if we were to restart theory….
…we might start by working the following out:
So much of the quasi-materialist theory of the past, oh, sixty years has staked itself on the promotion of the random wander through city streets as opposed to the technoratic, overly-rational, heartlessly-designed urban plan, and in particular, the plan’s incorporation of tracts of uniform, utilitarian housing developments / projects / estates. The dérive, the tactical - these topographical / metaphorical practices form the underpinnings of Lefebvre’s, Debord’s, SI’s, de Certeau’s theoretical resistance to centralized bureaucratic power.
Today, however, well after Reagan and Thatcher and their descendents have “starved the beast” of government and brought to an end, in the Anglo-American world and, by influence and force, beyond, the actually-existing and potentially-constructed category of the welfare state that was known as social housing, we now know, unlike those who have come before us, the true value of what was once and now is no more provisioned. We read these earlier theorists who had, no doubt, noble intentions, as cringe inwardly, knowing that we smell in their works an ideology better suited to bourgeois gentrification and tower demolition than, you know, the provision of rooves and running water, walls and doors, simple, unglamourous things that just every single one of us are very happy to have. We understand, in short, the inadvertent complicity of previous theories that are dependent upon libertarian visions of urban space, and we cannot help but think that they were written during a period when it was easier to take for granted the fact that these things would continue to be built, and that the people that live in them would never be left to fend for themselves on the open, and irrationally exuberant!, market.
To put it another way, today, given the choice (which is, perhaps, the only choice that we have, and only if we’re lucky and persistent) between the Ideological State Apparatus and the Abolition of the State, we know that we’d take the ISA and work through the problem of the I in it, rather than the latter, which is the path the world has taken since, and we know damn well where that has gotten us and will continue to get us.
We will have to rewrite the whole thing, cognisant of and vigilant about the ennui and disciplinarity, corruption and neglect, that comes of a strong state sector, but even more careful that we know what our true priorities are, in an age where there seems to be only one single priority.
So the question is, I guess, if we were to restart theory, would we have to sell our old, well-marked copies of Debord and de Certeau on Amazon, donate them to the charity shop, in order to get the room we need to work practically, efficaciously? Would we have to banish them to the category of the merely historical document in order to get done what needs to be done?
the decline of english
There’s a whole lot that’s right in William Deresiewicz’s review / jeremiad in The Nation focused on the ill health of the discipline of English circa now in the US. But don’t get me wrong - there’s a lot that’s way off in the piece too. Let’s start with the way off. Speaking of the MLA job list, he takes us on a tour of the silly stuff they’re listing nowadays, finally landing in the seemingly safe space of American lit, which is, “well, literature” at least.
When we [get to the literature positions] we find that the largest share of what’s left, nearly a third, is in American literature. Even more significant is the number of positions, again about a third, that call for particular expertise in literature of one or another identity group. “Subfields might include transnational, hemispheric, ethnic and queer literatures.” “Postcolonial emphasis” is “required.” “Additional expertise in African-American and/or ethnic American literature highly desirable.” This is an old story, but let’s stop for a moment to consider what the many ads like the last one, for a tenure-track position in twentieth-/twenty-first-century American fiction, actually mean. They mean that you can be a brilliant young scholar, from a top program, but if you’re an expert in Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald, or Malamud, Bellow and Roth, or Gaddis, Pynchon and DeLillo, or all of them plus Dreiser, Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, Mailer, Salinger, Capote, Kerouac, Burroughs, Updike, Chandler, Cheever, Heller, Gore Vidal, Cormac McCarthy and God’s own novelist himself, Vladimir Nabokov, plus Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Cynthia Ozick, Flannery O’Connor and Joyce Carol Oates, but not in African-American or ethnic American fiction, then there are a lot of jobs you just aren’t going to get. And there weren’t that many jobs in American fiction to begin with. Graduate students aren’t stupid, not even in practical terms, not anymore. So nearly everyone is studying at least some minority literature, and everything else–not the totality of what’s valuable in twentieth-century American fiction but certainly the preponderance of it–is getting studied a lot less.
The overall focus on the piece is on the decline of English enrollment and the corresponding efforts to adapt to the crisis on the part of the faculties themselves. Later in the piece, we get the big payoff line “the profession’s intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers.” But I’m pretty damn sure that increased emphasis on formerly-marginal groups / literatures has anything at all to do with declining enrollments - probably the opposite is closer to the truth. Given the choice between Morrison and Chaucer, or say Flannery O’Connor over Cormac McCarthy, I’m not sure the students wouldn’t pick the former in either case.
This move on Deresiewicz’s part feels like consummate culture wars base-touching, like he’s filling out the form that a venue like The Nation require those who would write on the literary humanities to complete before proceeding to other issues and arguments. (Why The Nation, ostensibly a left magazine, would implicitly condone or even require this sort of move is a long, long story, and one that is bound up with both micro-histories of the long standing academy vs. grub street turf war that has been going on in NYC for a long time as well as macro-histories of the anti-intellectualism of the American journalistic left… More on this another day…)
To be fair, the list reflects not so much the overall composition of English departments as the ways they’re trying to up-armor themselves to cover perceived gaps. More revealing in this connection than the familiar identity-groups laundry list, which at least has intellectual coherence, is the whatever-works grab bag: “Asian American literature, cultural theory, or visual/performance studies”; “literature of the immigrant experience, environmental writing/ecocriticism, literature and technology, and material culture”; “visual culture; cultural studies and theory; writing and writing across the curriculum; ethnicity, gender and sexuality studies.” The items on these lists are not just different things–apples and oranges–they’re different kinds of things, incommensurate categories flailing about in unrelated directions–apples, machine parts, sadness, the square root of two. There have always been trends in literary criticism, but the major trend now is trendiness itself, trendism, the desperate search for anything sexy. Contemporary lit, global lit, ethnic American lit; creative writing, film, ecocriticism–whatever. There are postings here for positions in science fiction, in fantasy literature, in children’s literature, even in something called “digital humanities.”
It is a bit difficult not to wonder how Deresiewicz’s own current project avoids the trap of trendiness that he’s describing…
My current project is Friendship: A Cultural History from Jane Austen to Jennifer Aniston. The book draws on fiction, film, television, poetry, and other arts, as well as on insights from the social sciences, to trace the impact of modernity on the ways that friendship has been imagined and practiced in Great Britain and the United States over the past two centuries.
Look, more power to him, but the title sounds exactly like the sort of course listing that people run to boost student numbers, especially at elite places where numbers really can matter on a course by course basis. Theme X: From Canonical Text Y to the Simpsons. Or was it Buffy? Depends. (Funny to think that he couldn’t really call it from Jane Austen to Friends, so Dame Jennifer gets the main billing…) We used to joke that adding the Simpsons to a course description would boost enrollment 1000%. And we joked this way because it was absolutely true. A class on satire that would draw 30 turned into a giant lecture with a squad of TAs if you showed cartoons on the first day of class.
The rest of the piece largely avoids this sort of thing, thankfully, and successfully delineates some of the real issues facing English today. This, for instance, is for the most part right:
What’s going on? Three things, to judge from their absence from Graff’s history, that have never happened before. First, the number of students studying English literature appears to be in a steep, prolonged and apparently irreversible decline. In the past ten years, my department has gone from about 120 majors a year to about ninety a year. Fewer students mean fewer professors; during the same time, we’ve gone from about fifty-five full-time faculty positions to about forty-five. Student priorities are shifting to more “practical” majors like economics; university priorities are shifting to the sciences, which bring in a lot more money. In our new consumer-oriented model of higher education, schools compete for students, but so do departments within schools. The bleaker it looks for English departments, the more desperate they become to attract attention.
In other words, the profession’s intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers. This is also unprecedented. However bitter the ideological battles Graff described, they were driven by the profession’s internal dynamics, not by what our students wanted, or what they thought they wanted, or what we thought they thought they wanted. If grade schools behaved like this, every subject would be recess, and lunch would consist of chocolate cake.
Graff’s critical movements were proud, militant insurgencies, out to transform the world. This year’s Job List confirms the picture of a profession suffering from an epochal loss of confidence. It’s not just the fear you can smell in the postings. It’s the fact that no major theoretical school has emerged in the eighteen years since Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble revolutionized gender studies. As Harvard professor Louis Menand said three years ago, our graduate students are writing the same dissertations, with the same tools, as they were in 1990. Nor has any major new star–a Butler, an Edward Said, a Harold Bloom–emerged since then to provide intellectual leadership, or even a sense of intellectual adventure. The job market’s long-term depression has deepened the mood. Most professors I know discourage even their best students from going to graduate school; one actually refuses to talk to them about it. This is a profession that is losing its will to live.
Twenty years after Professing Literature, the “conflicts” still exist, but given the larger context in which they’re taking place, they scarcely matter anymore. The real story of academic literary criticism today is that the profession is, however slowly, dying.
Now first of all, and while I only have the evidence garnered from my time in a few different English departments over the last ten years as well as the ambient stuff that goes around, he’s absolutely right about the declining enrollments. The department (big research 1 state institution) where I worked until recently is in full-on panic, as they’ve lost half. As far as I know, the place where I did my graduate work (a peer institution to Deresiewicz’s current place) is having the same sort of trouble that he describes. And there is absolutely no doubt that the worsening economic conditions - and in particular, the increasing anxiety that college-aged students feel when it comes to the job market that they anticipate entering - has a lot to do with this pattern.
But I can’t help but feel that there’s something else going on with the declining enrollments as well. After all, just as it’s never the wrong time for the Bush administration to push tax cuts (economy goes up, and the government has too much of “your” money; it goes down and its time for some cleansing stimulus), I’m not sure it’s ever been the right time to sign on for an English major. I don’t have the figures at hand, but it seems to me that there were good reasons in the 90s… and the 80s… and the 70s… and the 60s… to look for a more efficiently marketable degree.
In other words, to my mind, there are other issues here that inform the change beyond what I think Deresiewicz is trying to establish to be a self-reinforcing cycle of faculty desperation and the watering down of the course offerings. I wish I had time to go fully into all of them, and maybe I will in a future post. Just quickly for now: there’s the way that however valuable historicism is a scholarly stance, it tends to fall relatively flat in the classroom. I say this as a historicist, a part historicist, myself: given equivalent teaching quality, the students will be hooked by the magic tricks you can perform on The Waste Land via vulgar decon and/or new critical torque far faster than they will by the status of the industrial society in Victorian Britain and the way that it informs Hard Times. There’s much more to be said about this, of course, and I will soon… Beyond this, intellectual fadism and the mal-distribution of teaching emphasis probably doesn’t help either. There are other factors, some of which Deresiewicz touches on - the farming out of intro classes to part time workers, the soft condescension of letting everyone do creative writing, and so on…
But there’s one important issue that I do want to focus on here - and it is one that, for reasons hinted at above, obviously wouldn’t make it into Deresiewicz’s piece. Take a look again at the timing of the decline as described in the piece:
In the past ten years, my department has gone from about 120 majors a year to about ninety a year.(snip)
It’s the fact that no major theoretical school has emerged in the eighteen years since Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble
revolutionized gender studies. As Harvard professor Louis Menand said three years ago, our graduate students are writing the same dissertations, with the same tools, as they were in 1990.
Deresiewicz has all the pieces of the puzzle on the board, they just need to be put together. The decline of the English major has corresponded with the decline of two complexly, but distinctly, related things. They are: the reign of theory and what we might call the politicized classroom. These two factors are complexly related, in my mind, because I’m mostly sure that the politics of theory, as practiced by English departments, wasn’t much of a politics at all, and certainly wasn’t a politics with any (easy) applicability in the real world. Further, the de-politicization of the classroom is something that I’d mostly attribute not simply to the failure of theory, but mostly to the changing atmosphere after 9/11, when conservative attacks on “liberal bias” were front and center in the news.
I went to grad school during the last days of theory. We started out in our first years with Derrida seminars and ended scrambling to become textual materialists. It became gauche (!), by the end, to go on about Lacan or Althusser, Foucault or Deleuze. But I also got my first tenure track job in the years of the “war on terror.” True to form, true to my academic generation, I am a leftist who apologizes for mentioning Iraq in passing during my classes on Conrad, and who probably advances better critiques of Marx than appreciations of him. Such was the ideological weather on the day I was born to the professoriate - and it’s grown to feel like the way the weather is supposed to be, has always been. There are times when I can tell that the students don’t want me to pull my punches, but I inevitably do.
I am beginning to feel that students have felt the change in the atmosphere of the English department and have responded by finding other subjects in which to major. The politics may have been largely imaginary back before the fall of theory, but the ethos of radicalism was perhaps hugely more attractive than, say, learning about the fruits of some very solid and largely uncontroversial archival work that your teacher is involved in. Perhaps we as a discipline were just holding off the inevitable by becoming, for so many years, the defacto home of left politics in the academy. But it is worth noting, now that the politics have receded and with them the student numbers, that something we were doing was working. And it is further worth noting just how hard it is for us to admit what it was that was different just before the numbers dropped.
We are, in sum, left in a tough, but not impossible situation…. More to come, I promise…
hallward
Interesting summary of a Peter Hallward seminar entitled entitled ‘Dialectical Volunterism’ up at An und für sich. Here’s a slice:
He began by re-stating his conviction, present in his Deleuze book, that the choice for philosophers is still to contemplate or change the world. It is clear that this is not a hard duality, as contemplating the world is the very beginning of any attempt to change it. The urge to change the world comes about when we examine the world, how we think it will make sense and find that it does not make sense. In this way, Hallward said, the world is a scandal for philosophy. He related this to liberation theology, which he has been reading as of late, where the liberationists were presented with ‘poverty and the sinful structures surronding it’. At this point there must be a decision of the collective will to change the world. This became a point of contention for Neil Turnbull, a radical sociologist in the audience, as one could read this as a reactionary motif and not at all a revolutionary one. However Peter Hallward wants us to leave behind Adorno and Marcuse as our model for revolutionary leftist change and embrace Lenin, Mao, Aristide, Chavez, etc. In actuality Hallward betrays himself on this point for he did not discuss Lenin or Mao and his discussion of Haiti, while generally pro-Aristide, focused on the work of Paul Farmer and the reclimation of unused land in the industrial belt for youth football by another private citizen. Despite his seeming pro-State logic in ‘The Politics of Prescription’ it is obvious from this talk that his own position is closer to Hardt and Negri than he may want to admit.
badiou: reactionary modernist
(xposted to Long Sunday….)
We don’t do enough Radical Philosophy around here, I suppose because there’s not enough on-line for us to link to. But it really is - along with NLR and n+1 - one of the few things I’m genuinely excited to see drop through the slot in the front door.
In the new one, a particularly lucid piece by Peter Osborne on Badiou. Here are the first paragraphs, all that’s publicly available on-line:
Neo-classic Alain Badiou’s Being and Event
Peter OsborneIf anyone was in doubt about the continuing grip of French philosophy on the theoretical imagination of the anglophone humanities, the reception of the writings of Alain Badiou must surely have put paid to such reservations. The translation of his magnum opus, Being and Event, in spring 2006, brought to eleven the number of his books published in English in eight years – a period following swiftly on, not entirely contingently, from the deaths of Deleuze, Levinas and Lyotard (1995–1998), and coinciding with that of Derrida (2004).* However, it is not simply the number of translations that is remarkable (‘remarkable, but not surprising’, as Wittgenstein would say), but the fact that a philosophy such as this – for all its idiosyncratic philosophical charms – could so readily have assumed the role of ‘French philosophy of the day’ within the transnational market for theory.
Badiou’s philosophy takes a forbiddingly systematic form; it is anti-historical, technically mathematical and broadly Maoist in political persuasion. It has no interest in (in fact, denies the philosophical relevance of) ‘meaning’, and appears impervious to feminism. It takes a roguish self-satisfaction in its heterosexism.
Stylized individuality is a condition of branding, and ‘difficulty’ is a prerequisite of entry into this particular field, but there are more than market factors at work in Badiou’s successful transition to international theorist. It is a gauge of a number of things: the desire still invested in the English-language reception of French philosophy; the theoretical heresies that a new generation of the so-called ‘old’ Left will overlook in exchange for political solidarity (Žižek, master of this field, is Badiou’s mentor here); the strategic brilliance of two interventions – against Deleuze (The Clamour of Being, 1997; trans. 2000) and against the ‘delirium’ of ethics (Ethics, 1994; trans. 2001);1 the inherent brilliance of Being and Event, for all its ultimate philosophical madness; and last, but by no means least, the rhetorical power of ‘the (re)turn of philosophy itself’ – title of an essay of Badiou’s from 1992.2 It is in the profoundly contradictory character of the return of philosophy in Badiou – at once avant-garde and breathtakingly traditional – that the historical meaning of his thought is to be found.3 To anticipate my conclusion: Being and Event is a work – perhaps the great work – of philosophical neo-classicism. As such, at the level of philosophical form, it surpasses its ambivalent predecessor, Heidegger’s Being and Time, in the rigour of its reactionary modernism. The modernity of Badiou’s mathematics does not mitigate, but rather reinforces, the authoritarianism of his philosophical axiomatics and the mysticism of his conception of the event.
It really is a shame that we can’t read this together on here. There’s even a convincing bit on our perennial favorite, the history of big T little t theory, that I’m sure would produce a lovely comment thread. (The wonderful thing is, Osborne is able to 1) treat the subject “theory” while 2) never losing sight of the particulars, especially, the historical particulars of its rise and fall…)
If every one of you out there would just subscribe, we could talk a bit more about the piece. What are you waiting for?
foucault / chomsky on larry king
Now that would be something, eh? Not quite that, but not altogether different either:
Via threequarksdaily:
(The second part of the show is available here…)
Two things.
1) I’d never seen video of Foucault before. Strange. And strange how it changes your sense of someone once you have seen footage.
2) I found myself wondering, as I watched this, if my own work / ideas / findings could be spelled out as succinctly as Chomsky and Foucault do here. That’s not normally how we think (are taught to think) about things in the subfield of “theory.” Can’t just read extracts. Summary doesn’t do justice. There is a point to be made performatively by not reducing to the sound bite. Right? But - oh is it ever obvious, I know - there’s something to this. How many of us could pull it off today?
(Quite possibly I’m just sharing the echoes of what it’s like to draw near the end of (a first draft of???) your first book. Which is my day job, right now. I’m cramping crazily on the last few pages - there’s so much more to be said! Why can’t I stop hiding behind the particulars and just say what it is that I’ve been samizdating all along? Would it even work? Is there a point? Or just hithering thithering ambiguity / complexity?
The next book, I hope, will be simpler….)
spurious
Spurious today, on Blanchot, literature, and community or communism.
What happens when Blanchot’s writings are refracted through the prism of what he calls community? They shift slightly, or shimmer in a different way.
beauty and politics
Isobel Armstrong, on Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic:
Eagleton’s is a worst-case reading, and has to be attended to. But the best answer to this case might well be to retheorize a flagrantly emancipatory, unapologetically radical aesthetic. This would refuse the conservative reading of the aesthetic as that which stands over and against the political as disinterested Beauty, called in nevertheless to assuage the violence of a system it leaves untouched, and retrieve the radical traditions and possibilities with which the idea of the aesthetic has always been associated. I would regard with dismay a politics with subtracts the aesthetic and refuses it cultural meaning and possibility.
I’m not entirely satisfied with the “flagrantly emancipatory” aesthetic that Armstrong proposes in the chapter on Eagleton, which takes a somewhat predictable shape defined by experimentally contradictory betweenness and ambiguous play, but I am sure that she’s asking the right question in the paragraph above.
