One implication of Eagleton’s image is that he also is a scarred veteran – and it is doubtless the case that he does bear the marks of many life-or-death battles in examination rooms, seminars and lecture theatres. But lest this joint combat experience should imply an equality with Hall, Eagleton reminds us that Hall is of middle-class provenance; whereas Eagleton, as we know, is a working-class hero.

A key difference between them is not highlighted, however: a difference, not of provenance, but of professional location. Hall has done much admirable work at the Open University, an institution of higher education which, in contrast to Oxbridge, is genuinely open to all; and he has had to withstand direct government harassment, as a result of charges of left-wing bias in OU courses. Eagleton has stayed inside Oxbridge and has never ventured out in any sustained way into the wider and more difficult world of non-Oxbridge higher and further education. It is symptomatic that, in his review, he characterises Hall’s move to the Open University, not as a positive choice of involvement in democratic education, but as an escape from a putative ‘climate of ugly sectarianism’ at the Birmingham Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies.

To keep Hall the grizzled veteran company, Eagleton summons another old soldier: a ‘real-life’ Antonio Gramsci who helped to arm Italian workers and, for a time, supported the Stalinist line on Fascism. This rather unsavoury ‘reality’ is contrasted with a ‘fictional Gramsci constructed by cultural studies’ who is ‘a kind of Sardinian version of a London polytechnic lecturer in discourse theory’. After decades of epistemological and ontological questioning – some of which Eagleton himself helped to popularise – it is lamentable that he falls back into a naive contrast between the ‘real’ (or his own version of it) and the ‘fictional’. And note that invocation of ‘a polytechnic lecturer’, a signifier which, for Eagleton as much as Malcolm Bradbury or Kingsley Amis, has now clearly come to connote trendy inferiority. Eagleton used to instance the polytechnics as the fast tracks on which, in contrast to the rolling English roads of the traditional universities, cultural theory was eating up the miles. But the fuel then was his kind of Marxism: once the polys began to develop their own means of propulsion – for instance, heady mixtures of Post-Structuralism and high-octane feminism – the old snobberies re-emerged.

Eagleton’s attempts to infiltrate feminism have foundered on women’s resistance; but he manfully assumes the authority to discern which male leftists ‘have been genuinely rather than notionally transformed by feminism’ (Staurt Hall passes the test, as presumably does Eagleton himself). This authority also perhaps grants him the right to dismiss Angela McRobbie, whose informed, self-reflexive and sensitive work (first emerging from the matrix of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) is a contribution to a burgeoning body of analysis which seeks to suggest that shopping, for instance, is a complex activity that cannot simply be dismissed as ‘choosing between fancy brand-names’ – certainly not for the majority of the population, who are much less well-paid than Eagleton, and for whom shopping may well entail a difficult range of choices, calculations and decisions within a broader network of cultural, social and economic relationships.

This inability constructively to assimilate revisionist assessments of consumerism is one index of how far Eagleton has failed, in his own work, to practise the widening of literary studies into cultural studies which he formally advocates. An especially significant moment in his review is his invocation, in passing, of the Internet, which is implicitly associated with a Post-Modernist evasion of the earthy realities represented by ‘the Somme’ and by revolutionary politics. In this invocation, any sense of the importance of studying the cultural forms of new technologies is elided. But the failure to understand such forms, like the failure to understand consumerism, has been one of the repeated errors of the Left, which, in its attitude to science as to shopping, has oscillated between fastidious eschewal and fervent embracement.

Nicolas Tredell
Seaford, East Sussex

Vol. 18 No. 9 · 9 May 1996

From S.S. Prawer

Nicolas Tredell (Letters, 21 March) reproaches Terry Eagleton for alleged failure to venture out ‘in any sustained way into the wider and more difficult world of non-Oxbridge higher and further education’. Eagleton has done better than that: he has written plays which, broadcast by the BBC, have given listening pleasure and food for thought to many who have had neither cause nor inclination to enter the arcane world of Post-Modernist literary-critical debate.

S.S. Prawer
The Queen’s College, Oxford