One of the recurrent objections to (literary) theory has taken the form of a complaint that it promotes moral and epistemic relativism... As objections to theory go, this is among the more foolish, but it is also among the more sinister.Not if the literary theory is pretending to be 'emancipatory'. In that case, if it ends up promoting moral relativism, then it is useless because who is to say slavery is not freedom from an equally valid perspective?
The alternatives to moral and epistemic relativism are, of course, moral and epistemic absolutism;No. There are many alternatives to relativism- incomparability, pluralism or dialethia, type theories, hidden variable theories and so on. However, something which purports to be foundational or emancipatory is clearly nothing of the sort, it is stupid shit, if it actually promotes relativism.
and when they argue for a world of nonrelative values,which may be incomparable, plural, type theoretic etc, etc,
these thinkers are often expressing, whether they know it or not, a barely disguised hunger for a world where minorities knew their place and stuck to it.Nonsense! It so happens that literary theory appeals most to certain minorities who have reason to fear a world which may think their place is in the gas-chamber.
In any case, people who do theory are a tiny minority with no very exalted status even in the safe spaces where they earn their living.
To the extent that theory has helped to drag us at least partway out of this world, it has been an unmixed good.But that extent is zero. Thus theory has been an unmixed good only to the same extent as the Socioprocology of the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbor's cat.
A version of this point was made by John Sturrock when he reviewed Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s Intellectual Impostors: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science for the LRB in 1998. Sokal is a physics professor at NYU, who in 1996 submitted a hoax article to Social Text, then as now a prominent theoretical journal. Sokal’s article was called “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, and it was, as Sokal put it, “liberally salted with nonsense”, including the claim that quantum gravity was socially constructed. The editors of Social Text published the article, Sokal maintained, because it “flattered [their] ideological preconceptions”.The point of the hoax was that theorists were borrowing scientific ideas without grasping what they actually meant and using them to give their radical politics a patina of legitimacy; according to Sokal, if you couldn’t trust Jacques Lacan when he talked about topography, you would be an idiot to trust him when he talked about psychoanalysis. (It hadn’t occurred to him that the people who went to Lacan for his reflections on psychoanalysis were capable of understanding his topographical language as a metaphor.)This is foolish. Sokal's point is that Lacan did not understand topology. He was just pretending. There was no question of using its language as a metaphor because he wasn't speaking it. It's like the following witty detournement of mine on Terence, the Latin poet's hackneyed epigram 'vincula jamis mortis, catulum gorbis pocultum'. It can only strike you as having metaphorical aptness if you don't know any Latin. But, if you do know Latin you are likely to mistrust my claim to know about brain surgery. I am clearly a charlatan.
Sokal restated his argument in Intellectual Impostures, written in collaboration with another physicist, Jean Bricmont. Intellectual Impostures is fun to read for a chapter or two, but, as Sturrock notes, its critique of theory is based on a series of misprisions, and in place of imaginative thinking and writing it argues for a narrow scientism as the only legitimate way of understanding the world.Nonsense! It argues that scientific theories are meaningful in the same way as the epigrams of Terence are meaningful to people who know Latin or who have a Latin dictionary. But 'vincula jamis mortis, catulum gorbis pocultum' is not meaningful, though, no doubt, I pretended to understand it when a friend artfully dropped it into his conversation in the hope of making me look ridiculous to the blue stocking I was courting.
Sokal and Bricmont complained that the theorists (to call them “postmodern philosophers” as per their subtitle, is to suggest that you do not know very much about either postmodernism or philosophy)Nonsense! It suggests that Sokal and Bricmont were familiar with the most common designation of that bunch of tossers.
preferred a tricksy “verbal veneer” to clear language expressing hard facts.They were being charitable. Or perhaps they did not want to attract a nuisance libel suit. The plain fact is the theorists were ignorant and stupid. What they wrote was just one step above 'vincula jamis mortis, catulum gorbis pocultum'
Sturrock counters with the example of Jean Baudrillard, a writer for whom “the ‘verbal veneer’ is the very thing; so that to read it as a disguise rather than a display is to misread it in a particularly philistine and irrelevant way”.But to do so would be to advance Baudrillardian 'immanent reversal' though, to be fair, so would saying 'vincula jamis mortis, catulum gorbis pocultum' and not reading anything save the works of David Icke.
Sturrock’s larger point is that there is no imaginative writing without moral and epistemic relativism.If so, the even larger point we must grasp is that Sturrock had shit for brains. Swedenborg's writing is imaginative. It is not relativist. I never finished reading Harry Potter- it was too scary- but I'm guessing J.K Rowling did not end up showing that Voldemort had as much right on his side as did Dumbledore.
Art is a free country,No. It is Art. It may flourish in a country of slaves. It may wither and die where everybody breathes free.
and so is thought;No! Prof. Vagina Dentata Choothopadhyaya has very conclusively shown that Thought is not a free country. It is a Disneyland where you have to pay extra to go on the cool rides.
and the essence of that freedom lies in the recognition that there is always another point of view.What a worthless freedom! Suppose you happen to be tied up in my closet. You say 'set me free'. I say 'well, from one point of view you are free. The essence of freedom lies in recognising that there is always another point of view. Thus my shitting on you rather than releasing you is an example of something you have freely chosen for yourself. Also you own me a tenner for this liberative experience I am providing you by going potty on your face.' I'm not saying that stuff like this actually happens but it is the essence of my business model. Hopefully, I'll be selected for Dragon's Den.
You could call this recognition différance, if you happen to be a theorist;No you couldn't. Derrida's concept is like a 'hidden variables' theory. Univocal foundations exist, but not yet- never yet.
or, if you’re of a more liberal-humanist persuasion, you could simply call it irony, or play.No you couldn't. Irony and play are delightful. This is sad shite of a laboured and stupid sort.
It is hardly surprising that an intellectual movement founded on this recognition was taken up by women,Fuck off! Women haven't taken it up at all! They are sensible creatures! Third wave Feminism has nothing to do with Women though it may appear to have been useful in holding back reforms of a salutary type.
people of colour,Sho' nuff. Me & my peeps are constantly talking about Deconstruction as we run around the hood setting fire to everything.
queer activists and so on; nor is it surprising that this should have caused some blowback from the more privileged parts of society.Indeed. Gayatri Spivak is never surprised when the Duke of Westminster or the Maharaja of Patiala of the Saudi Crown Prince ring her up to give her a piece of their mind.
A more recent hoax, in which three right-leaning scholars submitted bogus articles on what they called “grievance studies” to various journals, ended up saying more about the flaws in academic publishing than it did about theory, but, once again, the unspoken message was reactionary in import – one of the hoaxers, Helen Pluckrose, is the author of a book complaining that theory has “made everything about race, gender, and identity”. Quelle horreur.Helen is a man. That is why he objects to theory. He is afraid his wife will stop cooking and cleaning for him if she starts reading Spivak or Butler.
I'm kidding. Helen is a woman. She knows that 'theory' has done nothing useful in the fields of race, gender or identity. It is merely a fraudulent type of claptrap like my detournement of a Latin epigram by Terence which is not itself Latin but gibberish.
Paul de Man, a convicted fraudster, a bigamist and a guy who failed to gain higher educational credentials, nevertheless conned his way into a job as a Professor. Everybody assumed someone else had vetted his witless shite. The man was a fraudster pure and simple. He represented the 'smoking gun' that 'Theory' wasn't just stupidity, it originated in a type of fraud which would not take in a child.
Kevin Power disagrees-
If l’affaire Sokal constituted a major skirmish in the Theory Wars, then the case of Paul de Man counts as a small war unto itself.What war? The fact is people knew they had been conned but wanted to hush up the matter. But, by then, they themselves were making money out of the Ponzi scheme. True, in youth they may have been a victim of de Man's fraud, but now they were getting rich of it while pretending to stick it to 'the Man.' Mamta Bannerjee dotes on Gayatri Spivak. But then Bannerjee claims to have a PhD from 'East Georgia University'! This is the proof that 'Theory' is the intellectual equivalent of 'Babu English'.
Probably the best piece collected in The Meaninglessness of Meaning is Frank Kermode’s extended rumination on the posthumous disclosure of de Man’s wartime journalism. Writing in 1942 for the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, de Man – then in his twenties – published an article on “the Jews in modern literature”, which included sentences along the lines of this one: “it is sufficient to discover a few Jewish writers under Latinized pseudonyms for all contemporary production to be considered polluted and evil”. At the time of his death in 1983, de Man was the most celebrated of the Yale deconstructionists – the author of Blindness and Insight (1971) and The Resistance to Theory (1986), works distinguished, in Kermode’s words, by an “ever-increasing density and strangeness”.This was a period when America was overproducing PhDs even in what looked like high I.Q subjects. There were plenty of Nuclear Physics PhDs coming into the backrooms of brokerages where they attracted attention by their extraordinary stupidity. Still, they either turned Chartists of the conventional kind or descended to the boiler room to sell penny stocks. Idiocy is no bar to making a living buying low and selling high. Similarly, 'theory' was no bar to not teaching French to people who wanted a credential in French literature but did not want to learn that disgusting language.
When de Man’s collaborationist journalism came to light in 1987, the theory-resisters pounced: here at last was irrefutable evidence that theory was rotten to the core; that its antipathy to bourgeois liberalism was fascism in a new dress; and that its expositors in the academy were not to be trusted. (It may have been the de Man affair that led the bestselling right-wing horror writer Dean Koontz to create, in his 2003 thriller The Face, a serial murderer whose day job is teaching deconstruction to university students.)The problem here is that by the late Eighties Nazis were kinda cool. Kurt Waldheim was helped, not hurt, by revelations of his Nazi past, when running for the Austrian Presidency.
Kermode is properly severe about de Man’s antisemitic writings, observing that “the wartime writing is odious, that of a clever young man corrupted by ideas, and corrupted by war (for in wartime the intellect grows as sordid as the conflict), or merely opportunist, or a mixture of all of these”.Kermode, like most British academics of a certain age, was tolerant of anti-Semitism. It was naughty, it was seductive, and since one can't expect greasy Continentals to take cold showers, play cricket and keep a stiff upper lip, allowances must be made. As Saki puts it 'tell me a man's longitude and I'll tell you his latitude'.
But he is not so intellectually gauche as to imagine that it easily or simply discredits de Man’s later thought, or theory itself.What discredits de Man's later thought is that it isn't thought at all. It is gibberish intended to pull off a con.
Louis Menand, writing for The New Yorker in 2014, observed that theory “has never really recovered its reputation” in the aftermath of the de Man case. But the fact that theory has faded from public view may be less a function of specific scandals and more a function of theory’s inescapable absorption into the cultural mainstream – its gradual but undeniable de-radicalisation, as its language and concepts migrate from the graduate seminar and the peer-reviewed journal to the Twitter feed and the Op Ed column.We all tell stupid lies from time to time. There is always some degenerate research program which we use to disguise imbecility if not mendacity. But we do distinguish between availability cascades on the basis of alethia. If you use pseudo-medical jargon to explain to me why I look like shit, I may actually make an appointment with my G.P. But if you use pseudo-astrological jargon I get the message that you don't like me and want me to feel shitty about myself. That's what happened with 'theory'.
When online ironists refer to “the discourse”, they are telling us that theoretical ideas are now part of our everyday armature of concepts;No. They are part of our everyday armature of stupidity, mendacity, paranoia and misanthropy.
and as Louis Menand points out in his essay on de Man, the hostility to theory was always strange, because to express a preference for one text over another is already to hold a literary theoryNo it isn't. It is to hold a theory of preference.
– the point being that theory, taken in toto, merely made visible certain things that we had in a sense been looking at all along.Or not looking for but living with like a painful hemorrhoid or debilitating mental illness.
The Meaninglessness of Meaning charts the gradual transformation of theory from exotic financial instrument to the pocket-change of the intellectual economy, a process that was more or less complete by the time the theorists themselves were becoming the stuff of respectful obituaries.Exotic financial instruments exist because there are genuine arbitrage opportunities. Fraudulent financial instruments exist because some people are con-men. 'Theory' was the latter. Its practitioners were not George Soros but Bernie Madoff. There is a wide difference between pocket-change and boogers intermingling with pocket-lint.
Thus Judith Butler, memorialising Jacques Derrida in 2004, writes:Butler was certainly kept alive by her pay check. But so were people who worked for Madoff.
Derrida kept us alive to the practice of criticism, understanding that social and political transformation was an incessant project […]
How is justice done? What justice do we owe others? And what does it mean to act in the name of justice?Yup. Butler sure has done a lot for Justice- thinks nobody at all.
These were questions that had to be asked regardless of the consequences, and this meant that they were often questions asked when established authorities wished that they were not.Butler showed great courage in travelling to Venezuela and Zimbabwe and China to denounce injustice in defiance of established authorities in those countries. Except she didn't at all. Whose boat did she rock in the US? People like her helped the Right by turning undergrads towards the Federalists.
This is as eloquent a defence of theory as you could hope to find:But it isn't eloquent! It is sophomoronic!
a moving claim for its continued relevance in a world shaped, in constantly changing ways, by power and by those who resist itso ineffectually that change of an adverse sort is catalysed. This is like Mahatma Gandhi saying 'the way to get rid of the Brits is to form an orderly queue and get beaten on the head and carted off to jail'. Every time the Indians tried it, the Raj got stronger. Ultimately, Nehru ended up begging Mountbatten to stay on as Governor General. Meanwhile, Gandhi got shot and an American caught his assassin. It seems the Congress Party did not want to protect the life of the Mahatma because the man was a cretin.
There are certainly problems with the world that theory has helped to create –Paranoia and imbecility don't create a world. They represent failure to properly live in it.
it does sometimes feel as if we are stuck with an intellectual culture that, at its worst, devotes itself to finding misogyny, racism and capitalist greed in texts like prizes in boxes of breakfast cereal, and that in teaching us to see the politics in every text, theory has left us unable to see anything but the politics in every text.With the result that America now has a choice between Biden whose 1994 bill hurt African Americans and Trump who thinks White Power nutters are wonderful folk. Crying wolf all the time is not an effective strategy to protect the community from that predator. It has the reverse effect. If Trump and Biden are Nazis then actual Nazis are just as good or bad as either of them.
In her 2015 book The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski observes that in the contemporary academy, “Rigorous thinking is equated with, and often reduced to, the mentality of critique [i.e. Theory]. The result can be a regrettable arrogance of intellect, where the smartest thing you can do is to see through the deep-seated convictions and heartfelt attachments of others.”What would Rita Felski know about rigorous thinking? She is as stupid as shit.
Or, as Susan Sontag noted, back in pre-theoretical 1963, “Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”What 'intellect'? She was a silly phrase-maker.
On campus, at least, things seem to be changing: Felski herself is an influential advocate of “postcritique”, a school of criticism that seeks to add ideas about emotion, affect, aesthetics and form to the theoretical menu.Yet, these things were there when the literary work was first produced and consumed. If this cretin is only able to add these things to her menu now then she has been dining on cutlery, not food.
Which sounds oddly like liberal humanism to me – but there you go.Yes, yes, we are going. The truth is we only stopped by to laugh at you. Your PhD is worthless. If you like John Sturrock so much, why don't you marry him? Also your fly is undone. Ha, ha- made you look!
As John Sturrock notes here, pace Sokal and Bricmont, “the more styles of intellectual discourse cultures find the room and time for, the healthier”.Very true. We gotta invite more homicidal neo-Nazis to our faculty parties. Dodging their blows will give us healthy exercise.
This should go without saying.Not say without going.
But if theory has taught us anything,or if it has taught us nothing
it’s that nothingor everything
– literally nothing at allor metaphorically nothing at all or literally everything at all
– ever really goes without saying.or really says without going
Or, to put it another way: La théorie est morte, vive la théorie!Or to put it yet another way, as Terence, the Roman African playwright wittily put it- vincula jamis mortis, catulum gorbis pocultum!
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