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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Mark Bauerlein

How Theory Damaged the Humanities

Hard as it is to believe, given the passions it continues to arouse, 42 years have passed since critical theory started to infiltrate the humanities in the United States. That’s if we count the famous Hopkins conference of 1966 as its inaugural event. And almost as old as theory is its antagonist, anti-theory, which since the early-70s has charged it with a set of intellectual sins.

Anti-theorists claimed that theory denied stable meanings to texts, thus opening interpretation to gamesmanship, setting cleverness above scrupulousness. (Call this “semantic nihilism.”)

They claimed that theory introduced a circular skepticism into literary practice, whereby before one studied the classics one had to interrogate the notion “classic,” and before one could do that, one had to interrogate the terms with which one interrogated the notion “classic,” … (Call this “endless bracketing.”)

They claimed that theory played fast and loose with concepts from philosophy and the social sciences, applying them to literature without observing the methodological baggage they carried. (Call this “dilettante interdisciplinarity.”)

And they claimed that theory turned teaching and training into induction procedures, the production of advocates, not independent thinkers. (Call this “disciplining disciples.”)

When a second generation of theorists extended theoretical outlooks to ideological and identitarian (race, gender, sexuality, colonial, etc.) matters, another indictment was added. Theory politicized the fields, it said, letting identity politics displace aesthetic criteria in the handling of works and displace intellectual criteria in the handling of practitioners.

Each of these accusations had some merit, I think, but theory was such a diverse and headlong mix of ideas and approaches and talents that it could handily invoke aspects of the enterprise that refuted them. Besides, none of the claims were sufficient to bring about the damages that anti-theorists saw in the humanities as a whole.

No, theory didn’t kill the humanities by its contents or its premises. There was nothing in Discipline and Punish or Orientalism that would hasten the end of liberal arts learning. However much they problematized the self, meaning, tradition, high/low, and so on, theorists didn’t really endanger humanitas by theorizing.

Rather, they damaged it by making a new professional demand. It was, quite simply, the assumption that in order to be competent and qualified, you had to know theory.

I found a good example in a letter by Paul de Man advising the Irvine Comparative Literature department about its proper mission. (It’s in Irvine’s Critical Theory Archive.) It dates from 1978, which means that it follows the flood of theories that overwhelmed the humanities for some 15 years previously — Derridean deconstruction, Levi-Strauss’s structuralism, French feminism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucault’s “archaeology of knowledge,” Fredric Jameson’s Marxism, and reader-response criticism. De Man believed that the “new situation” had produced a basic change in the nature of humanistic activity all the way down to the mental disposition of the humanist. De Man terms it:

“a new kind of skill … the capacity to use and feel at home in a whole series of different critical and theoretical codes and systems, as one would use a particular foreign language, without remaining rigidly locked into any one of them, but rather developing the capacity to translate those findings into different codes, systems, critical positions, as the case may require.”

This is a professional qualification. You have to know your theories, and handle them with a lightsome flexibility. We live amidst theories, de Man says, and the true art of the scholar is to skate well across them. Erudition, eloquence, taste … all the old virtues are fine, but this new one, this theory-savvy, bears a special value. It is what will make your conference paper noteworthy, your job application letter interesting, your article eye-catching. Theory-savvy means that you are, precisely, a new professional.

The problem is obvious. The theories that one had to master saw their day pass, and in the cold light of time it no longer seems necessary to know the arguments of deconstruction, reader-response … This is not to say that various theories were wrong or unimportant or worthless. It is to say that the 70s and 80s stewards of the humanities invested the profession in theory way too quickly and sweepingly. They grounded graduate training and hiring and promotion and publication in an enterprise that was uncertain and fluctuating. They announced that theory marked a revolution, but theory wasn’t strong enough to sustain a new institution.

Posted at 02:12:51 PM on July 31, 2008 | All postings by Mark Bauerlein

Comments

  1. I disagree with the premise here — I don’t think “theory” has “damaged the humanities” — but I actually think a good deal of the observation in the post itself is accurate and reasonable. (And I am saying this as someone who many people, probably Mr. Bauerlein among them, would take for a “pro-theory” person — i.e. a humanities scholar with a scholarly interest in certain strands of Continental philosophy.) The theory wars are thankfully long over by now, and most people no longer identify passionately with or against Theory with a capital T as an umbrella term, which is nice since it never identified any particularly useful coherent set of things. What it did name, which I agree was probably a long-term bad thing for the humanities, was a new kind of faddishness, unwittingly and unwontedly epitomized by that final de Man quote. De Man was not calling for the toolbox-like compartmentalizing of thinkers into shallowly understood, piecemeal “schools of thought,” nor for the accelerating cycles of fashion around “new” ideas to reach the fever pitch it did for a while in the ’80s and ’90s, but that is what we got. I don’t think many people are very interested in this question from either side anymore, though.

    — Roger · Jul 31, 02:42 PM · #

  2. Look at the issue on a more utilitarian level. Did enrollments go up or go down? Did the number of majors go up or go down? How much interest was there in theory beyond the faculty commons room? Psychology and Biology are now the big majors on most campuses. Many bio majors hope to become physicians, but many know that they won’t, so the argument that contemporary students automatically gravitate to the field that will enable them to buy a BMW may not hold. When I was in college there was no psych dept. Now that field is often ruling the roost.

    — Commentator · Jul 31, 03:45 PM · #

  3. The real damage, so far as I can see, is that talented people who aspired to academic careers in the humanities, but weren’t particularly enchanted by the Theory game were out on their asses selling insurance or getting MBA’s. Humanities departments are obviously the poorer for their narrow faddishness and conformism.

    — Fossil · Jul 31, 04:59 PM · #

  4. There have often been efforts to “scientize” the social sciences or humanities, ostensibly in the interest of promoting intellectual rigor. As has sometimes occurred in the “harder” sciences, the early steps of scientific method (careful observation, description, and measurement) have been neglected in order to rush to the development of theory. The scientific function of theory, generation of testable hypotheses, has often instead generated untested assertions that are too vigorously defended with too little evidence, and when tested, are not tested properly (often with what amount to unsubstantiated claims of “proving” the hypothesis true). And, of course, burying everything in so much jargon that those outside the immediate area of specialization cannot participate. So, of course, there is nothing wrong with theory in its place, but too much theory may be worse than too little.

    — Joe Erwin · Jul 31, 05:26 PM · #

  5. De Man’s description of “the capacity to use and feel at home in a whole series of different critical and theoretical codes and systems” sounds like the basis for the humanities before Theory as well. We forget that the New Critics imported a vast array of technical terms and critical codes; we forget that Marxist reading practices predate Big Theory by, say, at least 50 years, we forget that Wayne Booth and Northrop Frye and the Freudians and the Jungians and classical rhetoricians demanded the same professionalization.

    Theory just added new codes and terms and supplanted old codes and terms.

    — Luther Blissett · Jul 31, 06:59 PM · #

  6. To say, as Roger does above, “I don’t think many people are very interested in this question from either side anymore” is to acknowledge, perhaps, that the question seems pointless, the debate mooted by what seems the permanent enshrinement of theory. I am surely not the only member of a Humanities faculty who struggles each day against the belief that competence to teach literature and even creative writing classes requires an acceptance of critical theory as the only valid approach to these subjects. I do, in fact, agree with the premise that theory has hurt the humanities, and I applaud the suggestion that we look at enrollments in the Humanities since the advent of theory as uber-thought.

    — Writer · Jul 31, 09:40 PM · #

  7. It’s not as if Theory was some evil monster that ate Humanities Departments.

    What happened was that the people in these departments adopted certain ways of thinking and writing that crowded out the older ways of thinking and writing. Nothing prevented the more traditional forms of scholarship from competing in the marketplace.

    If Theory destroyed Humanities Departments, then they voluntarily destroyed themselves. Why were all of you in the Humanities Departments so susceptible to faddishness and triviality in the first place?

    — blah · Jul 31, 10:01 PM · #

  8. First – thank you for this post. It is always refreshing to hear your thoughts, your honesty is most refreshing. I really do like the previous posts where you describe hating all things Republican once. I think if I have a job it’s to show you that intellectual life exists in a very rich vein on the Internet, but you’re not going to find it in academic circles or policy circles or Wikipedia or any of that stuff. That’s right, I’m saying there’s stuff even richer than Marginal Revolution or Poetry Magazine or aldaily or Brian Leiter. It’s only accessible to a few of us, though, those of us looking to find pupils and teachers on the web rather than assume we know it all already.

    Second – Agreed with a caveat: the objection is at the end of this rant.

    There needs to be a way to hierarchically order what is taught. Fortunately, your last description of a younger De Man – where he was teaching and not focusing on putting together a book if that didn’t suit him – points in the right direction.

    I can’t have my students read Milton and then go right into Fish’s work about “Interpretive Communities” and such. That’s just insane, given that to appreciate Milton they need to at least know the previous epics of Dante, Virgil and Homer fairly well. Now I can safely tell you that the Divine Comedia and the Odyssey are the hardest books I’ve ever read (actually, that’s a lie. Try figuring out what Aristotle is really saying in the Poetics – the Benardete/Davis translation is highly recommended). Whether Dante even believes in God is an open question for me given Beatrice’s nastiness at the end of Purgatorio and Paradiso looking like some kind of joke half the time. The Odyssey is also nuts: how do we know when Odysseus isn’t lying?

    I can safely tell you that yeah, theory can augment understanding. The first essay I read on Milton that made me pay attention to detail was an excerpt from Fish’s “Surprised by Sin.” While I thought his explicit theoretical works were nonsense ultimately, I could see why he was doing what he was doing – an author that has real, present-day political beliefs isn’t just going to let that disappear in his magnum opus. Paradise Lost seems to have Adam commit the first sin, not Eve, and that Adam does so because he never really learns to love Eve – appreciate the fact of difference – as he should. Anybody that says this has nothing to do with Milton’s thought on divorce is nuts.

    But notice: you can disagree with me on my readings, but you’d better be ready to fight with me jot and tittle. That’s not theory, that’s just straight up knowing the literature. We have plenty of literature students that only know theory and have done cursory reads of works that are absolutely crucial to understanding anything. To what degree was the professional requiring of theory an obsession with theory ahead of loving good books? You’re trying to mask that by implying theory came about because of love of good books, and I’m gonna concede that to you because it’s your field.

    I mean, I don’t know I’m right. I’m willing to submit to your critique for now. I think I can prove you wrong ultimately – on my meek little blog there’s a little Dickinson revival. Yeah, it’s only 10 or 20 of us, and we’re not very vocal, but we’re reading and wondering. I know in time I’ll have hungry readers, but not ones hungry for theory necessarily, although they might dabble with it. They’re gonna want wisdom, and the readers I have are already moving from the poetry to straight up philosophy, where they find that Plato, Socrates and Nietzsche offer a fairly substantial critique of Homer and his age that doesn’t require a whole new jargon to understand.

    What mayl mark theory as decadence, as resentment towards a more instinctual, honest readership, is that people can just open the books for themselves and figure things out. When did we get in the business of telling people what to think, as opposed to being guides?

    — ashok · Aug 1, 04:20 AM · #

  9. We could also add that theory makes a large amount of humanities research inaccessible and even, dare I say it, boring in a society in which readership is decidedly declining.

    Is anyone really surprised that mainstream publishers are reluctant to touch heavily academic manuscripts now? The great irony is that the theorists rely on theory to blame contemporary society for not appreciating them while it is in fact the overuse of theory that has both alienated even much of the elite public from their work and ghettoized academia more than it already was.

    — bored with academia · Aug 1, 04:50 AM · #

  10. Great posts all. However, I don’t think we should be so hard on theory. It takes a particular brain to be able to synthesize information from various fields and bring a new meaning to a text. The problem is, in my experiences anyway, few theorists have that kind of brain, and yet so many still plod on (and publish). Moreover, the synthesizing kind of thinker would necessarily be a generalist, not a specialist, and there are no room for generalists in the profession anymore. It also takes more time to do meaningful work in multiple disciplines. Add all that up, and there’s no place for innovation in the humanities. That’s the real shame. There probably are some innovative thinkers out there who have been lost in the noise, drowned out by those who just plug in the hermeneutic. Once the identity politics crowd took over, theory became even more limited since only certain theorists passed the litmus test. Combine that with highly specialized fields and the result has been an amazingly bland, homogeneous, predictable body of work coming out of the humanities. I’m not sure that’s all theory’s fault, though. I am sure the profession enabled the current state by encouraging drone publishing. I am also sure that none of this is going to change, given the current political climate and that so many careers are invested in perpetuating the status quo.

    — Walt · Aug 1, 08:15 AM · #

  11. The introduction of critical theory was in itself a fine thing, back when it was firmly coupled with the study and dependent upon a knowledge of literature and history. The problem came about when it entered, nilly-willy, the undergraduate and graduate classrooms, where all time had to be devoted to its parsing and contextualizing. Gradually, it came to pass that one might encounter a few literary texts in a class all of which were in service of Theory. Over time, this meant that the sort of students who were being recruited to graduate school, and who became professors, were no longer people who particularly cared for literature (or knew anything about it) but rather the sort of folks who, in the main, were drawn to identity politics, which provides some excitement and some relatively easy reading, and where authority is derived from experience rather than scholarly knowledge. The reading and writing skills of English majors and graduate students (and younger faculty) continue to deteriorate, which is something no one seems publicly to be remarking.

    — Reality Principle · Aug 1, 09:43 AM · #

  12. Just a note on the enrollment question. Two of the comments here seem, glancingly, to invite speculation about whether Theory has been responsible for declining undergrad enrollments in humanities courses. This seems to me a fairly unlikely claim and one that would be very difficult to argue persuasively. Even assuming that we grant humanities enrollments have, in some general sense, been declining — an imprecise but empirical claim, and one which not everyone agrees with — there’s an insuperable element of post hoc, ergo propter hoc to any argument laying this at the feet of Theory. How would we possibly assign Theory the power to cause widespread demographic shifts, shifts happening both on campuses where the humanities faculty were fashionable Deleuzians and where they were descendants of Leavis and Matthew Arnold? And many of us who teach in the humanities will have seen (or been!) students who were seduced into our disciplines in droves by the sexy Big Ideas, and the famous star faculty, of even the most faddish and shallow version of Theory. There’s no easy way that I can see to salvage even a very weak general claim that Theory hurt undergrads’ interest in the humanities.

    — Roger · Aug 1, 11:43 AM · #

  13. The number that I have heard most frequently is that undergraduate interest in the humanities has declined by approximately one-third in the ‘theory generation’. Some portion of this loss should be attributed to the nature of the curriculum during that period.

    — Observer · Aug 1, 12:18 PM · #

  14. Taking off from Observer #13…

    Also, during the Theory years, wasn’t that the time when curriculum started to snowball down the professional prep ramp? Thus, the stress on technical writing as opposed to writing in general. {I am not specifically implying that either is superior or better.}

    Also too, wasn’t this also the time-frame when higher ed was opened up even more to a larger portion of the population?

    Sounds like there was an odd synergy of things that occurred to help kill Theory.

    — anon · Aug 1, 02:25 PM · #

  15. Maybe interest in the humanities has declined because we’re increasingly becoming a country of greedy ignoramuses who have no time or patience for any educational experience that doesn’t immediately translate into market value.

    Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with theory.

    — crazy horse · Aug 1, 02:29 PM · #

  16. Thanks, #15, but note my earlier post. Psychology (non-clinical) does not immediately translate into market value. That is the fastest growing department on our campus, with approximately 1,000 majors. We also have 1,000 majors in biology and they’re smart enough to know that they’re not all going to med school. Political Science is also growing very dramatically. That can be a good pre-law major, but so is Philosophy and it’s not growing the way Pol Sci is.

    I don’t want to politicize the discussion, but for much of the ‘Theory’ period, one of the dominant messages from literature departments was that the literary tradition as previously imagined was often the record of male inhumanity to women, empires’ inhumanity to their colonies, and the ultimate difficulty of determining meaning in texts. That’s not very ‘inviting’.

    — Commentator · Aug 1, 02:48 PM · #

  17. This discussion is conflating “the humanities” with “literature departments.” While Theory affected many fields, it never made huge inroads into history, while philosophy programs in the US and UK seemed downright opposed to Theory (and “Continental philosophy” in general)

    So to blame enrollment figures in the humanities on the methodologies of lit departments seems pretty misguided.

    — Luther Blissett · Aug 1, 05:09 PM · #

  18. Thanks, #17. Philosophy has its own issues. History is grouped with the social sciences at my university. There have been some devastating responses to ‘theory’ in history, which, unlike the literature departments, does not see itself as moving away from the historical method, empiricism, etc.

    — Commentator · Aug 1, 08:13 PM · #

  19. <i>one of the dominant messages from literature departments was that the literary tradition as previously imagined was often the record of male inhumanity to women, empires’ inhumanity to their colonies, and the ultimate difficulty of determining meaning in texts. That’s not very ‘inviting’.</i>

    But this time-frame also focused a lot on contemporary lit over the canon. One would think a lot of people might like that…find it very appealing.

    But then reading died. [Ok, it’s not exactly dead…just in a coma.]

    Think maybe that might be why lit programs have shrinking enrollments?

    — anon · Aug 1, 10:56 PM · #

  20. #16:

    Perhaps it’s not as boffo a career move as majoring in Mechanical Engineering or Applied Economics or whatever, but I would still argue that psychology, biology, and political science majors DO all translate into basic corporate (or political in the case of polisci) market value more readily than art history, English, and philosophy.

    And even if psychology majors don’t instantly have market appeal (and, again, I suspect they do have more market appeal than, say, art history majors), the major offers a kind of practical empirical analysis of the world itself that is at odds with the practice in English departments of reading dense tomes filled with flowery language about things that didn’t actually happen.

    The desire to put your college education to practical use simply must account for a large portion of the decline in humanities enrollment: for most parents and their children these days, going to college is explicitly a form of preparing for employment, and majoring in biology, finance, psychology, engineering or any other non-humanities fields still offers (or I would bet seems to offer to a young student) one a lot more options upon graduation than majoring in literature or philosophy (the study, respectively, of language and wisdom for their own sake, and not for the sake of becoming a Senior Human Resources Coordinator or whatever)

    — crazy horse · Aug 2, 10:41 AM · #

  21. This theory stuff isn’t my territory, but I’d like to say something about the “market appeal” of art history majors: it is, in a broad sense, much more than you’d think. Although the discipline has, in recent years, been eaten away at the edges by more theory-driven and amorphous neologistic departments of “Visual Culture” and “Visual Studies,” students who major in it in more traditional departments are more highly regarded than majors in most other fields in the humanties. Art history has a reputation as being a more difficult major than most of the other humanities’ subjects. At advanced undergraduate levels, foreign language skills are mandatory, and the year/semester abroad is just about required. Good law schools think it better undergraduate prep than political science, in large part because of the kind of thinking stylistic analysis requires. International businesses like to hire art history majors—when they come their way—as much if not more than business majors. (The attitude being that a culturally broad world-view can’t be got with an airport book on management tips.) The art world today is a booming business, so jobs are available in galleries, auction houses, antiques businesses, consulting, etc. Finally, art history is a good jumping-off point from which a little further study—a few classes, not necessarily a whole degree—in subjects such as screewriting, filmmaking, journalism, TV production, publishing, etc., opens up a whole lot more career opportunities.

    No, I’m not an art historian. I just see these things happening.

    — Knows a Tiny Bit About a Small Thing · Aug 2, 11:14 AM · #

  22. re: the market appeal of Art History: “it is, in a broad sense, much more than you’d think”

    I see that may be the case, but then, when we talk about the average student enrolling in a given program, we’re talking about their perception of the market value of that program. So, even if we can agree that art history programs actually do have some market value, it seems likely that the extent to which enrollment in them has dropped may have something to do with the perception that what is done in those programs is not practically valuable. That’s just a guess, though. I don’t have any hard data to back it up.

    — crazy horse · Aug 2, 11:43 AM · #

  23. It’s also interesting how English majors used to be able to find jobs where skill with the language was respected:

    Editing, Proofreading, Journalism, Publishing, Advertising

    Now most of those jobs seem to go to people who come from specialized programs designed to provide pre-job training, and often neglect the emphasis on skill at the language (which might explain how so many newspapers and magazines are often littered with typographical errors).

    Is Theory to blame? Or was Theory just a side-effect of some other factor?

    — anon · Aug 2, 04:41 PM · #

  24. High school has become the last refuge of the teaching of literature. College and university English departments are the domain of Laputan quibbling.

    — J. Linn Allen · Aug 4, 07:06 AM · #

  25. High schools don’t teach literature any more than college English programs do. And, as Chaucer might say, who paints the lion: who trains the high school English teachers? We’ve made a muddle of the profession, but then again, everyone has made a muddle of their professions, jobs, neighborhoods, families, the nation. We are a disgrace.

    What we need is for the baby boom generation to begin acting like adults. This is something I have not seen occur at any department or university with which I’ve had an affiliation. Instead, we all whine and bicker and act like children. We do not want to make decisions, but we also resent and criticize those who do. We whine about grade inflation, but we do not lower the grades we give, for we want our students to like us, and we want to get good teaching evaluations. We teach whatever appeals to us or them, or helps us to advance in our professions (which we’ve managed to turn into “professions”) rather than teach what students—who are not going to become professors in our fields—would most benefit from. For we are unable to agree upon such a simple thing at that because we are incapable of thinking or acting like adults, who understand that decisions entail sacrifices and sometimes make people (e.g., children) unhappy.

    We complain about loss of tenure lines, exploitation of graduate students, but we do nothing to change this, though it’s utterly within our power. We run our own institutions, in contrast to those who, for example, work at Goldman Sachs.

    Theory, grand in its irony, was a symptom and perhaps a portent, but certainly not a cause.

    — Reality Principle · Aug 4, 08:06 AM · #

  26. While the humanities faculty have been off inventing their own irrelevant little worlds, a much more serious problem emerged in colleges and universities – the disappearance of any coherence in undergraduate education. This was, of course, not the exclusive fault of the humanities faculty, but the traditional leadership they had provided for many decades has been absent, both in general education programs and in the “liberal arts.” Isn’t it possible and desirable that in 2008 undergraduates might share some common intellectual experiences? Can any college or university actually construct and implement a comprehensive, intellectually diverse undergraduate education program for its students – or, has departmentalism become so triumphant that anything resembling a true “liberal arts curriculum” is no longer possible?

    — Carl · Aug 4, 08:52 AM · #

  27. At the risk of advertising my age, it seems to me Hermann Hesse wrote a percipient critique of the current situation, quite some time ago: “The Glass-Bead Game,” usually translated when I was an undergrad as “Magister Ludi,” for no good reason that I could ever see.

    So much of what appears really to concern theorists is neither their putative subject matter, but rather a set of rules, principles, procedures, etc. all of which seem to have less and less to do with teaching anybody anything and more and more to do with establishing mastery over the game itself. Come to think of it, the translation title of that book isn’t inexplicable at all.

    My guess is that theory affects most students’ lives after graduation about as much as the historical evolution of the rules of chess affect the rise of radical Islamic fundamentalism.

    — Dan · Aug 4, 10:45 AM · #

  28. Critical theory displaced old-world Eurocentric hubris and hegemony, bringing Humanities into the current century. The trouble started when ponderous structuralists such as Dickens and Hugo were, for the first time, realistically evaluated (thanks to Hawthorne, Fitzgerald and Salinger reinventing English prose) and were deservedly taken down several notches, allowing a free-for-all for the vacancies, but this time based not on the splattered ejaculate of bearded literary onanists but a wild west shootout between clean-shaven gunslingers and uppity assistant professors shooting from atop the saloon.

    — Original Marci · Aug 4, 11:10 AM · #

  29. I remember an article on the decline of English majors from the 1960s, when I first became a dept chair. A key quote, from memory, by a famous scholar of the day: “The trouble with our students is that they come in because they love literature; sometimes it takes a full year to knock that out of them.” The dominant theory then was literary formalism, the “new criticism.” Not all that much has changed over the last 40 years, aside from the fortuitous rise of rhet/comp.

    — Edward M. White · Aug 4, 11:27 AM · #

  30. Has anyone read anything good lately?

    Or has theory (or whatever avatar thereof) made that impossible? If so, I’m sorry, naturally. However, to choose a Wodehouse comparison, it’s like the feeling of the chappie who’s just shinnied up a tree to escape a wild animal in the jungle and looks down to see how his friend’s doing and finds that his friend didn’t make it up the tree. He feels bad about the friend, of course, but he’s very glad to be up that tree.

    As a comp-lit minor, 1970 vintage, I’m grateful to have been spared Theory. Back then we still talked about books.

    — Dan · Aug 4, 02:36 PM · #

  31. In Dan’s day (actually a couple years before) we talked about theory. We talked about it ca. 10% of the time. We were required to take a course in it. The rest of the time we talked about literature. The balance seemed just about right. That was theory though, not Theory.

    — Commentator · Aug 4, 02:42 PM · #

  32. A “free-for-all” that got some people “taken down several notches” amid the “splattered ejaculate of bearded literary onanists” that’s turned into a “wild west shootout between clean-shaven gunslingers and uppity assistant professors shooting from atop the saloon.” I can’t decide whether that’s the really great writing Theory has destroyed, or Brainstorm should reactivate The New Yorker’s old “Block That Metaphor!” department.

    — Just Passing Through · Aug 4, 03:52 PM · #

  33. This post has encourage me to revive one of my many abandoned blogs to flesh out my own view. However, I would like to ask Mr. Bauerlein if he has any practical issue with the two books he chose to highlight in this post: Surveiller et punir and Orientalism.

    — Jarod HM · Aug 4, 11:38 PM · #

  34. Discipline and Punish is a tour de force, but I let historians expert in the field weigh its accuracy and research. Same for Orientalism.

    — Mark Bauerlein · Aug 4, 11:45 PM · #

  35. It seems to me that the problem is with what is called “theory” in English, comparative literature, cultural studies, etc. fields. There it involves half-digested bad sociology, misinterpretation of philosophy, use of antiintellectual subjectivist claptrap (Heideggerianism), bad history (Foucault) etc. A serious theory of literature would be of great use. Unfortunately, no such thing is available and the pendulum has swung back partially and so everything is back to the way it was, with tacit hypotheses about human nature etc. all the way through. IMO, this is a better situation, if the affected areas can relearn how to write for at least then we can see that their reliance on prescientific and ordinary understanding is present. Now we get endless “pile on” stuff.

    — philosopher-animal · Aug 5, 08:07 AM · #

  36. Foucault should remain within the contours of Continental philosophy, occupying (rightfully) a marginal place in its history. The residues of Foucauldianism, having since dried into noxious excrements of masochistic obsessions with “biopolitics” and “radical” identitarian pathos, have also become encrusted in certain crotches within the History departments— And it’s a terrible thing to behold!

    So Theory has had its ups and downs. The fantasy that it has helped to disrupt the hubris of Eurocentric hegemony is misleading, largely due to the fact that the conception of hegemony it has hijacked is Gramscian in origin, and was about seizing the State— Not the English department! Where does the critique of Eurocentrism lead besides an extremely nihilistic reassertion of one’s own Eurocentrism?

    But at least now one can air out all one’s stink holes, flex one’s identity, camouflage it via chic radical jargon with political content, and pass it off as scholarship!

    — postradicalantifoundationalistprobeinthephallogocentricorificeofwesternhegemonicdiscourse · Aug 5, 10:54 PM · #

  37. Well said, philosopher-animal! How salutary for everyone involved if the affected areas could merely relearn how to write.

    — Another philosopher-animal · Aug 6, 09:03 PM · #

  38. Marci #28 and # 36(may I just call you ‘orifice’?, or would that be too forward).

    BRAVO! It’s like a Gallager concert! Excellent!

    Well, I’m gonna hit the shower now.

    — T Paine · Aug 7, 04:36 PM · #

  39. I liked theory, but it did occlude reading poetry and dramas and so on for themselves. British Philosopher Mary Midgley argues in her autobiography The Owl of Minerva that theory in English departments was a useless activity like learning how to rhyme in a classical language. Even when it was done well it wasn’t of much interest, is, I think, her cavil.

    But the original theory-meisters — Derrida and Rene Girard (the latter of which is too often occluded in the theory battle, even though he’s far more interesting than Derrida), were quite eloquent and … on their own terms, worthy of reading.

    You can’t really read without a conceptual basis if you intend to think about what you’re reading, and if you’re a scholar, you have to think a bit.

    It’s just too bad that most of the far left French theory was so obscure, and finally was a bridge to nowhere.

    It might have helped if there was a lot more study of Girard, and a lot less study of Derrida and Lacan and Tel quel, generally.

    And perhaps a bit of British empiricism — ala Mary Midgley — would have helped the whole enterprise remain a bit closer to reality.

    — Kirby Olson · Aug 11, 04:28 PM · #

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