Road Closed

picture from here

Ladies and Gentlemen, I've decided to have a break from Charlotte Street, for various reasons. So, it will be closed until December. I will, however, still be posting at Long Sunday. Comments at CS remain open, as do the archives

May I also just draw your attention to Mark Thwaite's revamped Ready Steady Book.

28 August: : Some new posts at Long Sunday: here, here and here.

Coda to coda

Below are just a couple of things rescued from the haloscan. Not a real post, then, and I'm not opening the comments. Any points/ questions and you can of course email me (mark_b_kaplan[at]hotmail[dot]com

Val Cunningham himself concedes that Theory is a ‘huge flag of convenience’. What he means by Theory is, he says, what gets taught as Theory in departments across the country. Hmm. Strictly speaking, what gets taught as Theory is anything from the Russian Formalists to Lacan to Reception theory to Walter Benjamin. The fact that a category has institutional ‘security’ in no way makes it conceptually coherent. (For what it’s worth, Val Cunningham was - shrewdly? - pronouncing himself and English studies ‘post-theory’ back in 1989.)

A recent ‘introduction to Derrida’, inevitably ‘one in a series’, carries the following blurb: “This series demystifies the demigods of Theory.’ Other ‘demigods’ in the series include Heidegger, Jameson, Said and Stuart Hall. The organising ‘concept’ here is little more than a colophon. Something that can be marketed as Theory is more likely to sell than if it was labelled ‘historiography’ or ‘philosophy of language’. Consequently, that a thinker is annexed by ‘Theory’ has more to do with commercial strategy than conceptualisation, and one shouldn’t of course misrecognise the former as the latter.

The institutional pinfold and the publishing colophon, needless to say, need to be examined and their raison d’etre worked out. It is necessary to explain their conditions of emergence etc. But to think that these pinfolds/ colophons deliver to us a ready made concept or denote something like a coherent ‘movement’ is folly.

Incidentally, claims about ‘context’ are I think misunderstood, and this has to do with the unsatisfactory nature of the word itself, which inevitably suggests something like ‘background’ or inessential frame. Thus, reminders that we should look at the context of X category can be met with impatient demands to put aside such peripheral and adventitious stuff and pass on to the thing itself. But the argument about context implies that this ‘context’ is in fact inscribed in the very concept and to such a degree that it is ‘inoperable’. To the extent that a concept opens up and reveals the world in a certain way and from a certain point of view, to the extent that there is, pre-programmed into it, a range of assumptions and implications that cannot simply be shaken off, the concept is the Special Agent of its context and its history. The reverse of this is that the concept is, simultaneously, readable as a clue to the ‘context’ that it serves and reflects. Without this 'context' it is 'bereft of the light that gives it colour'.

Haloscan

note: I was unhappy with the 'coda' post, so have deleted it**. The ensuing haloscan knockabout was, I think, much more revealing and more entertaining, and is produced below. The flavour of the anti-theory position is particularly sharp here:

Sean McCann: "the obvious incoherence of the more polemical anti-Theory positions"

Ah, thank you, Mark! Finally, an acknowledgment of the point you wouldn't concede before.

I wouldn't see the remark about Eagleton's pomo book as being very significant--for two reasons. It's late work and quite different, I believe, in style and sensibility from, say, the Machery or Benjamin stuff. For another, both Eagleton and his one-time American admirers seem to realize that a once perceived affinity no longer exists.

Your argument here is a clever version of Matt's endlessly reiterated point: the claim that there's no there there. This is a strange attitude for a materialist to take. There are recognizable facts of social practice in, at the least, the American academy. They are not in doubt--until, that is, Theory is criticized, when all of a sudden it's pretended that it doesn't exist. Yes, there is vagueness and even incoherence in what Theory entails, just as there quite frequently, in fact rampantly, is in individual works of Theory. (Someone like Judith Butler thinks nothing, for example, of throwing together Foucault, Lacan, Bourdieu, Derrida, Hegel, and Austin in a single work of 100 something pages. A bit of this a bit of that, all hard edges rounded off and incompatabilities resolved/ignored. See, e.g, Homi Bhaba or Lisa Lowe for a similar hodgepodge of big names. The practice is utterly commonplace. An indifference to incoherence is, in fact, one of the hallmarks of Theory.) But that fuzziness does not affect the recognizability of Theory. (There are a lot of fuzzy categories that are perfectly recognizable.) The institutions Scott has mentioned are testimony to this. There are many such. The anthologies, including the Norton are another. The prevalent curriculum of graduate and undergraduate programs is yet a third. The bookshelves of hip book stores (St. Mark's in NYC) is another. The discourse of publication and professional conferences is a fifth. (In those settings, there are names you are expected to know and work you're expected to be able to pretend a familiarity with. [...]
What people mean when they say doing Theory, as I've mentioned several times now, is predominantly poststructuralism and poststructuralist influenced work, with room made for the gentle absorption of various figures who can seem to be read in sympathetic ways--even if this depends on sheer ignorance. [...]Those people are often manhandled to share similar attitudes: assumptions about the non- or weak referentiality of language; about the epistemological and moral dubiousness of realism; about the pervasiveness of power operating primarily through cultural forces (and very rarely arising as a product of economic or political forces); about the terribly dangers of normalization and various informal forms of social enforcement; about the value of isolated acts of resistance to norms; about the subversiveness per se of this set of intellectual assumptions. All this means that in the American academy you can be seen to combine Gramsci, Foucault and Lacan (dubious though that combination should be) and will be called someone doing Theory, but that, if you want to, say, bring Chomsky's TG to the study of meter, no one would ever, ever consider you to be doing Theory. There you have it, a meaningful social distinction that distinguishes t from T.

There are stylistic traits that go along with this set of basic intellectual assumptions--including the kitschiness John H describes so well or the performative grandstanding mentioned by Culler. The premise to be addressing the fundamental features of social reality by practicing a high-test form of literary interpetation (on display, e.g., in CR) is another facet of the quality both Culler and Holbo and Cunningham identify.

To ignore all this requires a determined resistance to acknowledging social reality and, ironically, a kind of anti-intellectualism.

Mark Kaplan: ' a determined resistance to acknowledging social reality and, ironically, a kind of anti-intellectualism'.

Sorry, are these being attributed to me?? It's just that if they are my reply might be different than if they are not.

Anon: keep swinging, Sean, you've got 'em on the ropes!

Roy Genders: 'Those people are often manhandled to share similar attitudes'

Sounds like a matter for the police.

McCann: 'Sounds like a matter for the police'

Oh, for pete's sake, Roy! Objection to intellectual sloppiness = policing? How absurdly melodramatic is that?!

Mark, do I think you're anti-intellectual? No. I couldn't avoid tossing back an intimation so frequently sent my way in recent days. My mistake. That said, I think Matt, say, and Jodi and to a lesser degree CR have staked out almost explicitly anti-intellectual positions. What counts in their view of things is not your argument, but your attitude. [...]

Matt: I'll respect Sean to kindly stop using my name as associated with any sweepingly inaccurate positions as he sees fit. I'm sick to death of this whole anti-intellectual meme you've insisted on foregrounding. Nobody ever accused you of being anti-intellectual. Merely pointing out objectively that "there is a history of anti-intellectualism in America" and wondering where, if anywhere, in this history, and where on the political spectrum (in the absence of any exceptionally visible left critiques of theory or positive demonstrations of something better) _Theory's Empire_ may fall is *not* the same thing as accusing anyone--Sean, say--of being an anti-intellectual.

the premise that there is matter of intellectual affinity among Theorists to consider

Who could ever argue, honestly, against such a hopelessly vague premise? The problem is where one goes with it, the uses to which such a line is being put, the sweeping dismissals without bothering to engage with particular examples, the broad sociology, revisionist historiography, etc. etc.. But I'm just repeating things here now, and I'll stop.

I've "stake out" nothing; you just don't get it. And, quite frankly, you seem rather determined not to get it.

McCann: Sorry, Matt, was I accusing you of something? I should have said I wasn't talking about you, I was just talking about your framework. It's not what you insist you believe, it's just the frame you keep advancing. The anti-intellectual meme, btw, was first put into play by you. You can hardly be surprised if it returns to whence it came.

Agreed, though. You've staked out nothing. That's not your method. No stakes in fog.


Kaplan: I suppose it’s quite amusing. After asking whether I’m guilty of anti-intellectualism and the wilful denial of reality, I’m reassured that of course I’m not anti-intellectual! On this wilful denial, more in a moment.

So, just a couple of things:
"the obvious incoherence of the more polemical anti-Theory positions"

Ah, thank you, Mark! Finally, an acknowledgment of the point you wouldn't concede before

I’ve obviously always thought that the more polemical anti-theory positions were incoherent. Where have I been insisting on their lucidity & consistency? I take you to mean that I was refusing to concede the possibility of a non-polemical position. This is false. See, for example, my response to Scott’s initial comment to T1/t2.

wouldn't see the remark about Eagleton's pomo book as being very significant--for two reasons. It's late work and quite different, I believe, in style and sensibility from, say, the Machery or Benjamin stuff

This is a strange observation. The point was not about the book’s place in Eagleton’s corpus but whether some people seem to think that Theory and Postmodernism/ Postmodern Theory are practically synonyms. On Eagleton, incidentally, the books ‘on’ Benjamin and Macherey (I take it you are referring to Criticism and Ideology) are markedly different from each other, of course, both stylistically and in terms of the presiding influences. I’d say only the Benjamin book conforms to your definition of Theory. Eagleton has always been very critical of postmodernism, certainly well before 1997. He has remained, at some level, and by his own confession, a fairly classical Marxist. Criticism and Ideology is a failrly straightforward eg of Marxist aesthetics.

Now, let me be clear. The post above does little more than record some of my ‘cursory’ impressions and then go on to ask a number of rudimentary critical questions - how are certain definitions compatible, what is the referent of Theory, what kind of a concept is ‘Theory’ – are we talking about a philosophical turn, or the result of institutional dynamics; are we dealing with a ‘Post-modern’ phenomenon in some non-trivial sense. In other words: what exactly is the object under consideration.

When such elementary critical questions are impatiently brushed aside with a brusque ‘tsk, tsk’, and an invitation – or demand- to pass beyond them to a reality which is self-evident and obvious, then forgive me if this very gesture arouses my suspicions (and impatience). The familiarity and self-evidence you speak of is, of course, precisely the proper object of critical thought.

Critical theory as I understand it is always a reflection on the things themselves at the same time as being a meditation on the concepts and categories by which we apprehend those things. So, for example, when thinking about poststructuralism, which you also invoke, we should bear in mind that the concept is largely an Anglo-German invention, and so on.

How this elementary operation, and the broaching of elementary questions can be equated with psychosis (which is what, surely, the perverse resistence to reality is) I have no idea.

McCann: Mark, I'm afraid the primary brushing here has been done by yourself and your colleagues. It's like lugging a train up a hill to even get you guys to admit that there might be a thing called Theory and that to consider it critically might be intellectual feasible and politically legitimate. That's not psychosis [..] It's simply the invention of quibbles in the guise of critical thought.

The remark about concession refers to your "Breaking News" post. Despite your later complicated elaborations, the clear point there was that criticism of Theory is incoherent and dubious. Question decided in advance.

p.s. To remind you of the obvious, no critical questions were brushed aside impatiently at the Valve. If you'll review the discussion there, you'll see that beginning efforts at probing some of them were taken up before the conversation was waylaid by various imputations of illegitimacy or unwisdom.

Kaplan: Thanks for reacquainting me w/ 'the obvious', except I wasn't talking about the Valve I was talking about your post above. As for the Breaking News post, might I suggest - as it seems to have presented you with insuperable interpretative difficulties - you ignore it, for all our sakes.

McCann: Same objection. Since some of the issues you raise were anticipated in my posts, as well as elsewhere, it's clear that I'm not trying to brush them aside--or trying to dismiss them via reference to motivation, psychology, context, hidden or unconscious agenda, or intellectual incapacity, all tactics evident in your posts and in those of your colleagues.

The Breaking News post did not present me with insuperable interpretive difficulties. It's meaning was perfectly obvious despite extensive efforts to obfuscate it away.


Kaplan: Re the monster post, it’s odd that others, coming to the post with the necessary good humour and good sense, were able to grasp its meaning without authorial intervention. What I will happily withdraw is the suggestion that your misreading of the text may have been my fault. Your error first appeared, you will recall, in the ill-advised ‘ad hominem’ post, which you at least retracted, or – rightly - regretted, after most of its rather hasty claims were shown to be groundless. What you might have learned from this episode is that your ‘opponent’ is seldom likely to be so generous as to act out your low and tendentious estimation of him.

Your other assertion, that the meaning of the category ‘Theory’ is perfectly transparent or (again) ‘obvious’, that resistance to this obviousness can only be interpreted as obfuscation, becomes no less false with each iteration. The appeal to ‘obviousness’ should put any critical mind on read alert. Incidentally, none of what I have said assumes or asserts the non-existence of Theory, and so what obscure jouissance you derive from repeating this claim I have no idea

Finally, ‘my and my colleagues’ don’t exist, there is no ‘position’ corresponding to this entity. I speak only for myself and will continue to do so.


An aside: Cunningham himself concedes that Theory is a ‘huge flag of convenience’. What he means by Theory is, he says, what gets taught as Theory in departments across the country. Hmm. Strictly speaking, what gets taught as Theory is anything from the Russian Formalists to Lacan to Reception theory to Walter Benjamin. The fact that a category has institutional ‘security’ in no way makes it conceptually coherent. (For what it’s worth, Val Cunningham was - shrewdly? - pronouncing himself and English studies ‘post-theory’ back in 1989.)

A recent ‘introduction to Derrida’, inevitably ‘one in a series’, carries the following blurb: “This series demystifies the demigods of Theory.’ Other ‘demigods’ in the series include Heidegger, Jameson, Said and Stuart Hall. The organising ‘concept’ here is little more than a colophon. Something that can be marketed as Theory is more likely to sell than if it was labelled ‘historiography’ or ‘philosophy of language’. Consequently, that a thinker is annexed by ‘Theory’ has more to do with commercial strategy than conceptualisation, and one shouldn’t of course misrecognise the former as the latter.

The institutional pinfold and the publishing colophon, needless to say, need to be examined and their raison d’etre worked out. It is necessary to explain their conditions of emergence etc. But to think that these pinfolds/ colophons deliver to us a ready made concept or denote something like a coherent ‘movement’ is folly.


McCann: it’s odd that others, coming to the post with the necessary good humour and good sense, were able to grasp its meaning without authorial intervention.

Yes, e.g., Matt got the point because he was aware, as was I, of the intended mockery. The humor he saw was precisely the smugness I recognized. That was its meaning. You yourself were unable to offer any other coherent account.

Your error first appeared, you will recall, in the ill-advised ‘ad hominem’ post, which you at least retracted, or – rightly - regretted, after most of its rather hasty claims were shown to be groundless.

No retraction was made. I regretted bringing my colleagues into contact with intemperate and thuggish writers like AvW and CR, and I attempted to give you the chance to back off some of the nastier of your suggestions. I stand by every one of the assertions in that post. The Valve's effort to talk about Theory was met with innuendo, contempt, vilification, and least courageously, quibbling and pedantic mockery--all of which congratulated itself on its political bona fides.

[...]

Kaplan: If there are any readers left, other than the impressively indefatigable Sean, who would like to consult my gloss on the Monster post, please see here, here and here
I think it blindingly obvious that I am not proposing that “what would catch a Theory monster [would]be Theory itself”. Anyone having genuine difficulty should email me.

McCann: and good luck to you trying to make sense of it.

Kaplan: 'And that's good night from me',
'and it's good night from him.'

** After receiving an email request, I've now reposted the deleted post at the end of the comments.

The Para-Costives

Suppose we invent a collective name for those people not ‘doing theory’ in Literature departments. Suppose we call them the Para-Costives. Yes, it’s an arbitrary and possibly misleading name. We say: the name ‘Para-Costives’ refers to a cluster of related approaches to literature and other texts. And let us discuss the merits and demerits of Para-costive criticism. Let us say that Para-costive criticism suffers from a lack of coherence and has failed to theorise ‘it’s assumptions adequately. We point out various contradictory Para-Costive claims, the inexplicable gaps in its canon of criticism. But wait. Let those impugned or hailed by the label Para-Costive rally together in self-defence. Let them, in so doing, discover things about what their methods have in common – analogies, themes, and shared assumptions. And so let them start saying things like ‘Which way forward for the Para-Costives’, and editing new anthologies with titles like “The New Para-Costives”. And eventually, as they become older and self-reflexive, conferences will spring up on “What is Para-Costivism?” Let them break away and form their own sub-department, with its own canon and terms of reference. They compile anthologies of Para-Costive criticism. And their enemies, who have lost much ground, will compile a counter-anthology; its cover shows a man shovelling horse dung and it is entitled ‘Symbolic Ordure: Cleaning out the para-costives’

p.s. Theory, a 'house of cards'? nonsense!!

Rhetoric Class

Lenin sends me the following email:

Surely the most obvious entry for Notes on Rhetoric has been missed? Middle class! A letter writer to the New Statesman calls Richard Gott a 'middle-class lefty', Nick Cohen derides 'middle-class left-wingery' (what class does a well-paid journo fall into these days?), someone has just called me a 'middle class trot' etc etc.

So, here's an entry:

"Middle Class. Your opponent, (especially if left-wing or intellectual), exists in a materially and culturally rarefied realm, separate from the masses, whose common sense they scorn. As they are Middle Class, their views are likely to be dippy, unreasoningly and excessively liberal /radical, ill-conceived, insufferably smug, know-it-all, hoity-toity and with all the sympathies on the wrong side. They can be airily dismissed with a bit of common-wi-nowt-tekkin-owt wisdom."

Indeed. How many times must we see this stupid, dishonest gesture rehearsed?

It’s not only the vain, tedious pretence that arguments and viewpoints shared across the population are the preserve of the bourgeoisie (a bourgeoisie defined not by its position in the relations of production, but by its poncey ‘lifestyle’). It’s not the the trotting out of this feeble rhetorical trick in lieu of argument. Nor is it the dull inevitability with which these ‘critics’ of middle-class pomposity are in fact it’s most obvious and embarrassing representatives. Nor is it even the patronising and disingenuous adoption of a ‘robust working class common sense’ from which these attempts at satire are launched (Even though their audience is also middle-class, so that they rely only on some kind of collective class shame or bad faith). It’s that these self-dramatising comedians would never dream of any actual class analysis, any genuine critique of ‘bourgeois values’ or ideology. They’d run a mile before pronouncing something like this, for example:

...what makes them representative of the petit-bourgeois class, is that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter politically.

No, the invocation of ‘middle-class’ and ‘bourgeois’ as pejoratives is all dandy as long as it’s aimed at the Left. That’s the rule. And there are enough scribes who’ve read the script and appreciate the remuneration to pass these stock gestures off as their own spontaneous ideas.

A not unrelated matter. Adam Kotsko has a nice little post on 'Islamo-fascism':

Seriously, "Islamofascism?" Are the terrorists winning the sympathy of the common folk by promising to get the trains running on time? Is contemporary Islamic terrorism characterized by a militaristic aesthetic? Are there rumblings of a return to paganism? Is there an industrial-style operation currently attempting to exterminate one or more races of people? Is this supposed Islamic version of fascism an attempt to ward off the danger of communism in the face of the injustices brought about by rapid industrialization? Is it focused in on a messianic leader who speaks publicly to crowds of thousands? Are the terrorists of a nationalistic and expansionistic bent? Do they actually hold power in a legitimate nation-state at all?

The ‘meaning’ of the concept of Islamo-fascism, like so many other such concepts, is to be found outside it in the positions it allows people to take up, the roles its authorises, as in “Yep, I’m fighting fascism, just like o’ George did back in the 30’s, just like the old decent left did. And of course, reciprocally, ‘why ain;t you fighting fascism. You’d better have a damn good ex-coose’.

Similarly, the tired ‘middle-class lefty’ jibes permit self-dramatisation as a debunker of unreal flim-flam of posh people, an Imaginary little theatre piece to amuse and reassure, whilst the actual ruling class go about their business unscathed.

Interruption Continuation

I remembered that there was a chapter in Jameson's book Postmodernism entitled 'Theory'. The initial Theory in question here is that of Walter Benn Michaels and Stephen Knapp, as featured in Against Theory. Anyway, the definition of theory here is an interestingly restricted one, at least according to Jameson:

Theory = '"the tendency to generate theoretical problems by splitting apart terms that are in fact inseparable". This tendency is tehn identified and localised in two kinds of privileged error: the separation of "authorial intention and the meaning of texts", and a larger, or more 'epistemological' pathology, in which 'knowledge' is separated from 'beliefs', generating teh notion that we can now somehow "stand outside our beliefs", such that "theory" now becomes "the name for all the ways people have tried to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without".

So, that's one point, and the thought that came to mind was that, regarding any definition of T/theory, one might always productively ask: what here would count as non-theory, or the opposite of theory (is it 'practice', is it 'Reason and Evidence' (!), is it 'analytical philosophy' or what?

Second thing of interest in Jameson's chapter is what he says about New Historicism, which was at the time (1991) the 'latest thing'. Jameson thinks that if this name corresponds to anything it is less ideological or intellectual content than a 'shared writing practice'. But he goes on to say that New Historicists are, in a sense, simply those who felt interpellated or were compelled to answer the label 'New Historicism'. Here it is in Jameson-ese:

"A crucial component of my particular situation as a unique individual
is always the general category to which I am also condemned by other
people and which I must therefore come to terms with (Sartre said assume) in any way I like - shame, pride, avoidance behavior - but which I cannot expect to have removed just because I am somebody special. ..A New Historicist, as Sartre might have said, is one whom other people consider a New Historicist. In our other terminology, this means, in effect, that individual immanence is here in tension with a certain transcendence, in the form of seemingly external, collective labels and identities."

Theorists are those people who, from a certain point of view, appear to be doing a single thing called Theory. This last (to parody FJ), is nothing but the name given to a kind of objective mirage, generated by distance and unfamiliarity, but then projected back onto the object itself. Those quite diverse individuals singled out by this name, nonetheless appropriate it in strategic defiance, hoping to evade the disempowerment of their interpellation by heroically becoming it.

Thought for the Day

A concept that has too many clothes may in the end be the same thing as a concept that has none.

The Deferral of Writing

'Unfortunately, the next day was not that vast, extraneous stretch of time to which I had feverishly looked forward. When it came to a close, my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome certain internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty-four hours longer.'

Cover Charge

In response to someone pointing out that the NAS implicitly contrast Theory to ‘Reason and Evidence’, Robert [in the comments] makes this more general point:

'What this should alert us to is that the ‘Theory debate’ comes to us ‘pre-politicised’ – it’s already been framed in a certain way, certain stakes have been set up. And the way it’s been framed involves a rightist agenda. The appropriateness of using a term as pre-politicized as Theory, as if it were just some neutral academic term, seems to me questionable. It’s already radioactive with polemical charge. '

I agree that if you are fighting on a certain terrain it’s as well to know who circumscribed that terrain, when and for what purposes. That’s another argument. For now, though, speaking of polemic, take a look at the cover of Theory’s Empire:



The paratextual stuff on Theory’s Empire manages ingeniously to suggest a number of familiar tropes at once. The house of cards that can be blown down with a gust of ‘reason and evidence,’ a grand illusion (cards and magical tricks anyone?) At the same time, the sundry implications of Empire – a kingdom where authority and dogmatism have sovereign rights. Hints of grandiosity, of preening and pretension. Indeed, add title and image together, and the image forms of a reassuring little nude Emperor reigning over his empty fiefdom. This is pure polemic. Tedious and without subtlety.

But in order for the rhetoric of the image to be intelligible, a great deal of (ideological) work has to have been done beforehand. This ‘work’ is the 'framing' of which Robert spoke. Personally, I would think it wise to analyse this framing before simply settling on ‘Theory’ as your object of analysis.

update: The editor of Theory's Empire comments briefly on the cover design here.

Breaking News

THE THEORY MONSTER HAS ESCAPED

Its appearances mutate, it is amorphous yet threatening, its names are many. It sprouts a sinister Marxist head here, a sly post-modern smirk there, all the time waving an indignant Feminist finger at us and at itself. No sooner has it begun speaking the austere language of ‘structures’ and than it's rejoicing in pre-rational intensities and bodily fluid. It is fatally attracted to systems and totalities yet does nothing more than cobble together half-assimilated ideas from miscellaneous sources. Here it’s over-subjective, conflating meaning with reader-response; here it’s reducing a text to a mere illustration of objective forces. Over lunch it celebrates the text’s endless indeterminacy, by dinner it’s imposing on it an alien, fixed meaning. When and where it was born remain uncertain, but it is certainly a mutant offspring, buggered into existence by the indiscriminate coupling of incompatible ideas. Schools breed and multiply within it, and yet it remains One. Its poker-faced PC solemnity is forbidding, yet it is also a frivolous homo ludens, taking nothing seriously, forever playing and punning and putting the world in brackets. The rhetoric of hegemony and power pours from its mouth, but jouissance leaks from its arse. It is irrational, even as – and just because - it introduces into Literature the cold acids of conceptual thought and interpretation; it hates literature and is blind to literariness even as it adopts a grotesque parody of literary style. It speaks in dry and boring jargon, yet lewdly seduces the young with an inexplicable sex-appeal. It is costive and hermetic and yet obsessed with changing the world. It is merely fashionable (and has been now for some thirty-odd years), yet stubborn or obtuse enough to survive its several publicised and prophesied deaths.

The Theory monster must be caught and grappled with. Reward: A prestigious academic career.

Prosthetic Thoughts

Whilst we’re on the subject of Theory, I’d like to ask you about the curious locution ‘doing theory’. It is as if thinking were replaced by ‘doing thought’. Was George Lukacs ‘doing theory’ when he wrote ‘Theory of the Novel’? Is Adorno’s “Lyric Poetry and Society” an instance of ‘doing theory’? The answer is no, they were thinking in as rigorous and critical a way as possible, using the conceptual resources at their disposal, within the tradition in which they had been trained - ie Marxism and dialectical thought, now deeply ingrained in their sensibilities..

‘Doing theory’ on the other hand makes theory sound like a profesional specialisation, some kind of technical skill, perhaps, to be used at work, but basically optional and detachable from your personality. Thus whereas Adorno or Lukacs were engaged in an activity that was so intimate to them as to be, so to speak, inoperable, the ‘theory’ of ‘doing theory’ is more a prosthetic device, or a series thereof – A Deleuzian hand, a Foucauldian eye, a false Zizekian-beard.

Perhaps in some quarters this is indeed what thought has become, professionalized and prostheticised; something to be left on the desk on the way out of the office. And this through prudence, since to really live (& really to think) these ideas might be to change your life or, at least, render your existing situation unsustainable. But if this is the case, then what we need to be looking at are the economic and institutional factors responsible for this. Instead, what can happen is that the ideas themselves receive the criticism which should be directed at the institution that has distorted and reified them. Where this happens it is clearly a form of displacement, one with ideological effects, and needs to be combated. (See Jodi's post).

This, at any rate, was my first thought on the phrase. Second: ‘Doing theory’: the other thing about this is its intransitivity. To talk about 'doing theory' sounds like ‘watching television’, i.e.., you’re no longer watching a particular programme; it’s the activity itself which is now an object of enjoyment. Now here we are touching, I think, on how Theory is seen. Theory has become its own object, its practitioners caught in some kind of self-referential enjoyment. Theory simply loops back into and feeds itself, self-grounding and self-perpetuating with no social issue. Now while this may contain truth, we may at the same time be dealing with a version of that long-standing suspicion of theory as non-instrumental thought, as irresponsible, playful, insufficiently plugged in to social and economic reproduction. And so I refer you again to Theo

btw, contrary to appearances, this isn't the promised follow up post to the one preceding it.

T1 and t2?

I was flicking through a copy of Theory’s Empire today (in a bookshop, that is), trying to get some sense of the ‘Theory’ that this anthology of dissent was dissenting from. Anyway, I’m certainly not going to write a post about a book I’ve only browsed for some ten minutes, but one name I noticed in the anthology was Paisley Livingston. Now Livingston is by no means anti-theory, or at least he wasn’t when he wrote Literary Knowledge, which is the only text by him I own. So, for example, we find this on p. 13:‘

Again and again, the supposedly nontheoretical approach amounts to a tacit reliance upon a complex host of invisible theories: the sedimented and unexamined theory of genres, a prejudicial nationalist parcelling out of ‘literatures’, an unreflective periodization, a Eurocentric and elitist canon mirroring a ‘great man’ view of history, a wholly idealist aesthetics, an arcane and incoherent semantics, colonial ethics, and so on'.

Livingstone mentions also a ‘pseudo-empirical’ and ‘immediate’ approach to “particular facts”. The scare quotes imply a false immediacy; an invisible frame determining what does and doesn’t constitute a 'fact'. Again, the sense is that because certain conceptual distinctions, demarcations etc, are invisible, they allow an illusion of simply dealing with things 'as they are', without mediation/ interference. And this must be combated.

Now, that notion of ‘invisible theory’, a theory which is not even visible to itself, is something that came up in an exchange at Charlotte Street. I’m not entirely sure I agree with it. That is, when Livingstone talks about ‘invisible theories’ isn’t he talking about guiding assumptions, presuppositions and ‘methodologies’ that refuse to acknowledge themselves as such? The reason I’m not sure about calling these hidden assumptions/ implicitly conceptual distinctions ‘theories’ is that, to me, one definition of theoretical activity is precisely the making conscious and reflecting on hitherto invisible frames and suppositions. Don't we speak of 'untheorized' assumptions? That said, I suppose I’d be happy with ‘implicit theories’.

Anyway, it was on the whole right and proper that these 'invisible theories' were dragged into the light and subjected to critical scrutiny. And part of what was experienced as exciting and liberating about (what is now called) theory was precisely this working through, this objectification of hidden suppositions and ‘methodologies’. Such ‘making visible’, and the attendant and remorseless suspicion of ‘self-evidence’, of immediacy, are surely all constitutive delights of thinking as such, and the experience of freedom, of enlarged horizons, that comes with it.

Some time ago, my attention was drawn to a post in which Theory was likened to a puffer fish. The idea was that, when attacked, it inflated to twice its original size. To be honest I was a little baffled by this, as some of the actual examples given seemed to show the opposite: i.e., when attacked Theory ‘deflates’ to a position of false modesty. It says, in other words, ‘I am simply critical or systematic thinking as such. How could you object to such a thing?’ And indeed, no one surely could. Or Theory says, along with Coleridge, that to think at all involves ‘theorizing’ – you may imagine you’re theory-free, but this is illusory. We’re back to ‘invisible theories’. Mr Holbo suggests we keep Theory separate from theory in this more modest sense. And doubtless we should.

Now all I want to do here and at this stage is make an anecdotal point. You would expect people who are anti-Theory to at least to be perfectly happy with ‘lower case’ theory. But my experience has been that those opposed to Theory (roughly: 'a relatively modern trend within academia characterised by the hasty appropriation and employment of select post-modern thinkers') are also uncomfortable with theory as such, with a 'theoretical' approach to literature and literary texts. So, I tend not to meet people who say "It’s so regrettable that literary theory has been hijacked by these ‘Theory’ people, or even ‘these Theory people just aren’t doing good and rigorous theory". And I do often meet people who object forcefully to Theory in the name of an 'immediate', 'one-to-one' relation with the text. In other words, in the name of an anti-theory position. And indeed, there genuinely are, within literary studies, those opposed to the idea that there can be something called ‘literary theory’. They are opposed to this in principle. Okay, so this is just anecdotal, and it’s therefore up to the reader to agree or disagree based on his/her own experience. But I have certainly encountered such people.

And so as well as making the distinction, as Holbo suggests between Theory and theory, we might also distinguish those who oppose theory and those who object only to Theory, and let these two objections not be conflated. And let those who oppose Theory not use this opposition to smuggle in an anti-theoretical position.

Nomination

When Barthes speaks of the Name as ‘the last trace that remains of things’, what does he mean? A mere appellation that has no material reality – how can such a thing be said to be a trace? (After all, we think of trace as a material residue).

Barthes proposition is explained with reference to the ship Argos. Gradually, and over years, each piece of the ship wears out and is replaced. Eventually not a single piece, a single pin, of the original ship remains. And yet, we are happy saying it is the same ship. What has remained the same, among other things, is the Name. A primal baptism bestowed upon the ship its identity – Argos: it is this name which binds together the ship through all its subsequent incarnations and adventures, even after it is no longer materially identical.



The name is not the only principle of identity. What also remained the same, perhaps, is the function of the ship, its place in a network of relations, the way people use it and the role it plays in their lives. Its identity resides here too, outside it in its context, in terms of the object it is for others. But these too pass away, are subject to time and history. The name is left behind, and this, partly, accounts for the aura of names.

Pop Quiz

Okay, a rather un-CS-like post, this one. I unearthed an old Joy Division tape earlier today. It contained what were at the time some of my favourite JD tracks. However, there’s no cassette card & track-list. So, some of them I can name, but others escape me. So full marks to anyone who can identify the following 3:

1. From the early Warsaw phase, contains the following lyric: ‘you’re on your own now/ can’t you see that it’s a shame/ that you’re the only one responsible to take the blame.’
2. I think this one is called wither Dead Souls or Dreams Even Here – ‘Here are the young men, a weight on their shoulders…where have they been, where have they been etc’
3. There’s an instrumental one which I think is, again, either of the two options mentioned in 2

.

A monstrous footnote

We had heard that a monster had been born at Ravenna, of which a drawing was sent here; it had a horn on its head, straight up like a sword, and instead of arms it had two wings like a bat's, and the height of its breasts it had a fio [Y-shaped mark] on one side and a cross on the other, and lower down at the waist, two serpents, and it was a hermaphrodite, and on the right knee it had an eye, and its left foot was like an eagle. I saw it painted, and anyone who wished could see this painting in Florence.


It was March 1512, and a Florentine apothecary named Lucca Landucci was writing up his diary. He had much to write about. Northern Italy was engulfed by war. Maximillian of Germany and Louis XII of France were locked in combat with the Spanish, English and Pope Julius II for control of the Venetian Republic. City after city was ravaged as the armies traversed the campagna. Ravenna fell eighteen days after the monster's birth. 'It was evident,' wrote Landucci, 'what evil the monster had meant for them! It seems as if some great misfortune always befalls the city when such things are born.'

Landucci had not actually seen the monster. It had been starved to death by order of Julius II, and Landucci's account is of a drawing that was on public display in Florence. That image was among the first of many. Printed woodcuts and engravings spread the news of the monster throughout Europe, and as they spread, the monster acquired a new, posthumous, existence. When it left Ravenna it had two legs; by the time it arrived in Paris it had only one. In some prints it had bat wings, in others they were more like a bird's; it had hermaphrodite genitalia or else a single large erection. It became mixed up with the images of another monster born in Florence in 1506, and then fused with a medieval icon of sinful humanity called 'Frau Welt' - a kind of bat-winged, single-legged Harpy who grasped the globe in her talons.

As the monster travelled and mutated, it also accreted ever more complex layers of meaning. Italians took it as a warning of the horrors of war. The French, making more analytical effort, interpreted its horn as pride, its wings as mental frivolity and inconstancy, its lack of arms as the absence of good works, its raptor's foot as rapacity, and its deformed genitalia as sodomy - the usual Italian vices in other words. Some said that it was the child of a respectable married woman; others that it was the product of a union between a nun and a friar. All this allegorical freight makes it hard to know what the monster really was. But it seems likely that it was simply a child who was born with a severe, rare, but quite unmysterious genetic disorder. One can even hazard a guess at Roberts's syndrome, a deformity found in children who are born with an especially destructive mutation. That, at least, would account for the limb and genital anomalies, if not the two serpents on its waist and the supernumerary eye on its knee. (here)