Piling On
Poor old Theory. It’s getting attacked from all directions these days. (Hurrah! Oh that’s not kind. But hurrah!) We read Dawkins on the subject a couple of days ago, and yesterday saw that Theorists were almost absent from Prospect’s List of Top Intellectuals, and now here’s the Australian and the New Statesman joining in. (Hurrah!) Poor Theory, how sad. (Good for us though. Perfect timing for dear Dictionary of Fashionable Bollocks, eh.)
Both articles are really quite scathing. (Hurrah! Now stop that at once or I’ll take the keyboard away and send you outside to play.) Really quite unmealymouthed.
Drat. Between the time I linked to the NS article in News, and now, the NS has (I guess) stuck the article in its paid section. At least, I could read it an hour or two ago and can’t now. So won’t be quoting from that one then! You’ll have to take my word for it (unless you’re a subscriber of course) – it was not bland or ‘respectful’. Neither was Luke Slattery in the Australian:
This sounds, I admit, like a specialist subject. But nothing could be of more universal interest than knowledge, learning and education…The disturbing thing is that once theory poured into the academy, it set like concrete. By the mid-’90s it had become a suffocating orthodoxy. A professor confided in me around that time that theory had become the desiderata of all new work in the humanities – it was the only way of being intellectual. In this period I began challenging theory in print, and then parrying the many histrionic responses from academics who seemed to think theory was above criticism (certainly from a journalist). In hindsight it was not theory that I found so alarming (a few weeks ago I found myself re-reading Barthes); it was the servility of its academic acolytes, the herd mentality of entire branches of learning, and the fragility of intellectual pluralism.
Yup. Some Theory is quite good, if one can manage to read it at a distance from the baa-ing of the sheep. Some of it, on the other hand, isn’t. But, poor thing, it seems almost cruel to say so now.
And speaking of the Dictionary (yes we were, right when you dozed off) – I got a copy yesterday. Of the bound proofs. It looks – well I just can’t tell you. Elegant, gorgeous, stunning. And you can leaf through it. Just imagine. You can flick through the pages, if you see a cross-reference you can go right to it. It’s so easy. Really, seriously, it is a beautiful typeface and layout. You’ll like it.
When that “Theory” stuff started coming out and spreading, I puzzled over it and wondered what exactly its attractions could be. The best explanation I could come up with is sociological: it serves as a self-referential code for the autonomization of institutional elites.
Absolutely, John. Not dissimilar to the rights of interpretation assumed by mullahs in Islam, rabbis in Judaism and the Pope in Catholicism. And, judging from some of the other articles linked today, the kind of lock-hold that the Bush administration wants to achieve over science – even to the extent of ordinary phrases like ‘sound science’ suddenly taking on special (hermeneutic?) meaning.
Yep. Though that doesn’t tell us why one elite is attracted while others are not – why theory was hot in some disciplines and rancid orange juice in others. There I tend to think Rebecca Goldstein’s witty formula about the inverse relationship between solidity of discoveries and desperation for self-presentation is useful. Physicists feel zero need to be trendy, people in literature departments feel an almost infinite need. Seems plausible to me. (I’ve known quite a few presentation-obsessives in literature departments. Anecodtal evidence, but indicates why I find it plausible at least.)
Actually, in contrast to Chris Whiley’s account, “post-structuralism” is anti-hermeneutical, laying claim to a radical “skepticism”, whereby all meaning is ruptured, incommensurable with any world, impervious to communicability, (since, according to one version, meaning is only the “effect” of the deployment of material signs in particular contexts.) Hence, it is the very opposite of fundamentalism, the insistence on literal and inerrant meaning, which is to say, its complicit or mutually generating doppelgaenger. By contrast, I think there is a fundamental need for hermeneutics, for translation and interpretation between different languages and lingos across differently situated experiences.
The tendency, in modern, highly differentiated social structures, for institutions or “social subsystems” to seek autonomization and “closure” through an operationally self-referential code is by no means unique to academic literature departments. No profession has a monoploy on professional deformation. Aside from “superstring theory”, which bears some resemblance to the anti-metaphysical metaphysics, the view from outer space, of post-structuralist “anti-humanism”, physicists might still entertain neo-positivist views, which are an expression of faith in the “autonomy” of science, or be prone to causal reductionism, (“the theory of everything”). Such a widely distributed tendency to institutional autonomization is one of the real, “material” factors contributing to our supposedly “postmodern” condition, that is, to the collapse of the public sphere, wherein matters were supposed to be deliberated and decided in common, with respect to a commonality of fate and common destiny.
With respect to the former currency of post-structuralism, perhaps it is best, over against its own conflations, to distinguish the literary aspect from the philosophical/political aspect. (It is noteworthy that, with the exception of the egregious Dr. Lacan, who was very much the godfather of the racket, most of the French leading lights of post-structuralism were trained philosophers, whereas its Anglo-Saxon reception was taken up mostly by literary critics, who could not tell a quiddity from an iddity.) On the literary side, the principal objection is the replacement of literary works by “theory”. Whereas one might want to construct a theory of literature for academic or other purposes, as a framework for discussions, the primary task of literary criticism is the interpretation and evaluation of literary works, rather than the treatment of literary works as fodder for “theory”. (Of course, the ready-made schemas and techniques of “theory” do make for a high rate of productivity in interpretations, but unfortunately the interpretations end up so undifferentiated as to occlude any specific point to a literary work.) And broadly speaking, the task of literary criticism is to mediate between literary traditions and formations and the literate public. (Bluntly put, it is the literate public that makes for literature.) But the insistence on the incommunicable status of the literary work, (since it is held to be at once a purely self-referential, autonomous “reality” and a sheerly material artifact), strips literature of its interest, (since its status as something that compellingly communicates something, however indefinable or indeterminate, is why people read literature), rather than articualting the indirect mode in which literary communication functions, (if only to communicate the failure of communication). Finally, the indulgence in “more radical than thou” literary politics, on the basis of on overgeneralization of a de-aestheticized aestheticism, fails to account for the indirect, mediated relation between literature and politics, which not only occludes the real burdens of the organization of collective action, but elides any specific consideration of how literature reflects or can intervene in and influence political processes. The result of such literary- (tempest-in-a-teapot)- politics is neither literature, (which might body forth and express potentials for meaning and experience blocked off by real social pressures and the interests of political power), nor politics, (which involves deliberation on specific courses of action for bringing about or dealing with social change.)
Off to work now. Will try to finish off in 8 hours.
Umm…The Australian is hardly a hotbed of right-thinking intellectualism. It is Rupert Murdoch’s first national newspaper and is renowned for it’s very pro-Bush, pro the war, pro the “white-blindfold” view of history, not to mention a trumpet for RM to get his opinions on the Australian political scene into view. Also a means he can use to lean on Australian politicians to promote his media and business interests.
Independent and hard-hitting journalism? I think not.