Terry Eagleton's 'After Theory'

This week, we have been asked to read part of Terry Eagleton’s ‘After Theory’. To be honest, I’m not quite sure what to make of it. He writes that we are living in an aftermath of what one might call high theory, in an age, which, having grown rich on the insights of thinkers has also in some ways moved beyond them. It seems quite depressing to think that we are now of the generation that cannot think at the same intellectual level as previous generations. He writes that structuralism, Marxism and post-structuralism are no longer the sexy topics they were, and what is sexy instead is sex. Maybe he is right in many cases, but I don’t think that that is the case with everyone, and I’m sure that not everyone in the past felt that structuralism was sexy.

I also wonder how far new thinking can go? We live in an age where almost anything can be interrogated as part of a student’s studies. I don’t think that this is a bad thing, as long as it doesn’t come to the point where more traditional topics are neglected. However, I do think that if someone has enough of an interest in something, they have the right to look into it more closely, even if I personally don’t find that topic remotely interesting.

Maybe I do not understand this fully, I think Friday’s lecture will help me get my head around this. What Eagleton is saying does make sense, but I’m not quite sure where he’s going with it. Maybe once my part-time job starts I’ll buy the book and find out more!

'Sand, Fear, and Money in Dubai' by Mike Davis

Before reading ‘Sand, Fear, and Money in Dubai’ by Mike Davis, I didn’t like Dubai. Now that I have read it, I really don’t like Dubai. Modern Dubai is a theme park, a completely fake ‘world’, which physically represents the greed, ignorance and selfishness of its creators.

Like I said before, I already didn’t like Dubai - the architecture being built there is monstrous. It doesn’t need to take into account any context, environmental factors, or anything else; because all that matters is that the buildings are a symbol of money. I wonder what will be next after Burj Dubai, or what people will make of this in 50 years time. The idea of building a set of islands that creates a mini world is ridiculous! I don’t know how Rod Stewart (wanting to buy Britain) can take himself seriously! Definitely a case of more money than sense. It is almost laughable.

Unfortunately, it isn’t funny, because behind all of the glamour and prosperity, is a grim reality of exploited workers and dirty money, which most of the overpaid celebrities won’t even know about. The ones that do are probably having too good a time to care. The divide between rich and poor is so extreme, but I suppose this is not unusual. It does baffle me how so many people can choose to be so ignorant to how others live.

Reading this text has really frustrated me, because ultimately a lot of the problems raised are not just about Dubai. Unfortunately Dubai is just an extreme representation of an attitude in many societies across the world. We live in a world where everyone has to be number one. Everyone has to be at the top. Everything needs to be the best, the quickest, the best looking - there isn’t time to waste – if we don’t have these things our lives will be so much worse than that other guy that we’ve never met. It’s really sad that all of this has distracted us from the real. Just like Badiou’s article explains; we are watching a fantasy on a cinema screen, we can’t get sucked in – we need to stand back and look at what is going on in the real world, and in the case of Dubai, it’s pretty terrifying.

Revisiting Badiou

Before I start writing about this week’s text, I thought I’d briefly revisit Badiou.

One of the most interesting points raised in the lecture for me, was that we have completely lost touch of the real, as we are no longer free thinkers. Everything around us has been defined. Everything seems to have an explanation, and it seems to be impossible to detach ourselves from a way of thinking that has been built into us throughout our whole lives by the society that we live in.

This is something that I have thought about before in terms of understanding what happened to create life (i.e. before the big bang). This may be completely off of the point, but there is a trail of thought that leads to this! I completely accept that we can never know exactly what happened, as we have no way of comprehending it. How can we completely understand something if we are limited by words and numbers, which are simply tools that we have created ourselves? We define everything using these tools, but there must be limits to how much these can explain. In this case, I think it is impossible to ever understand what is the real.

Alain Badiou’s ‘This Crisis is the Spectacle: Where is the real?’

I have just finished reading the first text for Theory 1 – Alain Badiou’s ‘This Crisis is the Spectacle: Where is the real?’

I wasn’t expecting to be reading texts like this at the start of the Theory course, but I’m glad that I am. Politics, the financial crisis, and everything else that goes along with it, has been something that I have always wanted to know more about. Unfortunately, in the past I haven’t given my time to reading into these topics, and only just keep up-to-date with what’s happening in the world by watching the news every now and then, and flicking onto the BBC news home page. As soon as I have started to find out more, I have been distracted by something else, and too many references to things that I do not know enough about stop me from fully understanding what I am reading.

Now I am being ‘forced’ to learn about it, and I like it. As I read through this text I kept looking up definitions, and looking into the histories of different political groups, and actually enjoying learning about it!

Badiou’s text has really made me think. He seems to simplify and clarify everything that that I have been hearing about briefly in the news. His ideas make sense, and make me question our Government’s interests. However, I am only just getting in to this – I have a lot to learn. I do not want to make a judgment too soon, as I tend to be quite easily convinced by a strong argument like this. I hope that we continue to read into this more in our theory lectures, and I want to make more of an effort with researching in my own time.

Hopefully, it won’t be long until I can confidently form my own opinion on all of this, and completely understand these important issues.