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uneasy with abstract thought; it prefers something that’s a little closer to the bone. I think that there’s a danger
that thinking in that way might be on the wane and that certain political advantages of thinking in that way will
also slip by too. On the other hand, I take the point that what happened after the epoch of high theory, things
like postcolonialism and postmodernism and so on, actually was in a certain sense a coming closer to the
ground, to concrete issues, and that’s fine; but I do think that in some way that needs to be combined with a
theoretical perspective, and the danger is that that might be lost.
CB: Do you feel, then, that meta-critical, high theory has fallen out of fashion in the academy? If so, do you have
any thoughts on why this is the case?
TE: I think the answer is yes, but why is trickier, and not immediately obvious. I remember in Oxford, when I
was a member of the English Faculty, we had a big fight to get a theory paper on the syllabus. And we did, and it
was riding high, and all the bright kids were taking it. And then there came a point, suddenly, when they
weren’t taking it any more. I think that had some connection with the political downturn, in however indirect a
way. By the 1990s with the advent of a strong postmodernist current and so on, theory was no longer so sexy –
it was certainly no longer so glamorous. Maybe it was partly, as theory itself argues, that things began to get
stale and they needed to be estranged again, so maybe theory itself suffered that kind of fate. But I suppose also
the return to a general political climate of conservative pragmatism obviously militated against theory quite a
lot, and was partly responsible for it. It’s not as though I’m hoping for an enormous theory revival, you know
that my book will spearhead a global ‘theory among the masses,’ but I do think that a lot of questions were left
unresolved as theory began to wane, so I’ve in a sense tried to raise them again, that’s partly what I’m doing.
RH: For many your work is still associated with a particular political project. Do you think that the events of the
past few years, including those in the Middle East, and the occupy movement in Wall Street and other Western
cities, are part of an increased political mobilisation, but possibly of a different kind?
TE: I’ve argued before elsewhere that just at the moment when grand narratives were off the agenda, suddenly
a couple of aircraft slammed into the world trade centre and an enormous grand narrative opened again that
we’re still living in the middle of: the whole radical Islamic project. Hard on the heels of that, of course, came an
almighty crisis of capitalism, and, as I’ve said before, suddenly a few years ago capitalists were using the word
‘capitalism,’ which is not allowed, you know, you don’t do that. So, in a certain sense they reinstated some of
these issues that they had previously swept under the carpet. They were now asking anxious questions about
the nature of the system, because, again as I’ve said before, one of the effects of a crisis is to render the system
perceptible as a system, which is not good for a system – it denaturalizes it in a sense. On the other hand, out of
that, as you say, have come new kinds of movements all the way from Occupy to the Arab Spring, so it just
reminds you of how very rash and dangerous it is to say that the left is dead and defeated. In my view, socialism
is such a brilliant idea that it would be very hard for it to be quashed altogether; whatever setbacks it’s
endured, whatever monstrous defamations it’s suffered, I do think that there are certain impulses towards
justice and community which are perennial. And they do, as you suggest, take different forms.
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