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Friday, November 21, 2008
How not to use Theory’s Empire
Scanning through the critical literature on Kafka—the dissertation finished, I’m free to pursue old ideas—I run into an essay which uses Theory’s Empire in the very manner the anthology’s critics assumed everyone would. I will, however, Google-proof my exasperation by replacing all mentions of Derrida and things Derridean with cognates of the word carrot. The essay begins:
The 2005 volume includes major reassessments of poststructuralist theory, notably [The Carrot’s] . . . . The emphasis on “undecidability” in Kafka can be viewed as symptomatic of the influence of [Carrot] Theory embraced by the American literary academy in the 1970s and 1980s . . . . But [lowercase-c carrot’s] skeptical effect undermined the certitude that Kafka was a politically important novelist. For its detractors, the [carrotist] view that there is “nothing outside of the text” ignores that texts like Kafka’s have shaped human lives and human history.
Reductive enough for you? No? How about this?
Wellek, who helped to introduce [Carrot] theory to American literature departments, now asserts that [carrots] have destroyed literary studies, while Frederick Crews argues that “[the Carrot’s] judgment that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ automatically precludes recourse to evidence.” In Crews’s view, “both [the Carrot] and his myriad followers think nothing of appropriating and denaturing propositions from systems of thought whose premises they have already rejected.” Thomas Nagel goes further in condemning “post-modern relativism” as a “quick fix” which puts reason to sleep. In Theory’s Empire, [the Carrot]’s language is described as a “maze,” a “prison house of language,” a “limbo of combined attention and nonassertion."
These assessments appeal to raw authority. Crews and Nagel hate on [the Carrot] and rightly so. Why? Because [the Carrot’s] language is as empty and invidious as that of Kafka’s bureaucrats:
[T]o what degree do [the Carrot’s] rhetorical devices and ingenious language games resemble the language of the Courtiers who torture Joseph K.?
Care to guess what conclusion the author draws? I take comfort in the thought that everyone will admit this is an awful appropriation of the thought forwarded in Theory’s Empire—that it is to academic argument what posts on Kos are to nuanced political thought—but remember that this sort of anti-intellectual response is exactly what the anthology’s detractors warned would follow if it ever gained traction. While I think this falls under “the abuses” instead of “the uses” of the collection, I still feel the queasy creep of wrongness starting to settle in . . . .
Comments
Very Terry Pratchett.
But surely know-nothing denunciations of Theory, Derrida, carrots & etc. didn’t begin with the publication of Theory’s Empire.
In fact it was already a venerable tradition by the time TE was published.
I do understand why this sort of thing is disappointing. TE was intended, at least in part, as an antidote to the tradition of know-nothing denunciations. It was supposed to be a reminder that there are also reasonable and well informed criticisms.
So it is annoying to see TE enlisted in the cause of know-nothingism. Then again, know-nothingism can assimilate just about anything.
I have to argue against this the same point that I used to argue against critics of Theory’s Empire—you’re reifying an anthology into an argument. Of course, the essay that you’re quoting seems to have done this too—it includes “In Theory’s Empire“ rather than “In so-and-so’s essay in Theory’s Empire.” But that’s no reason to accept this error. Theory’s Empire is a collection of arguments, some good, some dismissive.
I can’t even agree with calling it an abuse of the collection. Some of the essays in TE were just as bad, if I remember rightly. Some were good. It’s not an abuse of a collection of essays against neoliberalism if someone quotes the authoritarian essay that was included. It’s just a sort of citational failure.
Rich,
To put a little pressure on your argument, wasn’t the point of TE (as AcademicLurker put it) to be “an antidote to the tradition of know-nothing denunciations”? An anthology might be a collection, but unless it’s a random selection, the overall selection principle does give one something to grab onto in mobilizing it as a fetishized entity. “Reifying” it is a negative way of describing what’s going on, but we use that class of rhetorical technique in positive ways all the time. In that vein, the citational failure is a little more pernicious: if the point of the collection was to specifically critique “theory” by people that recognized some elementary facts about it (the actual meaning of the famous “nothing outside the text” bit, for example) then mobilizing TE in service of an argument that doesn’t understand it is actually something of an abuse.
Not sure that’s an important distinction, actually. But maybe the difference depends on how strong one finds the collection’s gravitational force to be (and on that, I couldn’t say, having only skimmed the thing).
Aaron, the basic problem (as I remember it years later) was that there was a convergence of people from various directions who wanted to regard TE as what you call a fetishized entity. Some of them were know-nothing denouncers who wanted to use the book as a brick. Some of them were people who wanted to denounce every critic of theory as a know-nothing with a brick. Some of them seemed to want a new academic trend that this could be the leading edge of.
Reading the actual book, though, I didn’t see how any of those could be supported. It’s a grab bag. Over there, you have an leftist like Chomsky; over there, you have a New Critic, over there, a conservative like Bauerlein, over there, a philosopher like Searle. Some of them seemed (to me, anyways) to have engaged with theory; some of them seemed fairly know-nothing.
The introduction to the book complicated things a little by over-claiming, as most introductions to anthologies do. But the overall selection principle really did seem to be what the subtitle said: “an anthology of dissent”. There were again all sorts of statements that this was pernicious rhetoric, but I think it works as a metaphor; it’s like, as I wrote before, a book of dissert from neoliberalism in which Marxists rub shoulders uneasily with anarchists and conservatives.
Every time you use secondary literature, you are appealing to authority. Unless you rehearse every argument on which your own argument rests, you will at some point be assuming the bedrock authority of some prior point.
The best you can do is cite clearly and quote accurately. It’s up to the reader—you know, that person with some agency—to evaluate the extent to which s/he’ll buy the argument.
(So for me, I just think this writer doesn’t understand Derrida’s comment about nothing being outside text—that’s precisely *why* texts shape our world according to Derrida. I also don’t think this writer understands *The Trial*, for no one besides the priest at the end has a command of complex language games or rhetorical devices. In fact, the language of the Court is one of physical brutality and psychological tortures: headgames and bodygames, not rhetorical games. No one in the Court system talks or writes all that much. The book Joseph K. finds lying around in the Courtroom only winds up having scribbles of pornographic cartoons within it. A better example of a Derridean worldview in literature would be Beckett and the need to speak [and futility of speaking] in the face of death.)