Posted on 04/19/2003 10:58:42 AM PDT by Pharmboy
These are uncertain times for literary scholars. The era of big theory is over. The grand paradigms that swept through humanities departments in the 20th century — psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, post-colonialism — have lost favor or been abandoned. Money is tight. And the leftist politics with which literary theorists have traditionally been associated have taken a beating.
In the latest sign of mounting crisis, on April 11 the editors of Critical Inquiry, academe's most prestigious theory journal, convened the scholarly equivalent of an Afghan-style loya jirga. They invited more than two dozen of America's professorial elite, including Henry Louis Gates Jr., Homi Bhabha, Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson, to the University of Chicago for what they called "an unprecedented meeting of the minds," an unusual two-hour public symposium on the future of theory.
Understandably, expectations were high. More than 500 people, mostly students and faculty, squeezed into a lecture hall to hear what the mandarins had to say, while latecomers made do with a live video feed set up in the lobby.
In his opening remarks, W. J. T. Mitchell, the journal's editor and a professor of English and art history at Chicago, set an upbeat tone for the proceedings. "We want to be the Starship Enterprise of criticism and theory," he told the audience.
But any thought that this would be a gleeful strategy session with an eye toward extending theory's global reach, or an impassioned debate over the merits of, say, Derrida and Lacan, was quickly dispelled.
When John Comaroff, a professor of anthropology and sociology at Chicago who was serving as the event's moderator, turned the floor over to the panelists, for several moments no one said a word.
Then a student in the audience spoke up. What good is criticism and theory, he asked, if "we concede in fact how much more important the actions of Noam Chomsky are in the world than all the writings of critical theorists combined?"
After all, he said, Mr. Fish had recently published an essay in Critical Inquiry arguing that philosophy didn't matter at all.
Behind a table at the front of the room, Mr. Fish shook his head. "I think I'll let someone else answer the question," he said.
So Sander L. Gilman, a professor of liberal arts and sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, replied instead. "I would make the argument that most criticism — and I would include Noam Chomsky in this — is a poison pill," he said. "I think one must be careful in assuming that intellectuals have some kind of insight. In fact, if the track record of intellectuals is any indication, not only have intellectuals been wrong almost all of the time, but they have been wrong in corrosive and destructive ways."
Mr. Fish nodded approvingly. "I like what that man said," he said. "I wish to deny the effectiveness of intellectual work. And especially, I always wish to counsel people against the decision to go into the academy because they hope to be effective beyond it."
During the remainder of the session, the only panelist to venture a defense of theory — or mention a literary genre — was Mr. Bhabha. "There are a number of people around the table here and a number of people in the audience, in fact most of you here are evidence that intellectual work has its place and its uses," he insisted. "Even a poem in its own oblique way is deeply telling of the lives of the world we exist in. You can have poems that are intimately linked with political oppositional movements, poems that actually draw together people in acts of resistance."
But no one spoke up to endorse this claim. In fact, for a conference officially devoted to theory, theory itself got very little airtime. For more than an hour, the panelists bemoaned the war in Iraq, the Bush administration, the ascendancy of the right-wing press and the impotence of the left. Afterward, Mr. Gates, who arrived late because he had been attending a conference in Wisconsin, said: "For a moment, I thought I was in the wrong room. I thought we would be talking about academic jargon. Instead, it was Al Qaeda and Iraq — not that there's anything wrong with that."
Finally, a young man with dreadlocks who said he was a graduate student from Jamaica asked, "So is theory simply just a nice, simple intellectual exercise, or something that should be transformative?"
Several speakers weighed in before Mr. Gates stood up. As far as he could tell, he said, theory had never directly liberated anyone. "Maybe I'm too young," he said. "I really didn't see it: the liberation of people of color because of deconstruction or poststructuralism."
If theory's political utility is this dubious, why did the theorists spend so much time talking about current events? Catharine R. Stimpson, a panelist and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University, offered one, well, theory. "This particular group of intellectuals," she said, "has a terror of being politically irrelevant."
Eventually, this changed into situational ethics and post modernism, as Derrida stated that the ethics of an action were only to be defined by the effect on the person affected by the action (the Other). That's a really rough guide, as it does not include the goofiness of Foucault and others whose works and theories are simply laughable.
These people normally write for very small audiences, many of those audiences are 300 people or so and their thoughts have been justifiably disregarded by the mainstream, due to the fact that they simply out of touch with the real world.
It is a real mystery as to why this discussion should occur at this juncture. Perhaps these intellectuals have finally realized that action changes the world, not theory and that their generations of musings have been an empty exercise. A real mystery.
The anser turned out to be quite easy. Paper was commonly used as wadding in guns, whether pistol, musket or rifle and the intent was not to tax broadsheets papers and writers of belles lettres, but to tax the common man for his shooting.
I don't know why historians have missed this link, but if you are familiar with the history of black powder shooting ( for which most historians have no interest at all, it would be un-PC), it is painfully obvious that this tax would have affected everyone, from the cities to the frontier.
We need a new set of historians, who are familiar with the tools of Colonial America, a new group that will acquaint themselves with the implements and methods of our forebearers. The current crop is miserable.
Much of the day-to-day history that we know to be true is held in the hands of amateur historians, re-enactors who build, buy and use the implements of our ancestors. It would be well if some of these panty-waste historians got out into the field and spent a good deal of time in tents and log cabins at rendezvous's and other festivals living with re-enactors, cooking over an open fire, using a knife and bone needle to sew deerskins. They would learn much that would be helpful in their profession.
But they won't, as they are too sophisticated.
Left-wing. There is no such thing as a conservative theory. There are conservative writers, sure, but conservatism is not a theory at all. It is more a set of principles, a view of life, of humanity. I think an essential of conservatism is a Christian perspective, a belief that there is both good and evil in the world and that it will always be such. There is no utopianism in conservatism and all theories tend to be utopian to some extent.
With phasers permanently set to 'stun'...JFK
I must disagree with the above. The American Colonists were very literate. The US was perhaps the most literate country in the world at the time of the revolution. In a country of just a few million Paine's booklet sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Your other point may be true also however. The stamp tax also taxed legal documents of which all had a need for.
In grad school we called it "physics envy."
The philosophy department IS the wastebasket of academia.
You are correct, sir. I don't consider any of the people in the list to be conservative, most especially Bloom.
I suggest you read my post more carefully. I only say they supported conservatives. Such support does not make them conservative.
To be fair, I guess one can better characterize them as successful detractors of the Left. Where that leaves them on the political spectrum, I leave that to your own imagination.
Did you ever think you would hear them admit this? Poison pills is a very apt description.
The first wave of immigrants (1600s) were quite literate, being made up of middle and upper class families but succeeding waves were not.
Isn't the "Theory of Evolution" a natural science theory? How helpful or provenly accurate is that? < /flame starter >
The primary instruction was in the home, this being an important part of a motter's duties and the child was put into a private school later, frequently a school directly funded and maintained by a church.
One source states that only 4 of 1000 colonialists were iliterate, a rate of literacy that is far higher than we have today.
Thanks for the correction.
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