The subject of 'Theory' seems to have attracted several people's attention recently, including John Holbo, philosopher Jonathan Derbyshire and polemicist Oliver Kamm. As these all mention Terry Eagleton, it might be worthwhile quoting Eagleton's opening remarks on theory from this book:
“The economist J. M. Keynes once remarked that those economists who disliked theory, or claimed to get along better without it, were simply in the grip of an older theory. This is also true of literary students and critics. [..] Some students and critics also protest that literary theory ‘gets in between the reader and the work.’ The simple response to this is that without some kind of theory, however unreflective and implicit, we would not know what a ‘literary work’ was in the first place, or how we were to read it.”
What passes as spontaneous insight and theory-free close reading is shot through with the reified or shrivelled remains of earlier theories, which have now become mere second nature and therefore invisible/unconscious. The first task of Theory would then be to reverse this process and to demonstrate the theoretical genealogy of the naively 'pre-theoretical' standpoint. Thus, those who are 'spontaneously attuned to the text' and with a real 'feel for literature' are retrospectively revealed to have been Liberal Humanists (or whatever) who use literature endlessly to to re-tell the same old story or to extract conclusions anticipated or even generated by their own unacknowledged 'method'.
This indeed would seem to be the starting point of Theory - the naive, immediate stance is a exposed as a lie. The anti-Theory allegation that literature should not be 'contaminated' with politics or conceptual assumptions presupposes precisely what is at issue - the claim that 'contamination' was there from the start.
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Is to ‘theorise’ simply to reflect rigorously upon one’s assumptions – concerning both the object of study (‘literature’ for example) and the method employed – and to engage in detailed analysis only after or in conjunction with such reflection? If this is the case, then any academic discipline without ‘theory’ would scarcely be a discipline at all and the opposition to theory would be baffling.
But the objection (or ‘resistance’) to theory is seldom theory in this sense. More typically, it refers to a phalanx of mainly ‘imported’ theories which have become increasingly influential in academia throughout the past 30 years or so. These are, very broadly: Marxism (in various guises), psychoanalysis and ‘deconstruction’. If what unites these various ‘theories’ or schools is equidistance from (what had been) orthodox criticism, then ‘Theory’ would hardly be a particularly coherent or useful category. I might seem odd, for example, that various theories, such as American New Criticism (Indeed, this omission might seem to reinforce Eagleton’s Keynesian point), seem to escape the anti-theory arguments altogether.
It might also seem that this concern with ‘theory’ is a rather Anglo-centric one, if one thinks of how, in Germany and France, for instance, theoretically and philosophically informed criticism has long been the norm. The brilliance of Benjamin’s analyses of Kafka and others, Adorno or Bloch’s thinking on and by literature, or the meditative essays of Blanchot, are all testimony to the rewards of a theoretically informed criticism.
The repeated objection to the various theories grouped under ‘Theory’ is that they typically act as no more than a conceptual template which is ‘imposed’ on the text, and which fails to reflect or respond to the text’s specific textures and rhythms – that they fail, perhaps, to recognise the extent to which literary texts (maybe unlike other objects of study) actually dictate or re-invent the criteria by which they are experienced and assessed. This is fine, although the implicit definition of literary objects, as things with their own singular ‘grain’ and demands, is itself a theoretical conclusion and one expressed very eloquently by the eminently ‘theoretical’ Adorno (amongst many others). It’s true that there is nothing more tedious than a critic ‘discovering’ in a text, yet again, an illustration of Lacan’s concept of the Imaginary. But this is hardly a problem with ‘Theory’ per se, and is more an amateurish ‘application’ of theory. Besides, the older ‘pre-theoretical’ approaches can be equally guilty of this – finding in a text yet another instance of man’s tragic dignity or whatever.
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It seems to me that while the mechanical ‘application’ of theory or the use of texts to ‘illustrate’ pre-decided theoretical concepts and conclusions is indeed a tedious and undesirable aspect of current academic work, it is not really feasible or desirable to ‘subtract’ theory and get back to some putative ‘unmediated’ relation to texts. What is needed, for one thing, is a reminder that not only can theory open up and illuminate texts in new and various ways, but also that texts can in turn question and contribute to theory. It struck me, for instance, reading Deleuze’s excellent book on Proust, that Deleuze was not simply ‘applying’ theory/ concepts to Proust’s text, wasn’t reading the work according to the logic of pre-formed concepts, but actually generating concepts out of the text itself. His conceptual armoury was being innervated and refined by the challenge of Proust’s text.