Author: Ophelia Benson

A little more on the Chronicle’s newsflash that Theory is hardly at all very much influential or mandatory or orthodox any more.

Meanwhile, at the University of California at Berkeley, Ian Duncan, a professor of English and the department’s chairman, reports via e-mail that “postcolonial, national/transnational, race and comparative ethnicities studies are flourishing” while New Historicism “does not exert the hegemony it did 20 years ago, although I think it’s fair to say it’s been digested by many of us and maintains a strong presence.”

And yet a lot of wacko people go on saying that Theorists seem to be interested in everything but literature – it’s staggering, isn’t it? Why would anyone think that? When postcolonial, national/transnational, race and comparative ethnicities studies are flourishing just as they should and all is right with the world?

“We believe in a broad intellectual training,” says Toril Moi, a professor in the literature program and the Romance-studies department at Duke University. “So that means students should know some theory, right?” In practical terms, she observes, theory has become “part of a cultural-social-historical conversation.”

Well of course it has. It’s quite impossible to carry on any kind of cultural-social-historical tragical-comical-pastoral now stop that right now conversation without ‘knowing some theory’ – by which is meant of course knowing the right some theory, as opposed to the wrong some. Some Foucault and Derrida and Butler not some Abrams and Rawls and Nussbaum. Which just goes to show how distant Theory is from conformity and groupthink and orthodoxy – how endlessly unpredictable it is. It’s pure coincidence that all the emails in this article mention the same few names over and over again and ignore all the others. There’s ‘broad intellectual training’ for you!

Mr. Keith, of Binghamton, cautions that “trying to map out alternative ways of knowing is going to be inherently difficult and demanding.” Complex concepts sometimes require complex terminology, and hurling abuse at theory for its “excessive difficulty has been used too often as an overly quick strategy of dismissing and not engaging.”

There there. There there. We know. It’s so unfair. You guys are so deep, and Deeply Informed, and you’re sooo smart, you know how to do such difficult and demanding things, because you’re so smart, and can use complex terminology – and then people just hurl abuse at you. It’s totally unfair. Obviously you can’t map out alternative ways of knowing by endlessly recycling the same ten writers over and over and over again, without using a lot of complex terminology. Can you?! Of course not. This is hard stuff. This is big, important, difficult, complex, grown-up thinking. Not like that simple easy childish shit that people like philosophers and physicists do, but really complex and difficult – and alternative. Therefore needs complex terminology. Much more than boring old positivists like Hume or Bacon or people like that did.

In his essay “Theory Ends,” Mr. Leitch offers up one final definition of theory: “a historically new, postmodern mode of discourse that breaches longstanding borders, fusing literary criticism, philosophy, history, sociology, psychoanalysis, and politics.” The result, he says, is a “cross-disciplinary pastiche” that falls under the increasingly wide banner of cultural studies.

Yeah. Which is great, because it’s six for the price of one. It’s like one of those all-you-can-eat places, or like a garage sale. Where before Theory you just got the one thing, now with Theory (even though it’s over) you get multitudes. You get a literary critic who is also a philosopher, a historian, a sociologist, a psychoanalyst, and a political scientist. Isn’t that great? Six fields in one! Because Theory fuses them all, you see. It doesn’t draw from these other fields, it doesn’t inform itself by reading and thinking broadly, it fuses them, so that it is in fact just as much sociology as lit crit and psychoanalysis as history. One wonders why the people in the other fields don’t do that. Why don’t historians do that fusing thing so that they too can be six things at once? They must not be as clever as Theorists. Or as Theorists used to be before Theory was over.

Mr. Williams points out that as universities lose funds, the humanities have come under more pressure, external and internal, to justify themselves, “not by saying that we do this high-research thing called theory, which nobody seems to care about, but to deliver the goods in a way that engineering does.”

Oh yeah. High-research. You bet. That’s one of the many impressive things about Theory: how research-driven it is. Funny that it all ends up sounding exactly alike then – unless all theorists do their research in the same place? But then wouldn’t they jostle each other over the archives? But maybe the Complicity & Hegemony archives have very very big print, so that there’s room for all.

So there you are, Theory is over, so it’s time for everyone to stop making fun of it now and let all those nice mappers-out of alternative ways of knowing get on with their high research and their deep informedness and their complex terminology and their fusing of many disciplines. And the sun sinks slowly in the west as we climb the hill, pausing for a last look back at the theorists’ peaceful little village [cue music, fade up]

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education is hilarious. Oh, Theory is so over, what empire, it’s all fragmented, what a silly fuss everyone is making, it says. Then it offers a comment backing up the claim.

First, theory has become so much part of the literary profession that one needs to have some familiarity with the “isms,” no matter which (if any) one embraces most closely. Being labeled a theorist does not advance a career the way it might have 10 or 15 years ago, but theoretical naïveté is a luxury that few aspiring professors can afford. James F. English, chairman and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in an e-mail message that while “it’s become very rare for literature departments to hire so-called pure theorists,” the theoretical movements of the past four decades have “created an intellectual climate in which a whole range of writers (from Kant and Hegel to Lacan and Kristeva) is now part of the conversation within literary study as such.” It is almost impossible to imagine a newly minted Ph.D. going on the job market without some grasp of structuralism as well as of Shakespeare.

Understand? It’s over, but you’re not allowed to not have it – you’re not allowed to wonder what is meant by a ‘range of writers’ that includes Kant – and Lacan and Kristeva. You’re not allowed to have theoretical naïveté – oh god no! But it’s over, you know, so there’s nothing to see here, go home.

Then the article offers example after example after example of how over Theory is.

When she plans her graduate-level classes, Lynn Enterline, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, tends to “organize the course around texts and problems they might raise.” If Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is on the syllabus, for instance, she’ll draw on “theories of the performative” in the work of such thinkers as Derrida and the feminist-psychoanalytic critics Barbara Johnson and Shoshana Felman. “Since I’m interested in questions of gender, sexuality, and the body,” she says, “I tend to work mostly with rhetorical and psychoanalytic theory.”

Ooh! Wish I could take that class! Questions of the body – I do love those. Especially when they got psychoanalytic theory, and the performative, and rhetoric – I can almost hear Judy Butler off in the distance. No theory here, folks.

Her colleagues in the Vanderbilt English department employ a similar strategy in the classroom, she says, even though their research interests vary widely in topic and theoretical affinity. “They’re all deeply theoretically informed,” she says, “but the choices they would make depend on the problems they’re addressing.”

Deeply. Deeply. Because they’re a deep crowd, you know. And informed. Deeply.

Jeffrey J. Williams…calls himself “very topic oriented” when it comes to teaching. Carnegie Mellon has what he describes as a fairly heavy emphasis on theory, and “the students kept coming to me and complaining that they weren’t reading any literature,” he says. His solution? “Now I try to teach hybrid courses.” In a recent course on “narratives of profession,” for instance, he mixed sociology and theories of professionalism with half a dozen novels, and taught Anthony Trollope’s Dr. Thorne alongside a history of the medical profession.

His solution? He declared himself a sociologist pro tem by way of giving the students the more literature they wanted. Of course he did! Because Theorists are all so Deeply Informed that they are experts on all subjects and can teach anything and everything the moment they decide to. Remember Judith Halberstam? Like that.

But those charged with introducing students to theory don’t appear to be trying to throw out Conrad and company. The University of California at Santa Cruz is not known for its aversion to theory. Even there, theory “is never taught in the absence of literary texts, and it’s never taught as if it’s gospel,” says Richard Terdiman, a professor of literature and the history of consciousness. “What we try to do when we teach it is demystify it. Everyone who teaches the intro-theory course required for undergraduates in the major chooses a focus, whether it’s Marxism or queer theory or whatever it is, and tries to get students to see the relevance of the interpretative strategy for their own reading.”

What empire? What empire? Do you see any empire? I don’t see any empire around here. Do you? All I see is a lot of people quietly and omnisciently teaching Theory and sociology and politics and Theory, so where’s the empire?

God, it’s a riot, and it goes on and on like that. I’m out of time, I have to go, but I’ll have to make more fun of it tomorrow. It’s the silliest thing I’ve seen in awhile.

Annals of Thought-crime. Orhan Pamuk goes on trial on Friday.

My crime is to have “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.”…Last February, in an interview published in a Swiss newspaper, I said that “a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been killed in Turkey”; I went on to complain that it was taboo to discuss these matters in my country…If the state is prepared to go to such lengths to keep the Turkish people from knowing what happened to the Ottoman Armenians, that qualifies as a taboo. And my words caused a furor worthy of a taboo: various newspapers launched hate campaigns against me, with some right-wing (but not necessarily Islamist) columnists going as far as to say that I should be “silenced” for good; groups of nationalist extremists organized meetings and demonstrations to protest my treachery; there were public burnings of my books.

Most of the ingredients, brought together in one nasty brew. Stupid idea piling on stupid idea until you end up with a great stack of nonsensical absurd hollow pseudoideas. The idea that there is such a thing as Turkish ‘identity,’ the idea that it shouldn’t be ‘denigrated,’ the idea that it shouldn’t be denigrated publically, the idea that doing so is a crime worth three years in prison, the idea that Pamuk should be ‘silenced’ for committing such a crime, the idea that he should be permanently silenced for doing so, the idea that what he did is ‘treachery.’

My detractors were not motivated just by personal animosity, nor were they expressing hostility to me alone; I already knew that my case was a matter worthy of discussion in both Turkey and the outside world. This was partly because I believed that what stained a country’s “honor” was not the discussion of the black spots in its history but the impossibility of any discussion at all. But it was also because I believed that in today’s Turkey the prohibition against discussing the Ottoman Armenians was a prohibition against freedom of expression, and that the two matters were inextricably linked.

Well, yes. What Turkey did some ninety years ago was done by an entirely different set of people (which is one reason ‘identity’ is such a bad idea: it leaves the impression that in fact it’s the same people, but it isn’t), but the people forbidding discussion of it now are the people who are alive now, and if they think they’re buffing up Turkey’s current ‘identity’ by doing so, they’re delusional. If they think preventing freedom of expression in order to suppress discussion of a part of Turkey’s history is a sensible, useful, productive idea, they’re infatuated.

What am I to make of a country that insists that the Turks, unlike their Western neighbors, are a compassionate people, incapable of genocide, while nationalist political groups are pelting me with death threats? What is the logic behind a state that complains that its enemies spread false reports about the Ottoman legacy all over the globe while it prosecutes and imprisons one writer after another, thus propagating the image of the Terrible Turk worldwide?…Last May, in Korea, when I met the great Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe, I heard that he, too, had been attacked by nationalist extremists after stating that the ugly crimes committed by his country’s armies during the invasions of Korea and China should be openly discussed in Tokyo.

They must all have offended someone. Never, never offend anyone – or else.