1. Have you noticed that as the profession of English has become more and more tolerant of social diversity during the past thirty years, it has become less and less open to critical diversity? Think of all the critical methods that were open to us in 1980 and how few of those we see in use today. Semiotics, structuralism, reader response theory, psychoanalytical literary criticism, speech act theory, phenomenology, deconstruction, and new historicism aren't too conspicuous anymore. Mose recently theory, in general, has been disintegrating into ideological invective: these days people invoke "institutional racism" or "white privilege" in order to make their cases.

2. In 2017 we're still living in an age of fundamentalisms. Obviously there are religious fundamentalisms, but Stephen Hawking's reductive view of physics as the only credible explanatory account of existence is also a fundamentalism known as scientism. There is the fundamentalism of statistics (which dismisses "anecdotal experience"), the fundamentalism of market economy (the hidden hand requires a "free market" in order to work, as if a "free market" were possible in our day and age), and we've seen the recent rise of the fundamentalism known as libertarianism, among numerous others. Typical of all fundamentalisms is that at the end of the day they're close minded, unrealistic, and static.

2a. In the humanities we spent decades saddled with an ideological fundamentalism grounded in 1960s counter-cultural values that over the past twenty years has been suggesting that the Occident is some sort of world historical mistake, because everything that's wrong with our social order can be traced back to values established by the Occident. Such a fundamentalism has led to the replacement of theory with a one-size-fits-all ideology that simply inverts polarities by privileging the Non-West over the West, as if non-Western social subjects were inherently more ethical, responsible, sensitive, and analytically intelligent. The MLA has been operating under this assumption for quite some time now.

2b. Within a field such as English studies there is a much longer standing empirical fundamentalism that insists upon monopolizing literary studies in terms of reducing it to historical fact finding, because of the assumption that the literal is self-validating. Whereas the New Criticism and other theoretical approaches once kept this sort of historicism in check, it had started to reassert its dominance in the second half of the 1990s. With its return, pretty much all of the scholarship on historical literary periods has been held hostage to a historical fundamentalism. This has anticipated a view from the political right that would prefer educators strip facts away from interpretations, the fear being that any interpretation amounts to a relativist construction on the part of left wing intellectuals intended to "brainwash" students.

3.It's hard not to notice that over the last decade or two interpretation has been replaced by information. Interpretation used to be an important concern. Linguistics, theology, philosophy, psychology, history, sociology, and aesthetics have all been significant contributors to theories of interpretation (hermeneutic theory). But hermeneutics is no longer a "player" in most of what we're seeing published in the arts and humanities. The relatively recent interest in print culture is largely about mounting analyses that consider a text in terms of information about its distribution and circulation in a culture, something that quickly devolves into statistical analysis, not literary interpretation. Notice, too, the death of interest in psychoanalysis, an interpretive science and a field once very relevant to English. It has been replaced by interest in cognitive science and neuro-science. These are about disclosing information: what parts of the brain light up when you stimulate the test subject. Wherever you look, you'll see that information is replacing interpretation. We see it again in the emphasis on "digital humanities," the Google-ization of English. That the sciences have been stressing empirical fact finding over all else has led to this very positivist mentality.

4. Already back in the 1990s, one could see considerable evidence for the reprise of 1950s humanism in order to advance a politics of the social subject. This required elimination of French theoretical critiques of the Cartesian subject. The emphasis on human rights and on the rehabilitation of old style humanism led to the replacement of feminist Simone de Beauvoir, a French representative of the critique of agency, with Hannah Arendt, a 50s style New York Intellectual, as ideal female critic and role model. This rehabilitation of the humanist subject enabled the melding of traditional literary historicism with the ideological agendas of alterity politics.

5. Although humanists of the 1950s were concerned with issues of existential meaning, we're now in a society that has become "interpretation averse" on even an interpersonal level. This has to do with the pragmatics of suspending issues of personal fault in order to fix problems. We don't interpret what the hoarder is doing psychologically, we don't interpret what the obese person is doing psychologically, because that only gets in the way of technologically fixing the problem that is best done when messy psychological issues and moral questions of judgment are suspended. In other words, there seems to be agreement that we need to get the human factor out of the picture so that we can fix whatever is wrong, as if the person were a broken machine in need of repair, not an existential being. Here again, no one wants to know what things mean; one wants to know how things can be cured or fixed. This is all part of what has come to be a "no fault" culture, one that doesn't have any interest in the existential, given that this is too "messed up" to get into. Of course, it is in this "messed up" condition that literary writers have traditionally taken an interest.

6. We can see that if the culture is moving more and more to literal, informational, technological approaches, that theory, with all its speculation and hermeneutics, is incompatible. The critic as such has been done away with as a concept, given that critics are individuals who hold learned opinions. In place of such individual voices, the humanities value voices that are political in the sense that they represent the collective views and agenda of large constituencies. This has it source in social activism which stresses group thinking as a precondition to collective action. Social media has contributed to this trend.

This politics of mass agreement has morphed in just very recent years, so that information in the form of uploaded videos on social media are accompanied by ideological outrage in the form of heated arguments that encourage constituencies to sign petitions hosted by change.org calling for offenders to be discharged from their associations, jobs, etc. This means that theory-speak has now been downgraded to the rhetoric of offense and the call to censor and ostracize. See, for example, recent attacks on Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place.

7. The university as neoliberal institution has been discussed in great detail by others. Essentially this model is designed to disempower the professors, which in turn undermines their capacity to make significant demands of student attention and performance.

 

 

The Cold War on Theory: Some Working Notes.

Premise: This page is a blog designed to sketch in various accounts, which I'm guessing are relatively accurate, as to what's been going with respect to the lcritical theory in recent decades; all of this can be thought of as yet more installments of what people abroad have called the "theory wars." I see this as a sort of postscript to a project I published over ten years ago entitled The Theory Mess (Columbia UP, 2001). That book engaged that part of the theory wars concerning deconstruction in many of its misappropriations, distortions, and adaptations, stemming from what was essentially an Anglo-American resistance to European thought in its more hermeneutical dimensions. I now think of this as The Theory Wars, Part I: The Hot War on Theory. What I call the Cold War on Theory is part of a bigger picture that concerns the demise of higher education, which relates to trends in society generally, and not very good ones, at that.

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