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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Rewriting Marx « Previous | |Next »
January 25, 2005

Is the spell of modernity breaking?

A quote from Terry Eagleton's After Theory about the juggernaut of modernity:

"There is far too much change around, not too little. Whole ways of life are wiped out almost overnight. Men and women must scramble frantically to acquire new skills or be thrown on the scrapheap. Technology becomes monstrous in its infancy and monstrously swollen corporations threaten to implode. All that is solid - banks, pension schemes, anti-arms treaties, obese newspaper magnates - melts into air. Human identities are shucked off, tried on for size, tilted at a roguish angle and flamboyantly paraded along the catwalks of social life. In the midst of this perpetual agitation, one sound middle-aged reason for being a socialist is to take a breather."(p.8)

This is a rewrite of Marx's all that's sold melts into air passage in the Communist Manifesto, that classic nineteenth century account of the impact of global capitalism on nations and populations.
As contemporary western subjects we experience the globalising world through a modern consciousness. No matter what our history or tradition ours is a modern gaze.

What I find interesting about Eagleton's 'After Theory' is this reviewer's reconstruction of Eagleton's response to this juggernaut and the end of culture theory as a criticsm of modernity in 'After Theory.' William Deresiewicz says:

"Eagleton articulates a set of ideas about the nature of human happiness and of the collective life necessary to achieve it that is often persuasive and beautiful. From Aristotle he takes the notion that happiness is not, as capitalist ideology insists, a matter of achieving wealth or success or indeed any goal but of fulfilling one's nature as a human being, the flourishing of one's innate capacities for excellence and virtue.

But if the good life means becoming more fully human by developing the virtues, it takes both strenuous practice (one becomes brave or compassionate by being brave or compassionate) and the social conditions that make such practice possible.

Ethics, in other words, is a subset of politics. "If you want to be good, you need a good society," Eagleton writes; "nobody can thrive when they are starving, miserable or oppressed." A true ethics is thus a materialist one, a morality not of feeling but of acting: feeding the hungry, comforting the sick."


Eagleton is rediscovering the classical philosophical roots of Marx. About time.

Is this not a rebirth of an alternative discourse to that of the modernist, scientific Marxism that Eagleton so eagerly embraced and wielded in the 1970s? Can I presume that Eagleton has dumped the science?

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:32 PM | | Comments (0)
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