Last week, Stanley Fish had a long post at his New York Times blog on a new book out next month about French theory, mostly deconstruction, and American campus politics. (552 comments at this time.) The book is French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, but the subtitle is a bit misleading. The author, Francois Cusset, doesn’t think that French theory transformed U.S. intellectual life in its own image, but rather that, in a three-part drama, American academics distorted and institutionalized it, public intellectuals (mostly conservatives) reacted with alarm, and the campus-culture wars ignited. American professors distorted theory by adopting it as a movement, a program, a politics, an agenda, a reform. In their turn, conservatives erred in taking it seriously as a political enterprise.
Fish’s conclusion:
“The result is the story Cusset tells about the past 40 years. A bunch of people threatening all kinds of subversion by means that couldn’t possibly produce it, and a bunch on the other side taking them at their word and waging cultural war. Not comedy, not tragedy, more like farce, but farce with consequences. Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks, the whole ball of wax.”
These charges and countercharges originated in a basic misunderstanding. At bottom, Fish says, theory was a critique of knowledge claims. It “interrogated” the ideal of “an independent, free-standing, knowing subject, the ‘I’ facing an independent, free-standing world.” Theorists found a glitch in the formula: The language used to describe things and frame experiments impinges on the facts. The “tools the mind employs” won’t get out of the way and allow reality to shine through.
Fish cites Bacon on the problem, and we could add Hegel, too (“if cognition is the instrument for getting hold of absolute being, it is obvious that the use of an instrument on a thing certainly does not let it be what it is for itself, but rather sets out to reshape and alter it”); and Kant on the Table of Categories (which forever exile us from things in themselves, whatever “they” “are”); and Nietzsche on “immediate certainties” (a quaint notion, he thinks); Heidegger on the “always already” . . .
Nietzsche is the key figure for Theory’s take on the problem, I think. For while most other philosophers acknowledged the epistemological problem and tried to devise methods and theories to overcome it, Nietzsche played with it and wouldn’t let it go. Derrida expanded Nietzsche’s negative critique into a full-scale nonstop method, a method against conclusion. No “center,” no “hors-texte,” no identity. Instead, we got decentering, textuality, and differance. Derrida termed it a “parasitic” activity.
That’s not the American way, however, says Cusset. Deconstruction posed “an endless metatheoretical regression,” but Americans want action and practice and politics. They got it wrong every time they implemented it as more than just a structural or conceptual analysis. Back in 1982 Derrida gave a talk at UCLA when I was a first-year grad student, and all I remember of it was a long-winded question that amounted to, “Why don’t you spend more time with Marx and be more political?” Derrida’s response: “Deconstruction could come from the Left, and deconstruction could come from the Right. It doesn’t have its own politics.”
I doubt if many people who consider themselves theorists would agree.
More on Fish’s post and Theory later.
