The Weblog: Single Post View

Friday, April 14, 2006

(8:18 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Give my regards to Holbo Theory

At John Holbo's request, I have read the infamous Mock-Platonic Dialogue, his most ambitious statement of his general theory of the Higher Eclecticism (e-mail him for a copy). It is a long dialogue, and as befits its genre, its communication often proceeds by indirect means. Yet, perhaps naively, I am going to comment on it, as if I already knew what was meant by a "text," "reading," "understanding," "dialogue," "Platonic," and "mock."

I should state from the outset that although I am one of the foremost critics of The Valve, I do not belong to an English department nor do I have any particular emotional investment in Theory -- at least not in all senses of the word. I will say, provisionally, and against Holbo, that there are not two, but three:

Critical thinking in general, with a greater or lesser degree of systematicity and sophistocation (Holbo's "small-t theory")
The lackluster, jargony scholarship most often churned out by American literature professors
The sources drawn upon in said lackluster, jargony scholarship, including but not limited to certain prominent continental philosophers

Thus, both Derrida and an overworked Assistant Professor of English at Governor's State University can be considered Theorists. This is equivocation. Though he notes, by way of inoculation, that he will be accused of trying to discredit continental philosophy on the cheap, that does not prevent him from actually trying to discredit continental philosophy on the cheap -- mainly by claiming that Theory is really philosophy, and it's therefore wrong to "exclude" analytic philosophy from the Theory canon. The hypocrisy of this charge could not be more transparent. And in any case, running with the "Theory is just philosophy" thing, it is not contradictory to say both of the following:

In a certain sense, we all do philosophy all the time, insofar as philosophy means critical inquiry, etc.
The following is an anthology of philosophy that does not include the long conversation you had that one night in your dorm room.

In point of fact, the so-called "canon" of Theory is extremely wide-ranging -- including even mutually contradictory views. And as "Socrates" notes, the category of Theory is open-ended, presumably now including Zizek and Hardt/Negri (who are opposed to each other and are both opposed to certain other bodies of thought included within the canon). The fact that one points out that both Deleuze and Quine do "philosophy" does not indicate that the speaker has some kind of totalizing ambition that would pull off the presumably impossible feat of mixing Quine and Deleuze into a heady epistemological tonic. And were one to gain a thorough mastery of even a handful of the thinkers represented in the Norton Theory anthology, one would objectively be an extremely learned person.

I will gladly admit that the gestures toward scientificity or toward a sophistocated professionality founded on the practice of Theory have not panned out. And thank God for that! And I will gladly admit that many of the apologiae for Theory have amounted to little more than the wagon-circling of a discipline that has never been and never will be coherent or straightforward -- even sticking with the "traditional" approach, I find it difficult, nay impossible, to create a rigorous concept that would include spending five years writing a study of, say, William Blake and then spending most of the rest of one's career teaching basic composition.

The excitement surrounding Theory was ultimately a resurgence of enthusiasm for philosophy, which is always at its strongest when it is no longer in its "proper place." It might have been obnoxious in its revolutionary or messianic rhetoric, but it really did represent a revolution. The move toward professionalization and the rearguard apologetics prove what we had already learned by the time Theory first arose: that the institutionalization of philosophy leads inexorably to a tedious scholasticism. This appears to be the case whether one is talking about an institutionalization of philosophy based on exclusion (Actual Existing philosophy departments) or on over-extending one's reach (Actual Existing Theory). Theory failed insofar as, in a certain sense, it succeeded -- it let its love go. That doesn't mean that it wasn't a genuine liberation of thought, at least for a time. And who knows? Something like that may even happen again. Let us hope so -- after all, in our anti-intellectual society, intellectual passion, even if naive or obnoxiously grandiose, is certainly to be welcomed.

That, I suppose, is my objection to John Holbo's general theory of Higher Eclecticism: I don't know whether he hopes so too.

| permalink | Main Page

(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)