Two Months Before the Mast of Post-Modernism

Over at The Valve, they are talking about the book Theory's Empire--and thus about the damage done by "Critical Theory" and its spawn on the American humanities over the past generation. But most of it is all too... theoretical.¹ What work can you do with statements like:

• "Derrida is... the greatest and most exciting thinker of the 20th century.... Derrida is in many respects... very conservative... one must start from that conservatism in order to measure the ways in which he is radical... can seem highly radical to thinkers who are attempting to graft Derrida into a tradition... in which many of Derrida’s key reference points have historically been marginal.... How much does that affect the way you read a sentence where someone asks to have a button undone? Probably not much..."
• "This polarizing, personalizing rhetoric indicates that social constructionism has an institutional basis, not a philosophical, moral, or political one. It tramples on philosophical distinctions and practices an immoral mode of debate. Though it declares a political goal for criticism, it is not a political stance.... Herein lies the secret of constructionism’s success... it is the school of thought most congenial to current professional workplace conditions of scholars in the humanities."
• "I liked theory, even when I felt I didn't have the faintest idea what was going on, because if nothing else you could sense the energy behind it.."
• "The older philosophical critics, Jameson suggests, lacked Hegelian seriousness: in place of an aggressive commitment to the consequences of their premises, they were 'content' to 'simply' muse about literature 'in an occasional way'.... His sinecured dilettanti mass-produced 'curiosities of an existential or phenomenological criticism, or a Hegelian or a gestalt or indeed a Freudian criticism.' Burke, Empson et al. avoided indenture in the Curiosity Trade, Jameson argues, by processing literature in accordance with a personal interpretive ethos, one resonant with a nonsystemized theory nonetheless compulsively applied in a rage for symmetry. Jameson’s notion of a virtuoso critic (of the good camp) can be summed up thus: a thinker of original temperament but suitable Hegelian seriousness whose passion for patterns generates interesting reading of literary works. His notion of a virtouso critic (of the bad): calicified mind, learned but unoriginal and philosophically fickle, whose passions for other people’s patterns generates predictable readings of literary works..."
• "I apologize for Heidegger’s highly convoluted and neologistic prose. (I imagine that some readers are already thinking, 'come back, Derrida, all is forgiven').... In Heidegger’s reading, we could say that the discovery of Neptune in 1846 could plausibly be described, from a strictly human vantage point, as the 'invention' of Neptune.... [B]efore we began to look for it, the planet 'Neptune' simply did not exist in any human consciousness.... And yet once humans had invented... Neptune, they understood [it]... as [a thing]... not susceptible to mere human invention..."
• "[It] takes the already deeply problematic arguments and style of the dominant superstars like Spivak, Prakash and Bhabha and operationalizes it as yeoman-level banality"

?

There is a certain bloodlessness here: the dry bones hop about and clatter, but there is no flesh on them: much too little is said about how High Critical Theory changed--for good and for ill--how "we" "read" "our" "texts".²

So let me get down and dirty: in the boiler room, at the contact point, before the mast. Let me recount the two months--November and December 1981--that I spent enthralled by the High Critical Theory of Michel Foucault.

By day I would rise late, eat a strange late breakfast of scrambled eggs mixed with cottage cheese (a kind of breakfast which I ate only from November 1981 through January 1982, never before, and never since), and then walk across the Charles River footbridge to the Kress Collection of the History of Economic Thought in Baker Library. I would read. I would hasten out into the lobby where I was allowed pens and take notes. I would go back in and read some more. I would hasten out into the lobby. After dinner I would sit in my room, either staring at the wall wondering what my thesis was going to be about or reading secondary works on the history of economic thought, hoping to spot a hole that I could fill with something sorta original.

It was Associate Professor of Social Studies Michael Donnelly's fault. He knew I was trying to write an undergradute thesis about the British Classical Economists and how they understood the economy of their time. He gave me a book by Keith Tribe, Land, Labour, and Economic Discourse. And Tribe had read and been hypnotized by Foucault--specifically The Order of Things and _The Archaeology of Knowledge. I began to read Keith Tribe. He said very strange things. He said that the Wealth of Nations that economists read was not the Wealth of Nations that Adam Smith wrote. The Wealth of Nations that economists read was made up of two books: Book I on markets and Book II on capital. The Wealth of Nations that Adam Smith wrote was made up of five books: Book I on the "system of natural liberty," Book II on accumulation and the profits of stock, Book III on the economic history of Europe and why the empirical history of its economic development had diverged from its natural history, Book IV on the mercantile and physiocratic systems of political economy, and Book V on the proper management of the affairs of the public household by the statesman.

The Wealth of Nations, Tribe said, could not be a book of economics because a book of economics had to be about the economy. And there was no such thing as the economy in 1776 for a book of economics to be about. What was there? There was the undifferentiated stuff of the mixed social-cultural-political-trading system that governed production and distribution: material life. There was the study of the management of public finances. This was conceived in a manner analogous to the domestic-economic management of household finances. Just as--to Robert Filmer and others--the King was the father of the people, so the King's household--which became the state--had to be properly and prudently managed.

In the words of James Steuart, who wrote his Principles of Political Oeconomy nine years before the Wealth of Nations, in 1767: "Oeconomy, in general, is the art of providing for all the wants of a family, with prudence and frugality. What oeconomy is in a family, political oeconomy is in a state." It is managing affairs to make the people prosperous and the tax collections ample by governing "in such a manner as naturally to create the reciprocal relations and dependencies between [inhabitants], so as to make their several interests lead them to supply one another with their reciprocal wants."

There wasn't, Tribe argued, an economy that an economist could write a book of economics about until the 1820s or so.

Strip Tribe's (and Foucault's) arguments of their rhetoric of apparent contradiction and you can understand that within the mystical shell there is a rational kernel. It is--or, at least, I read them as--an injunction to analyze a school of thought in more-or-less the following way:

1. Read not just one or two important books, but a whole bunch of books that talk to our past each other and use the same or similar vocabulary in order to identify the school you will look at.
2. Strip your mind of what they must be talking about, and look with fresh eyes on what they are talking about.
3. Examine what rhetorical, conceptual, and intellectual moves are common within the examples you have of this "discursive formation."
4. Think hard about what rhetorical, conceptual, and intellectual moves you would think you would find in these books--but don't.
5. Think hard about what rhetorical, conceptual, and intellectual moves you do not expect to find prominently in these books--but that you nevertheless do find.
6. Present to the world, in as clear and straightforward a way as you can, what this particular form of discourse was--what it thought the world was like, what it saw as important, what its particular blindnesses were, what its particular sharp points of insight were.
7. Do not, ever, grade a discursive formation of the past by how much it falls away from the ideas of the bien-pensant of today. The past is another country.

And I became convinced that Tribe and Foucault were right. It was, indeed, only with Ricardo that the operation of what we now say is the economy--the production, exchange, and distribution of goods and services all mediated through market exchange--was seen as something that was important enough, or separate enough, or coherent enough to be something that it made sense to write books about, and, indeed, something that it made sense to be an expert in. David Ricardo was a political economist. Adam Smith was a moral philosopher. To try--as somebody like Joseph Schumpeter was--to grade Adam Smith as if he were engaged in the same intellectual project as Schumpeter was somewhat absurd.

Tribe applied this methodology to Adam Smith, his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. What they were doing, before Ricardo, was Political Oeconomy--writing manuals of tactics and policy as advice to statesmen, although manuals restricted to what Adam Smith would have called (did call) a subclass of police: how to keep public order and create public prosperity. Hence for Adam Smith Book V of Wealth of Nations is the payoff: it tells British statesmen what they ought to do in order to make the nation prosperous, their tax coffers full, and thus the state well-funded. Book IV is a necessary prequel to Book V: it tells the statesmen in the audience why the advice that they are being given by others in other books of Political Oeconomy--by Mercantilists and Physiocrats. Book III is another necessary prequel: it teaches statesmen about the economic history of Europe and how political oeconomy of various kinds has been practiced in the past.

But Tribe's (and Foucault's) methodology collapses when we work back to Books II and I of the Wealth of Nations. For Adam Smith is not the prisoner of the discursive formation of Political Oeconomy. He is not the simple bearer of currents of thought and ideas that he recombines as other authors do in more-or-less standard and repeated ways. Adam Smith is a genius. He is the prophet and the master of a new discipline. He is the founder of economics.

Adam Smith is the founder of economics because he has a great and extraordinary insight: that the competitive market system is a remarkably powerful social calculating and organizing mechanism, and that the sophisticated division of labor to which a competitive market system backed up by secure and honest enforcement of property rights give rise is the key to the wealth of nations. Some others before had had this insight in part: Richard Cantillon writing of how once you have specified demands the market does by itself all the heavy lifting that a central planner would need to do; Bernard de Mandeville that dextrous management by a statesman can use the power of private greed to produce the benefit of public utility. But it is Smith who sees what the power of the "system of natural liberty" that is the market could be--and who follows the argument through to the conclusion that it forever upsets and overturns the previous intellectual moves made in and conclusions reached by the discursive formation of Political Oeconomy.

And once I had worked my way through to this conclusion, I could start to write my own thesis. I had broken the thralldom. Foucault's ideas of "discourse" and "archaeology" were not my masters, but my tools. And as I wrote it became very clear to me that between David Ricardo and even the later John Stuart Mill the discursive formation that was Classical Economics did not produce anybody like Adam Smith. There was nobody who made the intellectual leap--produced the epistemological break--that Smith had done that shattered Political Oeconomy and enabled the birth of Classical Economics. I could write my thesis about how the British Classical Economists never understood the Industrial Revolution that they were living through.

--J. Bradford DeLong, B.A. in Social Studies summa cum laude, June 1982.

---

¹Let me interject that the best contribution I have found so far is from Tim Burke--I think I like it the most because it is the meatiest and the bloodiest. But, as always, YMMV:

Tim Burke: Book Notes: Theory's Empire: In 1989, I was well into graduate school... had a lot of exposure to "critical theory" as an undergraduate... a class with Judith Butler on Foucault while she was at Wesleyan. I liked theory, even when I felt I didn't have the faintest idea what was going on, because if nothing else you could sense the energy behind it.... Theory made you feel almost like you were in the dream of the Enlightenment... disciplines and specializations set aside....

I warm to the talk that [Theory] was an empire, but I'm equally aware that my sense of it as such is a direct personal consequence of my individual experience of academic careerism.... I get both the insider and outsider version[s].... I tend to bristle on one hand at know-nothing denunciations of theory, like E.O. Wilson's in Consilience, but also at circle-the-wagons defenses of it.... The main point, and it is one made again and again throughout the anthology, is that theory was above all a... way of feeling and being academic... native to a past time and place.... You can't just separate out some of the chief manifestations of the era of theory, like the star system, as unrelated epiphenomena, or insist that we just talk about the actual texts. (Though at the same time, the volume could really use an ethnographic retelling of a conference or conversation from the late 1980s or early 1990s. Anthony Appiah comes closest in his short essay, and maybe there's nothing that really fits the bill besides a David Lodge novel.)....

[W]hatever "theory" began as, it quickly metastasized into... a way of being and acting that was often a new and virulent practice of academic warfare which left a lot of casualties and fortifications in its wake....

Saussure, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and even many of the various American academic superstars who dominated the era of theory like Fish, Jameson, or Spivak had important, substantive arguments to make that can't just be waved away or ignored.... Still, I agree with many of Theory's Empire's authors: the geist and historical moment of theory is an equally important part of the subject....

This is not to underrate the particular forms of self-interest that theory serviced in very particular ways.... [T]heory was the ultimate careerist maneuver, because its normal operations conferred upon the theorist a position of epistemologically unimpeachable, self-confirming authority (in part by claiming to abjure authority) while also freeing the theorist from having to know anything but theory in order to exert such authority.... [S]uch gestures of intellectual hypocrisy, some of them more subtle, some less so, are a particular target of mockery and anger from the authors in Theory's Empire.... [O]ther points that emerge along the way... strike me as important. One is the amnesia of theory.... So when John Ellis observes of Stanley Fish's work that it ignored the past, that in Fish's work, "philosophy of science begins with Thomas Kuhn, serious questions about the idea of truth and the positivist theory of language begin with Derrida, jurisprudence begins with the radical Critical Legal Studies movement", I think he's exactly right, and not just about Fish.... The same affliction affected us all across a wide swath of disciplines: we reinvented wheels, fire, alphabets and chortled in satisfaction at our own cleverness. Theory dropped into our midst like commodities drop into a cargo cult, and our reaction was roughly the same, right up to eagerly scanning the skies for the next French thinker to drop down....

[T]he ordinary work of postcolonial scholarship takes the already deeply problematic arguments and style of the dominant superstars like Spivak, Prakash and Bhabha and operationalizes it as yeoman-level banality.... [A] missing generation of monographs [is] a result, an absence of substantive, minutely authoritative, carefully researched and highly specialized knowledge....

It is a straightforwardly good thing that historians now write about a whole range of topics that were relatively unstudied in 1965; a straightforwardly good thing that literary critics read and think about a much wider range of texts than they once did.... I suppose if I had one hope from this volume, it's that people who read it and take it seriously won't be the kind of lazy Sokollites that Michael Berube justifiably complains about, because nowhere in the volume does anyone claim that doing literary analysis or humanistic scholarship is easy or straightforward. If this is a roadmap to the future, it does not go from point A to point B, much to its credit...

²A second interjection: Sean McCann does attempt to put some sinews on what he is talking about: he lists six (he thinks four, but they are six) intellectual power-moves of High Critical Theory http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/theorys_empire_wrestling_the_fog_bank/#2277:

1. Language is a complex and imperfect instrument of profound importance to our sense of what it means to be a self-conscious human being. Because communication makes use of conventional codes, it’s always possible for a listener to misinterpret the intentions of a speaker or for a sentence to be given more or different meanings than a speaker intends (a matter which explicitly or not may become a reflexive resource and thematic concern of literary texts).
2. The various possibilities for imperfect communication are comparable to, or perhaps consistent with or related to, the other senses in which individuals are less than fully autonomous, rational, self-directed beings.
3. Many commonplace beliefs, practices, and institutions owe far more to persistent habit, superstition, and ideology (in a word, culture) than to reason or evidence. These include once prevalent beliefs about the properties and boundaries of literature.
4. They also include more fundamental matters—-e.g., the social reproduction of race, gender, sexuality, and, to a degree, of class—-whose role in shaping our individual and social lives may be of greater importance than explicit legal or governmental structures. Literature plays a role in establishing and legitimizing, as well as in revealing and challenging those tacit beliefs, practices, and institutions and in this way is connected to more extensive social problems.
5. The existence of those social conventions, and our understanding of them, is shaped by systematic social inequities. We have good reason, therefore, to be highly attuned to the way interest as well as culture affects belief.
6. Taking full cognizance of these matters could have emancipatory consequences.

Comments

[Yo Mama]

"I could write my thesis about how the British Classical Economists never understood the Industrial Revolution that they were living through."

Are you saying this applies to today? That economists today don't understand whatever we are living though now. If you're not, I am.

[liberal]

Postmodernism: yuck.

A very funny spoof of postmodernism can be found at:
http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/
Keep clicking the refresh button! REALLY funny.

[Tracy]

Very like my own experience with Foucault. As a political scientist, I carry a lot more away from reading him then Brad, but I have similar final conclusions. Brad's list of what he learned - and finally largely abandoned - fits very well with me, but I never abandoned much of it.

Now back to those static score panel model specifications ...

[bostoniangirl]

I know that this is a tangent, but I have a request. Please rework the bit about Adam Smith's epistemological leap and send it to the Ec 10 office. When I took Ec 10, we read some stupid anecdote about making chairs or clocks as proof of the power of the invisible hand. It was one of the most anti-intellectual things I've ever seen.

They couldn't even be bothered to include an excerpt from Smith in the course pack. It made me very suspicious of economics as a field, because its practitioners seemed to be relentlessly ahistorical.

[andres]

"Adam Smith is the founder of economics because he has a great and extraordinary insight: that the competitive market system is a remarkably powerful social calculating and organizing mechanism, and that the sophisticated division of labor to which a competitive market system backed up by secure and honest enforcement of property rights give rise is the key to the wealth of nations."

Well, I can't deny that all of that is in TWON, Brad. But the passages of WON that stand out in my memory are not the ones where he philosophically extols the virtues of decentralized decision-making under competition, but the passages in Books III-V where Smith speaks truth to power: denouncing the depredations of the East India Company, the iniquity of the Bourbon ancien regime's taxation system, the misguided nature of Britain's policies in its colonies.

By comparison, Books I and II of TWON are very much a normative description of a _utopian_ government policy where there are no joint stock companies, no royal monopolies, no subsidies, no Colbertian industrial regulations, no tax farmers, in short, a utopia where self-seeking businessmen have not _captured_ government policy. How Smith proposed to prevent such capture from taking place in the future, well, he never entirely made clear, and so while he was an excellent writer and philosopher, he falls somewhat short of genius for this reason, IMHO. The upstarts across the Atlantic who seceded from Britain's empire in the same year had a greater impact on world history than Smith did, so Foucault and co. are not far off the mark in their reading of Smith.

[John Emerson]

At my URL I have a satellite piece on Theory that is much bloodier than Burke's.

Part of the problem is lumping. I still think Foucault is great, and I think that Lacan is a charlatan, but in the biz they're two comparable theory-production-units (not authors) of the first rank.

Part of the problem comes from the bureaucratic institutionalization and enforcement of a methodology, which works best in sciences where there's broad consensus about almost the whole field. (But I think there was a comparable problem when political economy came to be eliminated from economics awhile back -- as I was confidently told by people in the field, anyway.)

Oddly enough, while Foucault's tools would be ideally useful for analyzing the social organization of Theory itself, this isn't done much.

Additionally, during the seventies certain forms of identity politics took over theory. There are social constructionists, for example Rom Harre, who have nothing to do with identity politics or relativism at all, but you don't hear about them much.

Granted that "Theory" people deal with the more open-ended areas of human life, including literature, ideology, pop culture, informal culture, etc., you'd expect it to be quite a bit different, odder, and less empirical. Brad here, for example, is very sharp at economics, but reduced to shrieks of rage when contemplating American politics, media, and public opinion. Perhaps he should broaden his own studies.

[Brad DeLong]

Do go read John Emerson. This paragraph, for example, is brilliant:

"I doubt that Connery is really the problem here. I imagine him chained to his carrel, pale and wan, flinching in fear every time he hears the door open, terrified that his dissertation adviser might catch him doing something bad. Connery has certainly done his homework, and we can hope for good work from him if he ever reaches free soil."

[Diana]

actually, it's your thesis that sounds interesting ... can you put some part of it online? maybe just the conclusion, or something?

[bostoniangirl]

I agree that John Emerson's essay is well worth reading. That paragraph quoted by Prof. Delong was a gem. I think that it was donation worthy. Click over there and give, people.

[Sandwichman]

"...a strange late breakfast of scrambled eggs mixed with cottage cheese..."

And here I thought I invented that. Instant blintzes. Great sex food, too. Try it with some yogourt and blueberries.

[Matt]

I don't have enough interest in literary theory to read the valve project. It might be great, but it just doesn't interest me. But, I will ask that the term "critical theory" be reserved for the likes of Adorno, Marcuse, Habermass, etc. and some of their later followers, perhaps. "Theory" is a lose bunch of people, mostly in depts. of English or comp lit. Their stuff isn't to my taste but I don't read enough to comment on it. "Critical theory" is something else- the project of the frankfurt school. Raymond Geuss has the best little intro- _The Idea of a Critical Theory_.

[green apron monkey]

that sounds about right. If Smith is the founder of Modern Economics he should have one foot in each world, right? By the time things get to Ricardo, the discipline looks very much like modren economics, but becuase Smith was the innovator, his stuff only half looks like the stuff economists do today.

Our theorist over at the valve sounds like a smoker who knows all to well the dangers, but can't quite quit.

[tjallen]

Thank goodness my undergrad and grad philosophy departments were "analytic" departments! Of course, I admit, an entire semester spent on the analysis of the word "the" is about as useful for buttoning a shirt as Theory...

I wonder if reading Theory is any more difficult than reading Kant, and have you ever tried reading A. Gruenbaum? (sp?) Egad! I guess with Kant at least you know he is trying to get at the heart of something, and not playing a move in some elaborate game to win the department chair.

Along the way in grad school I had a class in British Moralists, and was surprised to find Adam Smith there, as I had only heard of him in connection with Wealth of Nations. Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) is quite interesting, and he is indeed a competent moral philosopher.

[Antoni Jaume]

Professor DeLong, It seems to me that "[...]Book IV is a necessary prequel to Book V: it tells the statesmen in the audience why the advice that they are being given by others in other books of Political Oeconomy--by Mercantilists and Physiocrats.[...]" is missing something. I reckon that it would be on the tone of "-- is wrong.". Or I'm wrong myself?

DSW

[Roger Albin]

!1) Not denigrating Smith, but his insight in this matter was not unique. He was the most notable member of a group of Enlightenment intellectuals convinced of the importance of the market. This includes Smith's close friend Hume and the French Physicalists.
2) As implied out by Burke in the associated post, there is a crucial respect in which theory was a huge windfall in English depts. There are only so many books, or at least decent books that can be written about the canon of important writers. Theory and all its progeny made it possible to develop dissertations and careers in fields that were running out of steam. Even worse, it was relatively easy. All you had to do was read the great theorists, read whatever is the topic of your dissertation or book, sit in your carrel thinking about applying the methods of the masters to your project, and write dense prose. No original archival research, no field work, no hard work of trying to master real knowledge outside your discipline. While usually well intentioned, this is really the worst sort of academic careerism.
3) In some sense, the theory business was a bizarre and distant attempt to reproduce the methods of the natural sciences. After all, physicists have theories and they often turn out to be very productive. Forgotten by all these theorists was the simple fact that what makes a scientific theory good is the production of useful and testable predictions, whether or not those predictions are actually correct. To the post-modernists, theory is largely after the fact rationalization, a cartoon of really useful theory.

[Tom Parmenter]

Never read a word of Derrida and Adam Smith is decades in my past, but isn't saying that there was no economics before Adam something like saying there were no bacteria before Leeuwenhoek?

[sm]

I am a sideline observer, but what Roger Albin says above seems to fit with some of the uses of the word "theory" I've seen in literature. Using the word "theory" makes an insight into something much more cosmic, yea, indeed, like Newton the Clockwork God. Not like Newton the actual scientist.

Bring on that dense prose!

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

As the author of the fourth blurb up there--"the older philosophical critics..."--I object to the label "theoretical." I argued a position--and advocated that others do so as well--from its premises through to its conclusion. The differrence? Well, take a standard "theoretical" conversation, one driven more by the "logic" of puns than the logic of logic:

"It's all about the Other!"

"No more monolithic patriarchal nonsense about the Other! It's all about the m/Other!"

"Phallocentric slashes wound the body of the 'm/Other.' She needs to be encompassed, like a womb, between the arms of the feminine. She needs to be a (m)Other!"

That kind of "argument" and the one I forward--in which argument qua argument should be considered sacrosanct by a literary critic--aren't kin. They may not even be of the same species. To mistake a carefully reasoned argument for one which claims Reason part of the hegemonic, imperalist, racist and misogynist legacy of the Enlightenment is to miss the point, the boat and pretty much the entire ocean entirely. Could I have written an invective, as Tim and Sean did?

I certainly could have, as I did here:

http://tinyurl.com/bnkfn

And here:

http://tinyurl.com/762nm

And here:

http://tinyurl.com/cyzzb

And here:

http://tinyurl.com/bcmd2

I could've done that, but didn't think it appropriate. Sometimes it's best to be rigorous...especially when what you're criticizing is the endemic lack of rigor in other people's work.

[Bruce Webb]

Quite interesting. My first graduate paper was on Derrida in 1983 so I sympathize.

But qua Adam Smith as economist vs Ricardo. In historiography it is common to criticize Herodotus and elevate Thucydides because the latter wrote what was recognizable as "History" to the eighteenth century scholars who defined "History" as a discipline and Herodotus was not. Not to denigrate Thucydides, he did a masterful work of explaining the course of the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta, a war in which he had some part. But he told a coherent story from a particular point of view, one that privileged the aristocracy and denigrated the democracy. In this he was followed by most other classical writers in both Greece and Rome which in turn resonated with the German nationalists that largely founded modern historiography and who equally promoted the "big man" and "best men" theory of history.

Herodotus was doing a much different project, one that wouldn't even have a name until the nineteenth century. Historians like Thucydides produce a history, a line of events connected by time. They may and do double back but their aim is to produce a single braided cable. Herodotus was a folklorist who had the misfortune to label his work "Historia". "Historia" means 'story' and Herodotus was all into stories. He came clean, his work is shot through with disclaimers like "they say", but in the course of telling a coherent story of the Persian Wars he packed in thousands of sidelines that we would now label as mythology or folklore or ethnology or biology. Moreover he did not hesitate to give two or three versions of the same events, each from a different people's tradition. He was sui generis, there was no one to tell him that all that stuff was not history and did not belong, and the world should be happy there wasn't. Because we know all kinds of things about what the ancient world believed that we would not without these sidetrips.

You shove Thucydides and Herodotus through Ranke's grater and the former comes out the better historian, but in my view Herodotus is by far the more valuable writer. If given a choice you would learn much more about the ancient world from the latter, on the other hand you would have to maintain a more open and skeptical mind. Which is a good thing anyway.

[Anderson]

Liteary theory is a tool for helping to see things in a text that one might've missed otherwise. As such, it can enhance one's "aesthesis" of a text. It can also help us to understand our presuppositions ("ideology" if you will) about reading.

When it becomes an end instead of a means, of course, then one is practicing philosophy or some other discipline, often without a great deal of the rigor that would be required in the appropriate department. (Partial exception: Anglo-American hostility to cont'l philosophy made English dep'ts a haven for reading Hegel et al. --- but again, with wildly varying rigor, depending on one's professors.)

The sure sign for me that a given professor had crossed the line was when we would spend all our time "on" a given work but never actually discuss the work itself, just the theories that might in principle be brought to bear upon the work.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Apologize for the dual trackback. Didn't realize it was still down there when I corrected a typo.

[Adam Kotsko]

I'm honored to have been the first example of the bloodlessness of the event. And the funny thing is that I'm one of the (kind of) pro-theory people!

So the accusation of being "too theoretical" doesn't quite stick.

[Warren F]

For several decades I've had the impression that this whole post-modernism gig is just a bunch of gas. Prof Delong's article does not dissuade me from this point of view.

[monboddo]

OK, I confess I am just baffled--what in points 1-7 is such an original contribution of Foucault's? All these points, it seems to be, could be gleaned from readings of Quentin Skinner and Thomas Kuhn. Not to say that Foucault is worthless, but these insights certainly aren't unique to him.

[sara]

It is clear that DeLong wants us to consider his indigestible breakfast, made of things that should not be mixed together, a symbol for the mixing of cultural theory and the social sciences.

This is to ascribe to the social sciences (presumably the scrambled eggs) a wholeness and perfection they lack. (They're scrambled eggs, after all.) The social sciences tend distressingly to reflect and represent the prejudices of their time, and, yes, the interests of power. Which is to say, eat too much scrambled eggs and you will get high cholesterol and a heart case like Dick Cheney's.

Now, if you were to describe the cottage cheese as proper French chèvre, you have a gourmet omelette, though admittedly one that still can't be made without breaking eggs.

[wally]

As an economist, what I think would be really interesting would be a critical comparison of the rise in theory in the (or one of the) humanities (like literary criticism) with the rise and complete imperial dominance of theory in economics. Why was the former so much less successful and transitory than the latter? Why was the introduction of theory in literary criticism thought to be so transgressive and radical in the humanities both by its proponents and its critics, while theoretical economics was so often viewed as complementary to the status quo (word?) and even reactionary by its critics and (implicitly) by its exponents.

[PQuincy]

The single most annoying feature of much of what passed as theory or theoretical thinking during the heyday of French post-structural philosophizing--especially among Americans who liked the idea but weren't especially good at it--was the invention of insider vocabulary and turns of speech. These seemed to have two purposes. Overtly, they imitated the word games (some with serious philosophical purpose, some just because playfulness was part of the game) of their French models, Additionally and equally importantly (nod to Tim Burke), they served as markers to distinguish those who used them as insiders, in the know, participants in a deep and important enterprise. Every academic knows how important (and how _tempting_) the game of talking-the-talk is, especially when trying to impress hiring and tenure committees or distinguished visitors.

Just for example: many of us might talk about how we enjoy reading a book, whereas those who want to show their insiderness experience aesthesis. To make sure that everyone recognizes the claim they are making, they often use scare quotes in writing--"aesthesis"--, while in speaking they may set off their use of the favored word with a special marker--"aesthesis, if you will".

Of course, writing in everyday language and using bluff common-sense phrasing can equally be a marking tool: there's no avoiding the genuine issues of language and reflexivity that the theory wars brought out (again). That's why there was good work that used theory, as well as bad, and my guess is that's why the underlying issues come back in new guise, generation after generation.

[wetzel]

When I was an English major in the early eighties I photocopied 200 pictures of Foucault's bald headed portrait from my 'Foucault Reader' and pasted them on the walls and ceiling of my dorm room. Foucault's panopticon.

Then I had to stop out for a while.

[matt]

Brad, I can't tel you how much I've missed this site.

I was in Romania when my Dell inspiron laptop burned out and the only fixes of you I could get were in net cafes with friends in Cluj. I couldn't take the time that i usually do to appreciate what I get here and now that I am home, with a new Toshiba laptop (much lighter, brighter, and overall better than the Dell)I am going to read every single thing 've missed.

This was a perfect way to start with my overdue remedial efforts. Thank god for Kage Baker. Without The Graveyard Game and The Life of the World to Come, a six hour layover in Milan on the way home without my computer would have ben unbearable.

Sara: You post in the middle of this is one of the reasons I come here. Always a truly eclectic mix here.

[jeff]

Most of the statements Professor DeLong quotes from the discussion at the valve are bullshit. Not because they are about literary theory, nor even because they are written in theory jargon, but because they are just bullshit. I've taught literary theory and I have to admit that the texts on my syllabus are unrecognizable from any of the discussions in this post or comments, with the exception of Sean McCann's. Tim Burke's comment is full of confident dismissals but utterly barren of engagement with the thinkers he mentions. And Professor DeLong, we're supposed to believe that critical theory is irrelevant because you didn't find a book by Keith Tribe useful for your undergraduate honor's thesis? I understand that a blog is not a place for a fully-dressed argument, but its in truly poor taste to write off an entire discipline just because your breakfast didn't agree with you. I've graded dozens of papers on theory from students from all walks of life and all kinds of majors, and I've never had a single one as intellectually poor as this discussion.

Though truth be told, I'm not surprised to find anyone proceeding in this way if you've been reading the _Theory's Empire_ anthology. Some smart literary theorist should analyze why in the early 21st century academy otherwise intellectually honest people seem to think that a few impressionistic anecdotes and a couple balderdash quotations are enough to dismiss an entire traditions of inquiry.

One of the generic features of the anti-theory essay is to evoke theory as a milieu or style or feeling or breakfast dish (rather than to see it as what it is: a body of discordant and wide-ranging texts translated into English from disparate locales and discordant traditions). The anti-theory essay typically talks about how an old guard of somewhat dusty scholars was replaced (in 1965, or 1969, or 1980, or 1989, or whenever) by a vanguard of deconstructive intellectuals who proclaimed their affiliation with progressive social movements but were in reality only interested in political power plays within the claustrophobically small world of the humanities. There is of course a lot more continuity between Empson and Derrida, between Burke and Jameson, than theory's detractors acknowledge. As an account of trends in literary studies, the anti-theory essay is basically worthless.

Yet why this kind of account of theory has such a hold on theory's critics is worth exploring. Of course, the essays collected in this anthology will enable a wide variety literary folks and professors in other departments to shout-down the English department down the hall, while at the same time freeing them of the responsibility to understand the arguments and histories of the thinkers under discussion. And I think the way this anthology has been used so far clues us in to how the anti-theory essay works. It really boils down to the question of the uses of literature inside and outside of literature departments. Outside of the departments, literature has important cultural functions for a wide variety of people. It provides pleasure, indexes prestige and accomplishment, represents the nation, fills out interior dimensions of our selves and our pasts. Of course, a lot of these functions overlap with what goes on in English department research and teaching. Yet if what gets called theory has anything in common, any internal consistency that would justify the title of this anthology, its that it appears to set out to do very different things with literature than the above-enumerated. What the rise of the theory milieu really names is a rise in prominence of historicist scholarship which uses literature to interpret culture and culture to interpret literature. Many of the ways of conceiving literature that underwrite the pursuit of literature outside the academy do not survive the scrutiny of a lot of professors. The anti-theory essay is really a contest about who owns literature: the people who have academic uses for it, or the people who have other uses for it. The latter camp obviously feel that the cultural capital that accrues to them through their use of literature is threatened by theory and cultural studies. The anti-theory essay is a coalition-builider--it draws a wide variety of readers who have a wide variety of uses for literature (the NY Times prints one every year in their annual review of the MLA conference). Through anecdote, straw man argumentation, intellectual caricature, and selective quotation, is that theory's...well, bad!

What _Theory's Empire_ does is take the anti-theory anecdote and elevate it to the structuring principle of an entire anthology. Predictably, intellectually ludicrous results ensue. Thoughtful critiques like those of Appiah and Bromwich (who I know to be sensitive and sympathetic readers of theory) are mashed together with the right-wing mush. Tim Burke actually credits _Theory's Empire_ with not giving us a roadmap to the future of literary studies, as if a hodge-podge collection of excerpts would even be expected to offer a roadmap to anything. The point of _Theory's Empire_ is to draw a line in the sand, to tar all theory with the same brush, to cordon it off from literature. This can be glimpsed in the editors' principle of inclusion. Their only criteria is that the author say something against theory, doesn't matter how or why or when--and it doesn't even matter what the excerpted author says in the rest of the piece. The editors and their sympaticos are carrying out a war of position, reducing an enormously rich tradition into a for and against. This anthology is designed not to stimulate discussion, but to stimulate position-taking, to reduce theory to a slogan. Its rather ingenious. Literary scholars will feel compelled to defend theory, but its clear that its the English professoriate itself and not just theory that's in the cross-hairs here, so defenders will have the choice of remaining silent or of contesting the issue on terms that are already intellectually incoherent. The suspension of a debate about the facts through a reduction of an issue into sheer position-taking...where have I heard of that before?