Graduate school in literature does not lend itself to a healthy life balance.  There are no nights or weekends off, and the insular, neurotic culture of most graduate English departments makes it easy for the line between academic work and one’s sense of self to disappear.  I’ve gotten to the point at which literature has even infiltrated my procrastination.  While ostensibly writing seminar papers last June, I found myself engrossed in a handful of lit-mag articles declaring and reflecting on “the death of literary theory.”  The academic establishment confirmed the diagnosis: an Amazon search yielded two different books titled Theory After Theory; the British academic Terry Eagleton, once a champion and popularizer of literary theory, simply wrote After Theory.  The consensus appeared to be that we were living in a post-theoretical age, and nobody seemed to know what’s next.

With my fragile grad-student psyche, I found this deeply troubling: in one way or another, theory has been the lifeblood of literary study for decades.  To study literature critically was to do theory at some level, whether you wanted to or not.  Even if you’re not rigorously or explicitly “theoretical,” you have no choice but to be at least conversant; catchwords and phrases like “deconstruct,” “symbolic order” and “abjection” have become so much a part of the way academics (and for that matter, many members of the educated class who aren’t academics by profession) talk about literature that you can usually expect your audience to know what you mean without citing Derrida, Lacan or Kristeva in your footnotes.  So it seemed that these smug literary journalists and scholars had just declared much of my critical vocabulary – and by way of extension, my personal epistemology – obsolete.  Was theory really dead? What did this mean for academic literary criticism?

As my miniature crisis of faith unfolded in my head, I realized I needed to answer a more basic question before I could sort all this out.  In Donald Rumsfeld’s terminology, I had come upon an unknown unknown, something I didn’t know I didn’t know.  For theory to be dead, it seemed, there needed to be some kind of definable methodology called “theory” that was no longer acceptable to apply.  But for something that I’ve more or less eaten, slept, and breathed for the past year, it was remarkably difficult to pin down: just what was “theory” in the first place?

Given the supposed postmodern skepticism of grand narratives, scholars and commentators on the life and death of literary theory in the twentieth century have evinced a remarkable fondness for origin myths of their own.  In its quick-and-dirty version, the story goes something like this:  in 1966, French philosopher Jacques Derrida attended a conference at Johns Hopkins University on structuralism, the linguistic theory fashionable at the time that gave us the distinction between signifier – the word – and signified – the thing the word represents.  Derrida’s now-famous paper argued against the possibility of truly stable or “centered” meaning: since we can only explain our words by using more words, language can never access the signified, the thing itself.  We can never really say what we mean.

The conference at Johns Hopkins scandalized the academic world.  Today, it’s seen as a watershed in twentieth-century intellectual history not only because it marked the arrival of “post-structuralism” in the United States, but because it opened the floodgates for the dominance of European continental thinkers, particularly French ones, in American intellectual life.  Over the next two decades, names like Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, and Jean-Francois Lyotard took on an almost superhuman significance in literature departments across America – certainly more so than they ever did in their home country.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, the American academy metabolized the thought of its European counterpart and spawned a set of critical approaches anyone who’s taken a college literature class in the past 30 years will have heard bandied about: feminist, Marxist, and psychoanalytic criticism; post-colonialism, queer theory, and New Historicism, to name a few.  These ever-more-numerous “-isms” frequently cross-pollinated, usually sharing an avowedly leftist politics and an aggressive, sometimes borderline-pathological skepticism of sweeping categories like “truth,” “objectivity,” and “universality.”  The irony of it was that, for all its resistance of absolutes and of grand, totalizing explanations, theory seemed to be able to explain everything in terms of language and power.  Whatever the object of analysis, a theoretical reading (and most theorists would insist on the term “reading;” it was, perhaps arrogantly, a key precept of twentieth-century theory that all cultural phenomena were made of the same signifying building blocks as a literary text) exposing encoded ideologies was ready at hand.

In retrospect, the smugness that characterized theory in its glory days looks both like a compensatory mechanism and a tragic flaw.  The various obituaries for theory circulating online and in academic journals see theory’s political entrenchment as a response to the waning of left politics in the United States after 1968 – Eagleton pithily calls theory “the continuation of politics by other means.”  Indeed, as the century slouched toward its end, things were looking increasingly grim for the American left:  the Vietnam war ended bloodily and ignominiously under a Republican president, and in 1984, a union-busting thug rode an electoral landslide to a second presidential term.  In these dark times, the academy kept the radical hopes of the 1960s on life support.  Instead of storming the barricades, academics consoled themselves by deconstructing patriarchy in Jane Austen or explicating the proto-Marxist implications of the Canterbury Tales, with half-baked arguments about “stakes” tacked onto their introductory sections.

Their language became increasingly performative, technical and specialized; for many theorists and theoretical critics, the odds were that if you could understand what they were saying, you already agreed with them, and if not, you often felt beaten into submission by five-syllable words.  Theory became notorious for its esotericism.  This reputation wasn’t wholly unwarranted, but it marks one of the saddest ironies in the story of literary theory.  As Eagleton and others are quick to point out, much early theoretical work emerged from an intimate dialogue with the grassroots radicalism of 1960s Paris.  Foucault was known to have joined student sit-ins, and protestors on the streets chanted “Marx, Mao, Marcuse.”  But as theory saturated academic discourse more and more thoroughly, it eventually became so recondite that even some humanities graduate students (I know a few) began to avoid it for its perceived difficulty.

To be fair, many of the concepts developed by the major theorists were so novel and complex that they needed lexicons of their own.  Nor would it be correct to say that politically driven scholarship was just about soothing insecure, white-guilt-ridden professorial egos.  The better scholars frequently offered convincing, well-reasoned justifications for their then-unorthodox projects, and made real contributions to academic inquiry.  They were definitely onto something; it was the fact that they knew it, and didn’t always deign to explain it simply enough for the rest of us, that often made them so frustrating.  Their confidence created an air of grand possibility, but also contributed to some of theory’s greatest derelictions.

Opinions differ as to the exact moment of theory’s supposed death, but it’s generally agreed that a confluence of events in the last few years of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first marked the end of theory’s glory days.  In 1987, a few years after his death, major post-structuralist Paul de Man was found to have written for a Nazi newspaper during World War II.  Though allegations of de Man’s anti-Semitism have since been called into question, the betrayal the leftist academic establishment felt lingered.  It was a reminder that theory was not necessarily morally unimpeachable.

The next major blow came in 1996, when physicist Alan Sokal submitted a hoax article to a prominent humanities journal.  Sokal purported to argue that a host of established scientific concepts are nothing but ideological constructs, presenting several pages of jargon-laden, highly referential nonsense as evidence.  The article was published.  After publicly announcing that he’d pulled one over on the editors of the journal, supposedly proving that intellectual rigor had taken a back seat to ideological flattery in theoretical discourse, Sokal touched off a firestorm of debate about scientific authority and became a hero for anti-postmodernists.  If it wasn’t exactly the fatal blow for theory, Sokal’s stunt undeniably shook a humanities academy that had been resting on its laurels for some time.

But perhaps the biggest contributor to theory’s death has been, well, death.  The ‘90s and 2000s saw the deaths of almost all of the big first-generation French theory “stars,” and the inevitable breakup of the tightly-knit critical milieu they had created.  While a few heirs apparent – Agamben, Badiou, Zizek, Negri, Ranciere – continue to work in a similarly abstract and ambitious vein, they’re too diffuse in intellectual orientation, and not bombastic enough, ever to command the stage as completely as the French theorists did.  Their theories, while often brilliant, lack the kind of grandiose sweep needed to spawn entire schools of thought, and their actual subject matter tends to be too esoteric for them to play well as public intellectuals (Agamben draws on minor clauses in the ancient Roman legal code, and Badiou insists that his readers have a sophisticated understanding of mathematical set theory).  In the academy at large, while there’s a keen sense that post-structuralism has burned itself out, efforts to move beyond it have been halting, and often feel contrived to fill the need for a Next Big Thing.

So what does it mean when critics say that theory is dead, and where do we go from here?  For some, like Sokal, the death of theory would mean a welcome return to intellectual responsibility after an era of hubristic decadence.  But insufficient rigor is far from unique to theory; one can do bad philology – or biology – just as easily.  In these kinds of discussions, “theory” tends to signify a sort of debased language fetishism that formulaically purports reductive, one-size-fits-all answers to complex humanistic questions.  To be sure, theory has been abused in this way.  But theory isn’t just post-structuralism, and it’s certainly not just derivative second-generation post-structuralist criticism.  While humanities scholars may not be explicitly Lacanian or Derridean anymore, theory taught us a way of thinking about literature that we’ll never fully leave behind.  In a history seminar I took last winter, we spent the majority of each class period picking apart arguments for implicit assumptions and biases, internal inconsistencies and self-contradictions, gaps in meaning – on our own parts as well as those of the authors in question.  If it weren’t such a dirty word, we might have called it deconstruction.  Whether we’re aware of it or not, theory taught us to read with that kind of incisive, thoroughgoing skepticism and reflexivity.  It made us more rigorous, not less.

So if theory might be described as sustained, systematic inquiry in pursuit of the most abstract kind of knowledge – which, paradoxically, is the kind of knowledge with the most wide-ranging implications – theory is alive and well.  That might sound like a meaninglessly vague definition, or like philosophy by another name, but theory is distinguished by its commitment to reading.  Theory privileges the text, and its commodious inclusion of virtually all cultural formations in the category of “text,” however arrogant, is still useful both in and outside the seminar room: language is the fundamental stuff of society, and we’ll always use language in ways that aren’t answerable to wholly logical or scientific explanation, and those uses of language will always continue to ramify in the way we understand ourselves and others as human beings in the world.  As long as that’s the case, we’ll never really be “after” theory.

 

 

 


 
 
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