Are humanities professors still waiting for the “Next Big Idea”? That’s the title of a New York Times story from July 2001 that got a lot of circulation. The author, Emily Eakin, formerly of Lingua Franca, heralded Hardt and Negri’s tome Empire as the Grand Theory of the new decade, comparable to Levi-Strauss and Structuralism in the 60s and Derrida/Foucault in the 70s. She talked about Hardt as, possibly, “academia’s next master theorist,” his co-authored book “sending frissons of excitement through campuses from São Paulo to Tokyo.”
At the same time, though, the article pushed a skeptical reply, noting “the need in fields like English, history and philosophy for a major new theory.” In fact, it quoted one thoroughly deflating voice: “’‘Literary theory has been dead for 10 years,” said Stanley Aronowitz, a sociologist at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. ‘The most important point about Empire is that Michael is addressing the crisis in the humanities, which has reached the point where banality seems to pervade the sphere.’”
A few years later, on the occasion of the death of Jacques Derrida, Eakin followed up with another theory article entitled “The Theory of Everything, R.I.P.” It began, “With the death on Oct. 8 of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the era of big theory came quietly to a close.” The chance of a Next Big Thing coming along in the humanities was gone. In the last years of Derrida’s life, she wrote, “the world had changed but not necessarily in the ways some of big theory’s fervent champions had hoped. Ideas once greeted as potential catalysts for revolution began to seem banal, irrelevant or simply inadequate to the task of achieving social change.”
The explanation Eakin and others quoted in the article (Eagleton, Fish) came up with was that the heyday of theory coincided with the heyday of the Left. When the Left collapsed in the 1980s, Theory went along with it. When the hope collapsed that Theory might not only revolutionize humanistic studies, but also social structures themselves, Theory turned, precisely, banal, an internal game.
I don’t think that’s right, though. Many of the people I saw embracing Theory most deeply as Theory weren’t the political types. Race, class, gender, and sexuality didn’t count for them as much as did metaphysical and epistemological questions. They read Nietzsche more than Fanon. They bristled more at the mention of “truth” than of “capitalism” or “heteronormativity.” That was certainly true of many in the generation of theorists from the 60s and 70s — including Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, Joseph Riddel, and Geoffrey Hartman.
What happened to Theory, what made it banal, what makes it impossible for it to happen again, for any Next Big Thing to come along and have similar impact was that Theory turned into, yes, a “Next Big Idea” — that is, a performance and a fashion. As soon as someone started saying, “What’s next?” the deep commitment that made Theory matter loosened. At the beginning, people became deconstructionists because Derrida’s early texts, for instance, hit them hard in the solitude of their library carrels. His heated phrases on interpretation and emptiness struck their intellects, not their repute. They adopted the outlook even if it meant being unpopular. It was personal, not political.
Today, though, it seems that intellectual commitments always keep an eye on institutional dynamics. That spells the end of Theory a lot more than do political trends on the national and international stages. Theory itself went political, internally so, and that was suicide. Many professors long for the era of High Theory, when the stakes of advocating this or that Theory seemed genuinely high, when interpreting lines from Wordsworth one way or another made a genuine difference. But that isn’t the case today, and it won’t be tomorrow. A reading is just a reading. A Theory is just one approach among many others.
Now, as far as I can see, the strongest energy levels in the humanities are reached not from Theorists or political theorists or gender theorists, but from outsiders. I mean those figures who criticize the humanities for their political bias, and the professors who react. But that’s another issue.
