Saturday, August 13, 2005
(11:14 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Against My Better Judgment
I haven't read all the comments on this thread, but at the risk of repeating: if the anti-Theory crowd were to take John's advice and take on the best and most rigorous examples of theory, then there would be no grounds for dismissing the movement as such. Not everyone is going to like their style or agree with their arguments, but I would argue that a fair assessment would indeed conclude that Paul de Man, Jonathan Culler, Hillis Miller, Frederic Jameson, Judith Butler, Stanley Fish, Slavoj Zizek, etc., are "the real thing." It's not just for show -- they are really developing real ideas, and simply dismissing them out of hand is a mistake. This is not to say that they are inevitable or that everyone will find their ideas useful or that it is morally wrong not to read these authors -- just to say that people who value these thinkers are not prima facie trend-sucking dilletantes.The problem, however, is that certain permutations of the anti-Theory argument address not "Theory" as such, but certain instinctive moves through which literary scholars produce tedious, bad impersonations of such scholars. Though particular Theorists may be objectionable, the real problem is the institutionalization of stylistic and argumentative moves that not everyone can really pull off. Thus, a certain glut of unreadable prose is produced. That's regretable. It might be better if people were more inclined to write straightforward expository prose in most situations, simply trying to elucidate a piece of writing (or other cultural artifact). I would say that, by and large, that is actually what most literary scholars do, in my admittedly limited experience. Modern Fiction Studies, for instance, does not strike me as a journal that is glutted with Theory -- the bulk of the essays are examples of straightforward literary criticism. (I could name other examples, but it's frankly been a while since I needed to draw upon lit journals.)
This is a point that Chun repeatedly made back when he was with him: the Theory-whores actually are not representative of the discipline as a whole. The "hottest" (i.e., hegemonic) work may still be Theory-based, and certainly there is now an expectation that any English program will deal with Theory (since it's, you know, part of the history of the discipline at this point) -- but the kind of workaday literary criticism that John Holbo wants to see really does continue to go on. And although I'm not keeping up with the literature anymore, I'd be willing to be that English departments are still going to produce figures of the stature of a Jameson or Fish.
AFTERWORD:
I'd just like to note, in closing, that people generally seem to me to misunderstand the term "hegemonic." They seem to take it as meaning "dominant" in some straightforward way, when in fact, the entire point of the concept of "hegemony" is that one exercises power to a degree that is disproportionate to one's means. Thus, the United States is a "global hegemon" precisely insofar as it does not directly rule the world. Arguably, then, the way to deal with a hegemonic power is not to allow it to control the terms of the debate -- hegemons thrive on attention!
So maybe the Counter-Anthology of Good Literary Criticism would be a better idea than, say, Theory's Empire.
