People who didn’t hit humanities graduate programs in the late 70s and early 80s probably can’t imagine the unique brand of enthusiasms that formed around the person and corpus of Jacques Derrida, of Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. By then, the novelty of their pioneering texts — “Structure, Sign, and Play . . .,” “Differance,” Of Grammatology, Ecrits, “The Rhetoric of Temporality” — had worn off, and the battles between theorists and anti-theorists (that’s how they were labeled then) — Hillis Miller vs. Meyer Abrams skirmishes, for instance — were over.
Anti-theorists such as Denis Donoghue and John Searle published in high-profile venues such as The New York Review of Books, but within the compartments of hiring committees and editorial offices, the theorists in all their variations were the winners. Devotees of Derrida and other master theorists played up their rogue identity for years afterwards, but in truth they had pretty well secured strategic terrain pretty fast. They won so thoroughly, in fact, that when some dons at Cambridge objected to an honorary doctorate for Derrida in 1992, they sounded not as if they were standing up for intellectual standards, but as if they were small-minded professors acting on resentment that the world had passed them by.
By the mid-80s, an understanding of Derrida et al was essential to competence in the field. Derrida still had radical cachet, but the institution leaned his way, and, ever sensitive to professional trends outside the classroom and library, graduate students sensed the pro-theory drift. They scanned the MLA Job List and noted how many job descriptions in historical fields wanted secondary interests in theory. They remarked how many conference titles echoed the theory idiom. And they counted how many theory titles appeared in press catalogs.
For these second-generation theorists, though, entry into the profession came too late. They caught the intellectual enthusiasms, but by the time they hit the job market in 1990, all-too-many new theory jobs were filled, and would remain so for years. A deconstructionist manuscript on Henry James might intrigue a scholarly press editor in 1985, but after 12 submissions received by 1995, the thrill was gone. Paper titles stocked with Derridean puns and parentheses and diacritical marks no longer looked clever. What seemed adventuresome in the second year of graduate school was routine by dissertation filing time.
The problem was compounded in that when the academy didn’t reflect their excitement over “the logic of the supplement,” they didn’t have the equipment to respond. An inflexible element had entered into their training: discipleship. For disciples are overcommitted. They throw not just their opinions but their entire identity into the standing of the master. For second-generation votaries to adapt to the market, they had to alter their whole outlook — not an easy thing to do at age 34 after developing one in the fraught and uncertain years of training. It took me five years of reading other things, publishing almost nothing, and skipping the conference circuit. I don’t know what happened to hundreds of my fellow graduate students, though, and I wonder if they regret the direction their inspiration ran —and the narrow instruction they received — back when their minds and manners needed a more catholic formation.
