Is Theory Dead?

There is a sense in many humanities departments across the country that Theory is dead. The news was not announced by a Nietzschean madman, nor did it spread from one university to the next in a panic wave. The death of Theory, if confirmed, was rather an inglorious one, a back alley affair involving tenure letters, firings at university presses, and a certain fatigue. More than anything else, the floodgates holding back the frustration of many scholars finally broke. The director of an interdisciplinary program at Stanford recently stood up and said, “I think we should teach the canon: no-one else does.” Stunned, everyone in attendance agreed. A silent revolution had occurred.

But this description is only half accurate. In some schools, they’re still partying like it’s 1999. Graduate students flock to Theory courses, where the syllabus consists solely of works by Frenchmen from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Professors speak of a shifting world in which meanings are unstable and the center cannot hold. Where other scholars seek to resurrect values, they’re busy deconstructing them. Like forgotten soldiers, they’re still fighting the war after the armistice has been signed.

Given that Theory did not suffer a Waterloo or even a Thermidor, however, it is fair to ask whether an armistice really was signed, and whether it is not somewhat Whiggish to assume that Theory has gone the way of past intellectual fads. The fact that these two incompatible perspectives on the state of Theory – it’s totally passé, good riddance, vs. have you read the late Derrida? – can nonetheless coexist does not bode well for the future of the field. Indeed, it is beginning to look increasingly as though Theory will not go softly into that dark night, but rather that the humanities will become engaged in the methodological trench warfare that already defines anthropology and philosophy. It is not hard to imagine a future in which there would be “continental”-style, Theory friendly departments at some schools, and “analytic”-style, anti-Theory departments at others. (In some respects, this is already the case.) Since professors who rode the Theory wave in the ‘80s are now at the peak of their careers, everything suggests that they will in turn hire junior faculty who share their theoretical outlook.

Regardless of whether one wishes to praise or bury Theory, this prospect can only be deplored. As sociologists and spectators of American politics know too well, when positions become polarized, they tend to grow increasingly so. Already both sides of the aisle hurl epithets like “positivist” (from the Theory benches) or “relativist” (from the sick-of-Theory opposition) that either aggravate or harden opposing views. With the rise of the digital humanities, and the inevitable use of quantitative analysis that comes with large data corpora, there is a distinct possibility that, faced with a “relativist” challenge, the technologists will indeed embrace a kind of neo-positivism.

It seems appropriate, therefore, to reflect on what can be done to avoid a drawn out civil war in the humanities. It would be pollyannaish to seek a simple compromise (Theory is allowed on Tuesdays and Thursdays?). There are deep problems with the way Theory has been taught and caught up in academic politics. There is no going back to the ‘80s. At the same time, those who have tired of Theory may still remember how exhilarating it was to first discover those Editions de Minuit books with abstruse titles. To be sure, therein lay not just cultural, but social capital as well: much could be gained by peppering one’s sentences with “as Deleuze says in Mille plateaux...” Still, at a time when enrollment in humanities departments is dropping, and students seem to treat college increasingly as professional school, it is worth recognizing the genuine intellectual thrill that studying Theory can trigger. This means taking a frank look at how and why Theory failed to live up to its promise, and how it could be recast.

Only a handful of born-again Theorists will refuse to acknowledge that the fundamental problem with Theory did not lie so much with the original works themselves (which is not to say they do not have their own problems), but with the ways in which they were used. Derrida can be annoying and mystifying, yet is usually a far more stimulating read than most Derrideans. In other words, the fundamental problem with Theory is that it stopped being theory. Derrida, or Lacan, or Deleuze, were not invoked to question, but to answer. The result was that the research always ended up validating the Theory, in an eternal, feedback-loop return. Theory always won.

One of the reasons that Theory failed to function as theory provides a hint at how it could be reformed. The great theorists of the ‘60s and ‘70s produced works of dizzying interdisciplinarity. They could play fast and loose with their references, but at least they were looking over the fence. Once these other disciplines (chiefly, linguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and Marxist political theory) entered into the Theory discourse, however, the old disciplinary walls went back up. Theorists in the ‘90s were still reading Saussure, much to the surprise of their colleagues in linguistics. If there are still Marxists in the university, they are not to be found in economics or political science departments. While there is no reason that humanities scholars must march in lockstep with the vanguard of other disciplines, intellectual integrity demands that we consider the challenges and debates in those fields. Healthy interdisciplinarity requires regular check ups. Otherwise, humanities departments truly run the risk of becoming, in John Searle’s phrase, the place where bad ideas go to die.

If Theory is to survive, it must fall off its pedestal, and loose the capital. Foucault, Deleuze, and others will always remain a source of intellectual thrills, and should not be packed off to some new Enfer. But they, like every other theorist, should be read against the grain; only in this manner can they sharpen, rather than blunt, the mind. At the same time, the doors of theory must be opened wider: it is a curious parallel that at the very moment humanities professors were exploding the literary canon, they were cementing a most exclusive canon of Theory. Must Althusser or Agamben have the last word on political thought? There is an entire discipline of political theory waiting to be tapped and queried (as Josiah Ober points out in his piece in our inaugural issue). Symbolic thought is a fascinating topic, but wouldn’t it be worth considering, say, Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics instead of just Saussure’s?

If we are to have a true theoretical reformation, however, it must cut deeper than methodology. Over the last few decades, Theory has left a deep ideological imprint in the minds, perhaps even subconsciouses, of many scholars. Why else do we end up telling the same story over and over again? A story of resistance to power, in which the oppressed are once again endowed with agency, and struggle to overthrow the selfish political and economic structures of class and race. In this story, the State is always the villain, and power something to be avoided at all costs. This is a good story, a noble story; it was a story that needed to be told, if only to challenge the Whiggish narratives that came before. But those narratives have largely been dispelled, at least in academia (and frankly, we are our only audience now). There is no point preaching to the choir: we are all reconstructed. Moreover, this story has reached the point where it has become more of a grand récit, a myth, one might say, of residual Marxism. As a myth, it carries great authority and even transfers onto our own scholarly endeavors a certain revolutionary grandeur (although as Terry Eagleton once pointed out, there is a big difference between writing Marxist literary criticism and engaging in Marxist politics). And as good and noble as this story is, it is not always the true story. Marx and Engels may have wanted to claim Balzac for their cause, but that does not change the fact that Balzac was a Catholic royalist. It is time we told some new stories.