Why have the revolutions that theory enacted become an embarrassment?
I have been finding myself a bit puzzled lately by some of the relief that scholars new and established alike are expressing over the death of theory, or at least the waning of high theory with a capital “T” and/or any variety of theoretical “cocktails” in which a conceptual eclecticism obtains. Indeed, I was talking with some equally puzzled colleagues with whom I went to grad school the other night over dinner about the sense that somehow the humanities would be in better shape now—less threatened by obsolescence—if only Theory had never occurred. Many things have been laid at the feet of Theory, most of which have been rightly or wrongly linked to the institutional crisis in the humanities at the moment: bad or obtuse writing; a lost audience in other disciplines; the irrelevance of literary studies to students; the declining authority of literature in universities; an anti-science stance; inappropriate claims for the social or political function of cultural forms. Theory has not left us with an embarrassment of riches. Instead, it is just plain embarrassing, sort of like the fashions we once wore but which we now find contemptibly out-of-date (Parachute pants? Ugh!).
So to reiterate: Why? Does it really make sense to be so embarrassed by Theory, or theory, or theoretical mixes?
Or to ask a different question: What might we be displacing onto Theory in making it into an object of contempt? Can really so much be laid at its feet?
Or to turn all of this around in what may be a more productive fashion: Has Theory done anything worthwhile?
I offer these questions up genuinely, and I don’t want to caricature the increasingly anti-Theory stance. I concur with some of what falls under the critique of Theory. A political and social account of cultural forms may not be inappropriate, but it must at least take care to delimit its boundaries. Our “irrelevance” may have something to do with uncomfortably abstract thinking, and perhaps it is time for a more robustly “applied humanities.” Science can make claims that the humanities cannot, and that’s a powerful thing. Jargon does limit who listens to us.
So yes, it makes sense to indicate certain ways in which what we have been doing for the past 30 or 40 years might have something to do with why we are in a moment of institutional crisis now. But I’m also just struck by the anti-Theory atmosphere as a kind of revolt against history, almost as if we wish the history of the humanities for the past 30 or 40 years could be wiped clean. I sometimes get the sense that, for some, if only those 30 or 40 years of Theory had never happened, then we might not be in the moment of institutional crisis we are in today. But is this so? I don’t think so, but it would be interesting and useful to hear some good causal or strongly correlative accounts, especially from those more empirically minded than I!
I want to offer up two perspectives here, neither of them mine, that seem useful in thinking through the moment of theoretical and institutional transition that we certainly are in.
One comes from a history of skepticism I have just begun to read in which the author attempts to struggle with what we should do now that “the moment of high theory…has passed” (14): Christian Thorne’s The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment. Thorne gets theory powerfully right when he writes, “Theory, in short, is philosophy that recognizes itself to be a form of social and historical thinking—the historically changing attempt to comprehend historically changing things” (8). A sentence like this one indicates Thorne’s sympathy and sensitivity to the historical phenomenon of theory that I have suggested others seem to find so embarrassing. In my view, Thorne accurately names what many have understood theory is along with the reason for doing it, whether they thought of it explicitly in Thorne’s terms or not from within their particular theoretical precincts (Marxist, postcolonial, queer, anti-racist, feminist)—almost all of them, as Thorne indicates, anti-foundationalist to the core. But it is precisely this core anti-foundationalism, especially the assumption that skepticism can function as a “political guarantee” for “consistent or coherent political effects” (13), that Thorne seizes upon as an object of knowledge with the passing of high theory. But as he indicates, seizing upon this object need not entail dismissing it. Thorne writes that he does “not [want] to shut down anti-foundationalism, but to find new ways to take its measure. It has come time, I think, to investigate the skeptical categories through which many of us still think, through which it seems we must still think—through which many of us register our outrage at the continuing degradation of our common lives—but whose multiple political valences we do not get to dictate or control, leaving them forever in excess of our utopian imagination” (18).
The second perspective comes from Louis Menand in The Marketplace of Ideas. Menand is not taking the kind of measure that Thorne is calling for, but he nonetheless also offers up a historically sensitive and sympathetic view that dovetails with the history of skepticism Thorne pursues: “What the humanities experienced between 1970 and 1990 was the intellectual and institutional equivalent of a revolution. Despite what some critics claimed, the humanities did not make themselves irrelevant by this transformation. On the contrary: the humanities helped to make the rest of the academic world alive to issues surrounding objectivity and interpretation, and to the significance of racial and gender difference. Scholars in the humanities were complicating social science models of human motivation and behavior for years before social scientists began doing the same thing via research in cognitive science. That political and economic behavior is often non-rational is not news to literature professors” (91). And further: “It is probably impossible, after the revolution, to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Eclecticism seems to be the fate of the academic humanities. But there is no reason why that cannot in itself constitute a claim to legitimacy. If one part of the university is (along with its many other projects) continually enacting a ‘crisis of institutional legitimacy,’ it is performing a service to the rest of the university. It is pursuing an ongoing inquiry into the limits of inquiry. And it is not just asking questions about knowledge; it is creating knowledge by asking the questions. Skepticism about the forms of knowledge is itself a form of knowledge” (92).
Both Thorne and Menand make me think that after the revolution, theory may not be so much of an embarrassment after all. And that we might be better off if we start to wrestle with the legacy of theory in a way that taps into its riches, even if it is no longer to do high theory as it was done at its most intensely skeptical.
To state my conclusion as a question: How, like it or not, has theory shaped your thinking today?
I like that you brought up the contrast between fashion and history here. David Wellbery makes a similar point in his introduction to Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Wellbery quotes Georg Simmel's distinction between fashion, changes over time that are arbitrary and inconsequential, and history, changes over time that matter. Wellbery points out that when theory is dismissed, it's conventionally described as mere "fashion," which is to say arbitrary and inconsequential; hemlines up, hemlines down. (Wellbery does not dwell for long on the idea of fashion, but I believe the idea that fashion is not historical is likely attributable to fashion's status as a feminized category, and is therefore suspect.)
What makes the books you mention so much more substantive than the parachute pants dismissal is that they rightly take stock of theory as part of the history of criticism, toothpaste that can't be put back in the tube, in Menand's slightly disgusting but, I think, apt metaphor.
It's true that for the moment we can only speculate as to how much damage High Theory did to literary studies in the US, having no hard data to go on. But here's at least one piece of anecdotal evidence. I was talking last year with someone who had been president of one of the top research universities in the country, and when I asked why much of the funding had dried up, s/he offered a few standard reasons, followed by three chilling words: "Deconstruction didn't help." So in at least one (important) case, High Theory had a direct negative effect on the perception of the literary humanities at the very highest level.
I agree with many of the reasons you advance in your excellent post. But I would like to add one more. It's not just that Theorists wrote obtusely (and were, in some cases, proud of it!); it's not just that they made wild claims about the status of cultural forms, as you rightly say; it's also that they didn't care whether their claims were true. This cynicism, I think, is the real key to the declining authority of literary study in universities. If even we don't think we are getting it right, why should a university president? And if we're not getting it right (or even trying to), what on earth are we doing in academia?
As I see it, the mistake we literary types made was to carry over the kinds of judgment we bring to bear on aesthetic artifacts into the domain of thought. (I've referred to this elsewhere as "aestheticized cognition.") Instead of worrying whether a given claim (e.g. "e=mc2 is a gendered equation") could possibly be right, we contented ourselves with marveling at its power, its novelty, its uncanniness, etc. These are features that are often sufficient to make aesthetic objects valuable... but not theories. Theories also need to get it right about something.
We ended up with a discipline in which the practitioners (a) downplayed the value of the very objects they were studying and (b) showed no real concern for standards of inquiry.
That, I think, is why "deconstruction didn't help."
I agree with Josh that our judgment of Theory's legacy should center on its validity. Are Barthes, Foucault, Althusser, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Kristeva, Derrida, et al. right, wrong, partly right? Does anti-foundationalism get things right? Does it have a politics? The question of validity is, I feel, somewhat separable from the question of style. This is why I think that anti-Theoretical polemics should only be taken seriously if the polemicist shows an understanding of the theories he or she is taking time to skewer. Saying you "can't read" a certain theorist isn't an acceptable critique. Likewise, the piecemeal use of many theorists isn't necessarily bad if the writer can give an account of how these theories fit together -- of why the writer extracted this or that piece of a system to hook onto some other system or systems. After all, assuming that one must accept a system all or nothing is itself a kind of theology. The whole basis of intellectual work is that we can synthesize something new from what has come before and from new observations and thoughts. So the difference between parachute pants and Michel Foucault is that parachute pants can't be right or wrong. Moreover, if Michel Foucault is right, the fact that he isn't fashionable today -- by definition -- can't undermine his correctness.
Thanks for the comments, Natalia, Josh, and Lee. Natalia, elsewhere I am actually thinking about the distinction and the relation between fashion and history, so thanks for the reference to that introduction.
It is interesting that theory gets--or got--dismissed as so much fashion. And while I wonder if that attitude is still in circulation--after all, I evoked the fashion idea in the first place--it feels like the stakes are higher for some at the moment. Josh is right that there is something chilling in that university president's comment, for all sorts of reasons. One thing it does is confirm my sense that there are institutional pressures and realities behind the anti-Theory stance, some of them about what theory claimed, some, well, let's face it, not.
One of the very real ones with which we need to struggle, and here I think Josh is aligned with Menand and Thorne, is to realize that we need to think through what our relationship to truth is in the humanities, among those who practice more theoretical brands of critique and more practical forms of criticism. I think sometimes the gesture towards power and novelty, the uncanny and the counterintuitive, has the effect of illuminating, of drawing out existing truths and possible truths; at others, it simply is just for the sake of following the fashion of the profession. My question becomes--and this is sparked in part by Lee--how to adjudicate right and wrong (is this the same thing as true?) in taking up theory? It seems to me that qualitative reasoning is distinct in kind from inartistic logos, that settling what is "right" is not always based on the same set of criteria. I don't mean this in a radical sense, that is, I do think there are right and wrong answers, more and less true statements. But isn't it possible that Foucault could stop being right at some point? I guess I am asking whether to be right "by definition" is to be right forever, and whether such a claim is what happens in the practice of ideas, their history, and uses. Don't the humanities operate with some sense that rightness can't always be right, that we can correct, argue, dispute, build? Again, not disavowing the possibilities of truth or being right, just suggesting that these positions may not be so obvious as we want them to be in order to launch polemics. Maybe the point is to be saying that we are commenting on some aspect of reality, that we are invested in forms of truth.
Continuing to see the value of theory does not preclude such comments and investments. I'm just concerned that agreeing with the university president without some defense of where theory has also gotten us--and its mistakes--might not be a more productive position on decades of intellectual labor that enabled many of us to think about both literature and life.
I was at Johns Hopkins when the French landed. When Derrida proclaimed an end to Western metaphysics, I believed him. Still do, in a way. The Foucaultian episteme? Seems a bit like the Kuhnian paradigm. & both make sense. And still, when push came to shove, I opted for what wasn't called "cognitive science" until 1973. The revolution was on, all things were possible, so why not cognitive nets and recursive functions? Let 10,000 flowers bloom. It's a new world.
NOT
Not quite.
I figure that decision may have cost me a career, and I could, with some reason, blame Theory for that. Heck, I do.
But be embarrassed by Theory? Well, given my history, I guess I don't have to be embarrassed by it at all. But that's a side-issue having nothing to do with the main argument.
Remember, half the people who denounce theory and kvetch about badly written literary criticism, half of them want to turn the intellectual clock back to the good old days when the truths of straight white middle-class Western males living in the mid-20th century were taken to be universal truths against which all others are to be measured. Another half have never written squat about literature and so they simply haven't got the foggiest idea of what it's like to analyze a literary text. As for the third half, well, they may have a point, so listen to them.
Theory may have proclaimed itself to be the revolution. But it's not. It failed on that front. Turned out to be the swan song of the ancien régime. The revolution hasn't happned yet. (And if I said that the revolution's always on the horizon, well, then I'd be headed back to Theoryland, wouldn't I?)
But don't be embarrassed by Theory and don't apologize. Take the good stuff and move on. Then, maybe, the "revolution."
I'm not embarrassed by theory, just struck by the atmosphere of embarrassment that seems to surround it these days.
I agree that the issue here is not fashion; it shouldn't matter (to thinkers) whether something is fashionable or not, just whether it's true or not. But of course to say this is to say something radically un-poststructuralist. So there is a bit of "he who lives by the sword dies by the sword" at work here. If one is a consequent anti-foundationalist, one has no grounds on which to assess one theory as better than another (surely it can't be on the basis of its accuracy, since we deny the very existence of accuracy, not to mention question the motives of anyone evil enough to believe in it). So it was inevitable perhaps that poststructuralism lived by the logic of the fashion system -- and died by the logic of the fashion system.
What's really promising about the present moment, I think, is that there are "new big things" (the cognitive turn, for example) but they are valuable for reasons beyond their novelty. My sense is that we are moving beyond the logic of the fashion system, and that this is a really good thing for all of us.
Back to Joel's excellent question: what did we learn from High Theory? What was both true and new? You often hear, for example, that High Theory put in question for the first time the appeal to the author as ultimate arbiter of textual "meaning." But of course the New Critics preceded Barthes, Foucault, et al. in this (and before them, Proust, Mallarmé, arguably Flaubert, Joyce, and others). Or you hear that they were the first to put pressure on the notion of the subject. But again, there's all kinds of precedent for that.
Conversely, some of the new claims High Theory made were simply not true. Thus for example when Foucault claims that the author is a modern invention, coinciding more or less with the creation of copyright laws, he is ignoring the fact that the ancient Greeks were really quite interested in who wrote what (consider all the arguments over the authenticity of the Homeric corpus; consider too Aristophanes's The Frogs, which stages a debate between Aeschylus and Euripides: something completely unimaginable in a culture devoid of the "author function"). And when Foucault adds that the author function was invented to "reduce the great peril, the great danger with which fiction threatens our world," you really have to wonder exactly what danger he had in mind.
I do think that there were some interesting contributions (the notion of the author function is in fact a case in point). But in many, many cases I think we can find better help elsewhere (in Wittgenstein, for example, or in Nietzsche). I'm interested to hear what others think was both true and new in High Theory.
Thanks for putting your finger on what for me is the central problem with High Theory (I love this term, too - like High Magic): the apparent ignorance of its main shapers. I didn't know that Foucault's claim about the invention of the author could be so nicely refuted simply by turning to the Greeks, but it can be equally neatly undermined by recourse to the history of literature in China, Japan, or India, and although I myself am too ignorant to know for sure, I suspect Persia and the the medieval Islamic world might also give him a run for his money.
It's possible that Foucault's claim still has some validity despite this, but why should we, the readers, grant him so much value that we're willing to do half his work for him? The framers of High Theory seem to have worked in such a narrow cultural and historical context that one wonders whether their conclusions can possibly be valid for the rest of the world. And while I have no doubt that some of them can be useful for working on non-Western materials, I also have no idea why I should bother with the difficult work of teasing out the useful material from that which is indissolubly mired in the author's own limited sense of history: why should that be my job and not his?
As someone who entered academia at the tail end of Theory's ascendancy, I encountered it only after it became canonical, and have limited perspective on what caused so many scholars to be so excited about it upon first encounter. Thus I can't really speak to how this all got started, but I wonder, if Foucault's work hadn't been so revered in the academy in general, would we put up with the slipshod use of history that sometimes underlies it (or, let's be fair, the *outdated* use of history, in which the author is less to blame than his times)? Ultimately, I find myself most annoyed with the cult of High Theory for obligating me to do work (the separation of theoretical wheat from historical chaff, as it were) that I really think should have been the responsibility of its authors.
Thanks for this comment, Kate. I might be the resident Foucault-lover here, so I'll pipe up. I think your critique is more than fair on a writerly level; dredging what's powerful out of deeply flawed writing, and determining the limits of a theory that presents itself as universal but which is in fact thoroughly Eurocentric, is hard work, no question, and it always seems like the famous can get away with more handwaving than our dissertation advisors would have tolerated in us.
But isn't this an objection of degree rather than of kind? That is to say, that work of separation is, to a greater or lesser degree, our constant obligation when we read books with theoretical ambitions. And in particular, it's what we always have to do with books that are old, as Foucault's most influential books emphatically are. Part of what distinguishes the humanities from the sciences is an overriding concern with how not to throw babies out with the bathwater--how to recuperate the value of that which is, as you say, outdated. Which is, I think, a good thing, annoying though it may sometimes be.
That brings me to another point that Joel raised in his original post: the notion of embarrassment. Embarrassment may be the result of an intellectual stance, and it's precisely that stance that Joel's trying to pinpoint, but it is, in itself, a feeling. Add annoyance to embarrassment and we find ourselves in a strange academic situation comedy. Are these feelings merely epiphenomenal, or something more?
I do agree that it's an objection of degree. Of course we do this with all our sources, not just the theoretical ones. I personally feel that I don't see enough of it being done with Foucault et cie., but it's possible that's precisely because of the awkward fit of their work with the Sinological material I'm usually working on/reading about - chances are that I'm not reading the work that does the best job of winnowing High Theory these days.
And I don't think the feelings are epiphenomenal. I think that at root they are what drives what we do. In a private e-mail to you yesterday, I said "Crankiness is a very powerful intellectual goad." I was talking about my initial comment above, which I freely admit is somewhat cranky, but it's something I think is true of a lot of my own work. Not that I am a crank, per se (I hope), but rather that it's often a sign that I'm on to something good when I start to feel very strongly positive about it - excited, passionate, what you will. Similarly, I feel like it's a sign of a problem worth wrangling when I get cranky about something I've read. Maybe it just means that I have sufficient motivation to get through the work (and not that the problem itself is inherently good) but I've learned to follow the grump. Grumpiness, crankiness, embarrassment, annoyance: aren't these just the signs of intellectual passion, not only to be expected in people like us but indeed to be embraced? G-d help us if they disappear from our work.
I pretty much agree with you, Kate, except that (1) I'd interpreted your earlier comment about crankiness to be alluding to sleep deprivation (ha) and (2) it seems like one of these feelings--embarrassment--is not like the others. I'll need to cogitate more on the subject, but whereas the other examples (grumpiness, annoyance, enthusiasm) do seem like markers of intellectual engagement, embarrassment seems like the opposite. Which was perhaps Joel's original point?
(I have ulterior motives for thinking about embarrassment, because I'm incubating an essay on embarrassing syntax. What makes a syntactic form embarrassing, you might ask? Well, I'm stumped, which is why the essay has gone nowhere so far. And yet: you've probably read poems that made you say, "oh, no you didn't," for reasons of syntax rather than, say, theme. I know I have.)
Back to Joel's excellent question: what did we learn from High Theory?
It may take a substantial chunk of scholarship over a decade or two to figure that out. It's not as though one can list the Lessons of High Theory and then pick the good ones and toss the bad ones. This is something people are going to have to chew over while looking at some of the new stuff that's bubbling up. These are truths that will have to be negotiated.
"I say nothing, never anything tenable or valid, no thesis that could be refuted, neither true nor false."
--Jacques Derrida, Circumfession.
Indeed, Josh--This embodies what enchanted people about Derrida, and what has now disenchanted so many of us. Are we becoming Fox Mulders, in search of the truth that is out there in literary and cultural critique as we struggle to preserve and reinvent our institutional, intellectual, and disciplinary practices?
I've been meaning to reply to your request for moments of validity and truth-seeking in high theory, but it's been striking me that my "high theory" models for years now have come out of cultural materialism--Adorno, Benjamin, Jameson, Marx, and, most recently, Arendt. All of these folk have a higher investment in truth, causality, and explanation than others, though they--especially Adorno and Jameson--would problematize any empiricism that presumed its objects to be independent of the conceptualizations of those objects beyond their concrete particularity, however necessary such conceptualizations absolutely are. And this, I think, is correct.
On a related note: I recently went to a talk on visualization in the humanities that was arguing against the "aha" moment of drawing a picture of literary history as if the picture is what it depicts. This talk, given by Johanna Drucker, sought to reintroduce some of the lessons of poststructuralism into visualization, to allow some of the presiding assumptions of the humanities--for instance, that time is not linear and empty, but cross-hatched and heterogeneous, a fact which we might bring to bear on humanities's visualizations of time in texts and history--to inflect how we visually model time. She was notably still under the influence of both poststructuralism and cultural materialism, insisting quite persuasively at times that deconstruction had repeatedly reminded us of the importance of the subject, while Adorno had repeatedly warned against the reifying power of visualization. And I think she was actually getting at some tenable truths. Think of her as a productive complement to Franco Moretti's efforts in graphing and mapping. If I've not made it clear yet, what I found most useful in Drucker's talk (and the visualizations that accompanied it) was a reminder that as more empirical models such as visualization find their way into our practices--which I welcome--we would do well to heed some of the lessons we did learn from various high theorists. So when we "map" Europe, say, using trade routes or train schedules the very space of Europe and the time it takes to get across it substantially changes in a way that is relatively unavailable in a standard map of Europe from the 15th century or the 19th century. Or when we map time in a literary text the human experience of temporality starts to look quite different than certain empirical assumptions would want to make.
This is not a full reply to your good question, just some places where your question has reared its head as the school year drew to a close here on the East Coast.
I wouldn't think of theory as a revolution or an embarrassment, but just another moment in history where skepticism, which usually lurks out in the dark margins, thrust its head into the center of things; for my part much of what was deemed so shocking (probably because it was received into English departments, and not the cold halls of the philosophers) was already more potently thought and said by Nietzsche. Reading Derrida and the rest of the French served largely as an amusement, little else.
that is one way to think about it, but whether we like it or not--or were amused or not--Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, and others did much more than make us laugh. Though play is elemental in much of the French theory, that theory has ingrained itself into the ways the humanities think.